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.

Tinbergen authored influential books including The Study of Instinct (1951) and The Herring Gull’s World (1953). He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, shared with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz, for discoveries concerning the organisation and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns in animals. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1962 and supervised notable researchers including Richard Dawkins. Tinbergen died in Oxford in 1988.

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