Emil is a cognitive ecologist interested in social learning, information use, environmental effects on cognition, and the causes and consequences of changes in cognition. In his PhD thesis at the University of Ottawa, Canada, he investigated the effects of environmental influences on social learning, social information use and sociality in tits. Since April 2025, as a postdoc in the team of Thomas Bugnyar at the Konrad-Lorenz Research Center at Grünau im Almtal, he will continue his research on variation in social learning and information use in different environmental contexts and also investigate the evolutionary processes that shape cognition.