Our researchers
Janire Castellano Bueno
primate welfare | animal behavior | cumulative experience | welfare indicators
Current projects
Assessing the suitability of welfare indicators for wild animals
Testing the validity of several welfare indicators in house sparrows
Identifying challenges behavioural ecologists face when trying to integrate welfare considerations into their research
About Janire
Janire Castellano Bueno is Outreach Manager at Wild Animal Initiative and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Newcastle University, where she has lectured 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, data collection, encoding, and analysis. Janire is a member of the Outreach Committee at the Animal Welfare Research 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 at the Vervet Monkey Rehabilitation Sanctuary in South Africa.
Prior to joining Wild Animal Initiative, Janire trained at the Centro de Recuperación de la Fauna Silvestre de Martioda, a wildlife rehabilitation center in Martioda, Spain, and at the University Hospital of Álava’s microbiology lab in Spain. 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.
Selected publications
*Baciadonna, L., Castellano Bueno, J., Elliott, V., & Naworth, C. (2024). Taking welfare into account in comparative cognition research. Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews 19, 3–7. https://comparative-cognition-and-behavior-reviews.org/vol19_baciadonna_bueno_elliott_nawroth/#:~:text=To%20reliably%20compare%20cognitive%20performance,and%20demonstrate%20their%20cognitive%20capacity
*Castellano Bueno, J., & Elliott, V. (2024). Bridging the Gap-Integrating Wild Animal Welfare into Behavior Studies. In A. Spink, G. Riedel, K., Truong, & L. Robinson (Eds.), Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research (pp. 331–332). figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.25897855.v3
Castellano Bueno, J., Vezyrakis, A., Xu, P., & Miller, C. W. (2024). Beyond barriers, towards diversity: How hybrid student conferences can drive accessibility. Biology Open 13(2). https://doi.org/10.1242/bio.060290 *
Poirier, C., Oliver, C. J., Castellano Bueno, J., Flecknell, P., & Bateson, M. (2019). Pacing behaviour in laboratory macaques is an unreliable indicator of acute stress. Scientific Reports 9, 7476. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-43695-5
*Denotes papers published while working at Wild Animal Initiative.