Our lab includes biologists engaged in fieldwork, genomics, neuroscience, computational and behavioral studies. These varied approaches provide unique perspectives on social behavior, its diversity and its mechanisms.

Click on photos to learn more about individual lab members.

Steve Phelps

Dr. Phelps got his PhD in Integrative Biology from the University of Texas in 1999. As a graduate student he received pre-doctoral fellowships from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and the National Institutes of Health. As a post-doc, he was a fellow at STRI and at the NSF Center for Behavioral Neuroscience in Atlanta. He was a faculty member at the University of Florida from 2002-2010, and joined the University of Texas in 2010. He is currently an Associate Professor of Integrative Biology, and the Director and co-founder of UT-Austin's Center for Brain, Behavior and Evolution. He is a member of graduate programs in Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, Cell and Molecular Biology, Neuroscience and Psychology. His lab has been funded by NSF, NIH and National Geographic. A full CV is available here. His interests include social cognition, perceptual scaling and brain size, signal detection and information theory, neural network models, the evolution of gene regulation, epigenetics and transcription, sexual selection, human evolution and population genetics. He also likes softball, good writing, and old country music.

Graduate students

Past trainees