Technical Assistant

Department of Behavioral and Cognitive Biology
University of Vienna

I work as a technician for the Fusani Lab, where my responsibilities include hormone analyses, lab management, and field work. My expertise lies in behavioral endocrinology and biological anthropology, which I acquired through my education and training at the University of Vienna, Indiana University Bloomington, and the Max Planck Institutes for Ornithology and for Evolutionary Anthropology.

I am a competent technician experienced in hormone analyses, specializing in ELISA techniques for blood plasma, saliva, urine, and fecal samples. My work extends to both wild and captive settings, with field work experience in Europe and tropical Africa. Furthermore, I have worked with human study participants, providing necessary training. As a researcher, my primary interest lies in understanding the adaptability of organisms to changing environments. My previous work explored the role of hormones in mediating phenotypic plasticity within the ecology of great tits, great apes, and humans.

Recently, my focus has shifted towards the welfare of wild animals used in research. My current project explores the utility of respiratory rate as a parameter to assess the severity of experimental procedures in wild great tits (Parus major). For this, we are developing an open-source automation tool for estimating respiration rate metrics from mobile phone videos. This project is in collaboration with Dr. Michaela Hau at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence and my brother Dr. Raphael Deimel at the TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology).

Funding:

Wild Animal Initiative https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/

https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/blog/small-grants-2023

Collaborators:

Dr. Michaela Hau https://www.bi.mpg.de/hau

Dr. Raphael Deimel https://www.acin.tuwien.ac.at/institutsangehoerige/cds/#rdeimel

Personal pages:

Google scholar page https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=uX8lFKcAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

Research gate https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Caroline-Deimel