Staff profile

Honorary Fellow; Postdoctoral Research Fellow(Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation)

I am a behavioural ecologist studying how individual decisions and social relationships shape how humans and other animals navigate their environments and respond to environmental uncertainty, including climate change. My research takes a comparative approach to understanding the feedbacks between individual behaviour and social organisation: how individual decisions generate broader patterns of social organisation, and how social position influences access to information, resources, and cooperative support. I study processes including social information use and collective foraging, with a particular interest in how social relationships can buffer environmental risks and shape responses to environmental change, including and climate change.

I am developing FEAST (Foraging Ecology And Social Ties), a research programme integrating evolutionary theory, computational approaches, and comparative analyses to investigate how social relationships shape foraging decisions and cooperative outcomes across Indigenous subsistence communities and non-human systems.

At Durham, I'm a member of DCERC (Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre) and SIGICS (Special Interest Group in Indigenous and Colonial Studies).

You can find my publications and read more about my work, including animal behaviour research and metascience, on my website: fhillemann.github.io.

Journal Article

• Congolese BaYaka children's learning and exploring in a village context
  
  Visine, A., Hillemann, F., Holden, E., Ndenguele, R., Ngoma, G. R., & Lew-Levy, S. (2026). Congolese BaYaka children’s learning and exploring in a village context. Evolution and Human Behavior, 47(6), Article 106978. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2026.106978
• Collaborating With Early Career Researchers to Enhance the Future of Scholarly Publication: A Guide for Publishers
  
  Kohrs, F. E., Kazezian, V., Bagley, R. K., Boisgontier, M. P., Brod, S., Carneiro, C. F. D., Casas, M. I., Chakrabarti, D., Colbran, R. J., Debat, H., Delshad, V., Drude, N. I., Edmunds, S. C., Fischer, F., Franzen, D. L., Gatto, L., Gazda, M. A., Gjoneska, B., Glatz, T., … Weissgerber, T. L. (2026). Collaborating With Early Career Researchers to Enhance the Future of Scholarly Publication: A Guide for Publishers. Learned Publishing, 39(1), Article e2028. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.2028
• Animal social networks are robust to changing association definitions
  
  Chan, A. H. H., Dunning, J., Beck, K. B., Burke, T., Chik, H. Y. J., Dunleavy, D., Evans, T., Ferreira, A., Fourie, B., Griffith, S. C., Hillemann, F., & Schroeder, J. (2025). Animal social networks are robust to changing association definitions. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 79(2), Article 26. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-025-03559-7