Rate My Professor Mandy Ridley

Professor Mandy Ridley is a Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Western Australia. She earned her PhD in Behavioural Ecology from the University of Cambridge in 2004 and a BSc (Hons) in Animal Ecology from Lincoln University, New Zealand, in 1999. Her academic career encompasses postdoctoral research fellowships at the University of Cambridge from 2004 to 2005 and at the University of Cape Town from 2005 to 2009, followed by a lectureship at Macquarie University from 2009 to 2012. Since 2012, she has held an ARC Future Fellowship at UWA, progressing to her current professorial position. Ridley established the Pied Babbler Research Project in 2003 in the southern Kalahari desert, South Africa, and the Western Magpie Research Project in 2013 in urban Perth, Australia.

Ridley's research centers on behavioural ecology, with a primary focus on the evolution and dynamics of cooperative breeding behaviour, including the causes and consequences of helping behaviour, long-term population dynamics, host-brood parasite interactions, animal cognition, vocal communication, social evolution, and the impacts of climate change and anthropogenic noise. Her influential publications include 'A large-scale study across the avian clade identifies ecological drivers of neophobia' (2025, PLoS Biology), 'Climate-induced divergence of song: Vocal communication' (2025, Nature Climate Change), 'An Experimental Test of Central Place Foraging Theory in a Cooperatively Breeding Bird' (2025, Ecology and Evolution), and 'Group size affects spontaneous quantity discrimination performance in wild Western Australian magpies (Gymnorhina tibicen dorsalis)' (2025, Animal Cognition). She has garnered over 6,000 citations for her work. Awards include the Faculty of Science Excellence Award and UWA Student Guild's Student Choice Award in 2017, as well as the ARC Future Fellowship in 2011 for research on group dynamics in cooperative breeders. Ridley contributes to the ARC College of Experts and engages in media discussions on bird behaviour and conservation.