Antonio Carlos COSTA

My main research focus is the dynamics of animal behavior, which ultimately is the scale at which evolution plays a role : animals need to move appropriately in order to find food, mates, and adapt to changing environments.

Leveraging high resolution tracking methods, I mainly work with time series data and develop analysis techniques to unravel new insights on the genetic and neuromuscular control mechanisms underlying behavior.  In analysing such time series, I combine ideas from dynamical systems theory, statistical mechanics, inference and information theory to build effective predictive models of animal movement.

Combined with detailed data analysis, I construct effective physical descriptions of the observed dynamics with the aim to provide deeper insight into the observations.