David Sumpter is professor of applied mathematics in Uppsala where he runs the collective behaviour research group. An incomplete list of the research projects on which David has worked include: pigeons flying in pairs over Oxford; clapping undergraduate students in the north of England; the traffic of Cuban leaf-cutter ants; fish swimming between coral in the Great Barrier Reef; swarms of locusts traveling across the Sahara; disease spread in remote Ugandan villages; the gaze following of London commuters; dancing honey bees from Sydney; and the tubular structures built by Japanese slime mould.
More details of David’s research, along with a number of visualizations and popular science accounts of his work, can be found at his www.collective-behavior.com website.