Aurore Avarguès-Weber

Aurore Avarguès-Weber (born 1983) is a French cognitive neuroscientist and ethologist who is researching the behaviour of bees at the Centre de Recherche sur la Cognition Animale in Toulouse.

In 2015, for investigating the brain mechanisms of visual cognition of social insects, she received an International Rising Talent Fellowship, one of the L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science. She has also received a CNRS Bronze Medal.

Early life Avarguès-Weber is from Givry, in France. After graduating high school in Chalon-sur-Saône, she chose to study in a Classe Préparatoire in Lyon, and developed a passion for biology and physiology.

Education and research Avarguès-Weber studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan. She then undertook two post-doctoral research positions, one under Lars Chittka at Queen Mary University, and one with Jean-Christophe Sandoz in Gif-sur-Yvette. The results of her research have implications for both computer science and facial recognition. She has also shown that bees can recognise face-like patterns. She is currently developing a virtual reality system to test more complex abilities of bees.

Awards and achievements Averguès-Weber has received an International Rising Talent Fellowship, and was awarded the L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science in 2015, along with prize money of 20,000 euros. The Bronze Medal recognises the first works of researchers; Averguès-Weber was recognised for her work on the cognition of bees. Simultaneous mastering of two abstract concepts by the miniature brain of bees (2012) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The forest or the trees: preference for global over local image processing is reversed by prior experience in honeybees (2014) Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Recognition of Human Face Images by the Free Flying Wasp Vespula vulgaris (2017) Animal Behavior and Cognition Bumblebee social learning can lead to suboptimal foraging choices (2018) Animal Behaviour. 135: 209–214. Does Holistic Processing Require a Large Brain? Insights From Honeybees and Wasps in Fine Visual Recognition Tasks (2018) Frontiers in Psychology Aminergic neuromodulation of associative visual learning in harnessed honey bees (2018) Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. 155: 556–567. Numerical cognition in honeybees enables addition and subtraction (2019) Science Advances

Personal life Avarguès-Weber has four children.