Staff profile

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

I'm a behavioural ecologist studying FEASTs --Foraging Ecology And Social Ties-- in Indigenous communities and non-human animal societies. My research takes a comparative approach to understanding how individual-level decisions and social processes, such as social information use, collective hunting, and food sharing, interact to shape socio-ecological systems. I am particularly interested in the feedbacks between individual behaviour and social networks: how decisions shape social relationships, and how social position influences access to information, resources, and cooperative support that affect future decisions. Currently, I develop methods for cross-cultural analyses of food production and food-sharing decisions in subsistence communities.

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

• 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