Ann Clemens

The University of Edinburgh

Webpage
Bluesky : @annmclemens.bsky.social / @kinshiplab.bsky.social

Title

Neurobiology of Kinship Behaviour

Abstract

The nervous system of vertebrate species evolved to navigate diverse social and environmental terrain. Our research group aims to understand the neurobiology of natural rodent behaviour from an ethological perspective. We are interested in how animals sense and respond to their natural environment through olfaction, somatosensation and have a particular interest in the development of social kinship behaviour. In recent years, our work in Edinburgh and the Marine Biological Laboratory has uncovered whisker sensory processing for wind stimuli (Mugnaini et al 2023) and sensory, behavioural and fur-based drying responses to environmental wetness (Attah et al 2024). We elucidated tactile mechanisms and skin sensory afferents for the rat pup transport response (Ni et al 2024) and tactile, vocal and kinship dynamics of rat pup huddling behaviour (Rocha-Almeida et al 2025). In ongoing work, we are working to understand the sensory, vocal and circuit mechanisms underlying reciprocal offspring-caregiver interactions across rodent species. We are developing research in the African spiny mouse, a gregarious, pro-social rodent with precocial offspring and the only rodent with a menstrual cycle. By pursuing a comparative approach across altricial and precocial rodent species, we aim to elucidate evolutionarily conserved and divergent neurobiological principles which will help us understand the development of the social brain and body interactions within environmental context.

Biosketch

Dr. Ann Clemens pursued her baccalaureate studies at the University of Texas at Austin and postbaccalaureate research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. She returned to Austin to pursue her PhD in the laboratory of Dr Daniel Johnston, where she examined intrinsic plasticity in neurons of the hippocampus. Upon completion of her PhD, Ann moved to Berlin, Germany where she performed a postdoc in the lab of Michael Brecht. Her postdoctoral research focused on uncovering the cellular mechanisms of social-sensory processing from a structure-function perspective. Since 2016, Ann has co-led the Somatosensory/ Rat module of the Neural Systems and Behaviour Course and was a pandemic Grass Fellow in 2020 at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. Ann is now principal investigator of the Kinship Lab at the University of Edinburgh, Simons Initiative for the Developing Brain. The research of Kinship Lab aims to understand the neurobiology and development of natural social behavior.