My interest in social behaviour probably stems from me belonging to a species where social interactions rule our lives. As a teenager I was very interested in psychiatry, and I also recall spending hours observing the human-like attitudes of chimpanzees and gorillas in the zoo. Accordingly, while studying biology at university, I seriously considered the option of studying chimpanzees. But at the time of graduating I had come to realise that this was not an easy task. Either one would conduct studies in the field with the only hope to collect sparse observational data, or one could study chimpanzees in enclosures, but the very contrived and artificial environment makes it difficult to understand how behaviour might have been modulated by natural selection. I therefore started to think about other social organisms that could be easily observed and, importantly, where it was possible to experimentally manipulate key components of social organisation. This paved the way for my interest in myrmecology.

My first work in the field of myrmecology (the ant world) was primarily concerned with understanding the evolution of multiple-queen colonies, which at that time was seen as a major problem for kin selection theory. During my PhD and postdoc I conducted many experiments, which, together with the work of some colleagues, allowed us to solve the apparent paradox of reduced relatedness stemming from colonies containing several reproductive queens.