Wednesday 5 March, 2025
Venue TBC, London

The Verrall Lecture is an annual public event organised by the Royal Entomological Society, open to all and free to attend. The lecture takes place on the first Wednesday in March to coincide with the Annual Meeting of the Verrall Association of Entomologists, the Verrall Supper, which begun in 1887 by G.H. Verrall and is now organised by the Entomological Club. The Verrall Supper is not an RES event.

In 2021, RES joined with the Amateur Entomologists’ Society to organise the first Young Verrall lecture, with the same lecturer speaking to a younger audience. This takes place on Saturday 1 March at Staffordshire University as part of the Staffordshire Invertebrate Science Fair. Further details will be announced soon.

Verrall Lecture 2025

Professor Iain Couzin
Director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior

Iain Couzin is Director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and a Professor and Speaker of the Excellence Cluster “Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour” at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Previously he was a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, and prior to that a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, and Junior Research Fellow in the Sciences at Balliol College, Oxford.

His work aims to reveal the fundamental principles that underlie evolved collective behavior, and consequently his research includes the study of a wide range of biological systems, from neural collectives to insect swarms, fish schools and primate groups.

In recognition of his research he has been recipient of the Searle Scholar Award in 2008, top 5 most cited papers of the decade in animal behavior research 1999-2010, National Geographic Emerging Explorer Award in 2012, the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London in 2013, a Web of Science Global Highly Cited Researcher 2018-2022, the Lagrange Prize in 2019, the Falling Walls Life Sciences Award and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (Germany’s highest research honor) in 2022, and the Rothschild Distinguished Fellowship at the University of Cambridge in 2023.

Registration

To attend in person, we encourage you to register for free at the bottom of the page to avoid queues at the venue. There is also the opportunity to turn up on the day.

The lecture will start at 16:30, there will be tea and coffee available from 16:00 outside the lecture hall. There will be an RES stand and rare books on display, so do arrive early to meet key members of the RES team.

If you are unable to attend in person, the talk will be recorded and shared after the event.

Location

The Verrall Lecture will take place in London, we will announce the venue soon.