Flavia Grenga is a visiting research fellow from Università La Sapienza di Roma. She will spend 6 months at MIB working under the supervision of Associate Professor Andrea Ravignani.
At MIB she will for the first time work with humans, taking part in developing an experimental study regarding vocal plasticity and F0 shifting in noise conditions, with a second comparative part that will be carried out on captive seals in Rome.

Flavia graduated in 2021 in Neurobiology with a thesis about consonance and dissonance preferences in budgerigars carried out at the Budgie Lab at the University of Vienna and Acoustic Research Insitute under the supervision of Dr. Marisa Hoeschele.

She’s interested in comparative vocal learning studies, especially between parrots and marine mammals.

Flavia has experience working in the field with Cetaceans, in population monitoring, using photoID techniques and passive acoustic monitoring. She collaborated with research centers and associations in Italy and Iceland, working on several species. She has also been part of the Max Planck Comparative Cognition Research Lab in Tenerife for the last 9 months, working on a project about Motor and Vocal imitation in parrots.