Dr Adria LeBoeuf

Adria LeBoeuf leads the Laboratory of Social Fluids at the University of Cambridge (UK). 

Since first jumping into research, Adria has enjoyed working in between and on the edges of fields, especially around the evolution of communication and behaviour.

During her undergraduate studies at the College of Creative Studies at University of California Santa Barbara, she tried the two extremes of studying the brain, first on human behaviour at the Centre for Evolutionary Psychology and then on the microtubule dynamics underlying neurodegenerative disease.

She received her PhD in neuroscience and biophysics from The Rockefeller University after studying the subcellular friction and adhesion within the auditory sensory hair bundle.

Adria then made a dramatic shift from the nano-scale up to the organismal scale when she shifted to work with ants for her postdoc at University of Lausanne in Switzerland and later at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. As a recipient of a prestigious PRIMA grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation, in 2019 she began her research group at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Her research focuses on how evolution has engineered social life, in particular, through socially exchanged fluids.

In 2024 the Social Fluids Lab moved to Cambridge University’s Department of Zoology.The lab’s work has been recognized by awards (Best Paper for Meurville & LeBoeuf 2021), many stories in the media, and prestigious grants (HFSP 2022). 

In addition to her scientific life, Adria is the founder and strategic director of the science-entertainment collective The Catalyst which focuses on using improvisation to help researchers better communicate their work.