Looking back at a stimulating and successful symposium

On September 24th and 25th, we held the anniversary symposium "Frontiers in Behavioural Biology: From Ethology to Comparative Cognition" at the University of Vienna, to reflect on the development of Ethology in the last two decades, after the passing of Konrad Lorenz in 1989. We took the development of Lorenz own research institute, the KLF in Grünau as a framework. In the last 20 years, the  Konrad Lorenz Research Station has experienced a big step forward from studying classical ethology to becoming a modern scientific institution investigating top-notch behavioural questions applying state-of-the art techniques. The turning point was induced by hiring a.o. Prof. Dr. Kurt Kotrschal through the University of Vienna twenty years ago. Approx. 160 participants contributed to this two-day symposium und made it a great success, which is not only shown by the number of participants, but also by the intense media interest. Among others, the Austrian radio station Ö1 broadcasted a feature on the symposium.

A number of top young KLF-associates, the reknown senior researchers Jan Komdeur, Jerram L. Brown, Bernd Heinrich, Ton Groothuis, Wolfgang Goymann and the emerging junior scientists Markus Öst, Bernhard Völkl, Amanda Seed and Molly Dickens presented their work and a number of participants presented their own work in the poster sessions.

We would like to thank all participants again for their contributions. For those who would like to have another look at the symposium, we will keep this page online. Also, the abstracts of the poster presentations and the talks can be downloaded from the programm page.