Rate My Professor Nikolaas Tinbergen

Nikolaas Tinbergen was a Dutch biologist and ornithologist who joined the University of Oxford in 1949 as a lecturer and fellow of Merton College. He later became Reader and then Professor of Animal Behaviour, and a fellow of Wolfson College. Tinbergen earned his doctorate from Leiden University and established the Animal Behaviour Research Group at Oxford, where he remained until his retirement in 1974. He played a central role in founding the field of ethology, the biological study of animal behaviour, and developed Tinbergen’s four questions for analysing behaviour in terms of causation, ontogeny, function and evolution.