Our researchers

About Janire

Janire Castellano Bueno is Outreach Manager at Wild Animal Initiative and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Newcastle University, where she lectures on the Animal Welfare MRes program. Janire’s research focuses on the validation of welfare indicators and the need for integrating welfare into behavioral research. She is a member of Wild Animal Initiative’s house sparrow welfare project, working on research design, as well as data collection, encoding, and analysis. Janire is a member of the Outreach Committee at the Animal Welfare Research Network, the COST Action on evolution of affective states network, and the Spanish Office for Integrity in Research committee.

Education & experience

Janire earned her PhD in Affective Neuroscience and Animal Welfare from Newcastle University, where her thesis focused on the cumulative experience of laboratory rhesus macaques using neuroimaging and behavioral indicators of welfare. Prior to this, she completed a masters by research in Animal Behaviour at Newcastle University. Her undergraduate biology thesis, completed at the University of the Basque Country, focused on parasitology and welfare of vervet monkeys and involved a comparison of techniques for the detection of gastrointestinal parasites.

Prior to joining Wild Animal Initiative, Janire worked at the Centro de Recuperación de la Fauna Silvestre de Martioda, a wildlife rehabilitation center in Martioda, Spain, where she specialized in bird ringing and mammal care. She also worked at the University Hospital of Álava’s microbiology lab in Spain, and conducted parasitological research at the Vervet Monkey Rehabilitation Sanctuary in South Africa. She has taught biostatistics at Newcastle University and organized two conferences: the 2023 International Symposium on Animal Behavior and Cognition (ISSABC) in Mexico, and the 2020 North East Postgraduate Conference (NEPG) in the United Kingdom.