My expertise covers evolutionary ecology of bonding, life-history trade offs, evidence synthesis, and data and code standards. I strive to apply my knowledge of different modelling approaches and Open Science to study and optimize scientific process itself - called meta-science and to enable ecological research to reach its full potential.
As a sole carer of a toddler, I have been experiencing many obstacles in managing my scientific career. I hope that being vocal about this can help in changing the current evaluation, expectation, and promotion systems in science, and encourage practices that accommodate those in less-common life-situations.
Get in touch if you have any questions about my work, ideas for collaborative projects, or if you think your group would benefit from a workshops on open practices, meta-science, or meta-analysis.
The majority of my work has been based on long-term studies of birds, although I have worked on mammals too. Within the scope of improving data connectivity and collaboration between birds researchers, I have initiated SPI-Birds Network and Database. More recenty, my study system has become a research process itself.
As one of the pioneers in studying and promoting Open Science practices in ecological and evolutionary research I was one of the founding memebrs of SORTEE where I act as the EC memeber. I also act as a Associate Editor of the Journal of Animal Ecology and as advisory memeber of several Open Science initatives.
I currently hold a personal VENI research fellowship. Within this fellowship I work on
I am also activly working on several other projects related to Open Science and meta-science in ecology, use of meta-anlaysis for informed decision making, and probelms related to uncertainty inherent to observational data
During my undergrad and Masters at the Univeristy of Zagreb, I was also working as an ornithologist at BIOM - Croatian association for biological research and Croatian Institute of Ornithology, where I still hold research ties. I did my Masters thesis on the urban bird fauna, linking habitat traits of urban parks to the diveristy of breeding and wintering birds.
After that, I have done a DPhil at the Univerity of Oxford (2010-2015), on pair fidelity and divorce in monogmous species, followed by a postdoc position at the the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, University of Oxford (2015-2016). During this position, I have established scientific background for a project on life-history and population dynamics in bats. During my PhD I have developed an interest in the Open Science, and I have took up an exciting position at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology to lead a project on Open Science and Meta-Analysis in ecology and evolution in 2016.
Executive board and founding member, Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary biology (SORTEE)
Co-chair of Education Committee and Awards Committee of SORTEE
Wildlife Research Conservation Unit (University of Oxford), Alumni
Lorentz Center Grant for organizing a workshop (2021)
Dutch Data Prize of Research Data Netherlands for SPI-Birds project (2020)
Open Science Use Case award for SPI-Birds project (2020)
Cooperation and Scientific Meetings grant of NWO (2017)
Culina A. (2020): How I managed my work and personal life as a sole parent during the pandemic, Nature. doi: 10.1038/d41586-020-02329-x
Nature Careers Webcast (2020): Tips from Nature Careers on managing time and childcare during pandemic
SPI-Birds Network and Database
My collaborative network consists of several main clusters:
1) evolutionary ecology research cluster
2) SPI-Birds cluster (130 collaborators)
3) meta-science and Open Science cluster
I suppervise a personell of the SPI-Birds Network and Database project (Code developers team, and Coordinators team) as well as SPI-Birds postdoc Dr. Chris Tyson. and a previous postdoc Zuzana Zajkova.
Currently I suppervise 2 Master Students (one in Croatia, working on estimates of unused potential of Ecological research), and one from UvA (meta-analysis in terestrial ecology)
My previous students include Dr. Jip Ramakers (open data meta-analysis) , Andrea Aldas Vergas (meta-analysis in microbial ecology), Ilona van de Berg (code sharing in ecology), Miram Barto (maternal effects and animal welfare)