Swarm! Biologist & Animal Behaviorist Simon Garnier

Director of the Swarm Lab and professor of biology at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Simon Garnier uses ant-mimicking robot swarms, bridge-building army ants, and socially networked slime molds to learn how intelligent collective behaviors and decision-making emerge in groups of social animals. He also considers the question of self-organization in nature—in everything from cells to human crowds. Simon Garnier’s work has been widely covered in the media, and he has been a featured scientist on Science Friday, the Guardian technology series, National Geographic, Scientific American, BBC News, and Mashable.

What is intelligence? Good question . . . Safely encased in our human skulls, our 85 billion neurons gather information, form thoughts, and dictate our actions. But is that the only kind of smarts? Biologist Simon Garnier studies animals that exhibit highly coordinated group behavior—or collective intelligence. Think army ants, bees, schools of fish, flocks of birds.