Research Areas

• Refinement of animal experiments and housing conditions
• Reproducibility and generalizability of animal experiments
• Animal welfare
• Cognition and emotion
• Animal welfare and animal personality
• Gene-by-environment interactions

Selected Publications

Richter SH, Kästner N, Kriwet M, Kaiser S, Sachser N (2016): Play matters – the surprising relationship between juvenile playfulness and anxiety in later life. Animal Behaviour, 114: 261-271.


Richter SH, Vogel AS, Ueltzhöffer K, Muzzillo C, Vogt MA, Lankisch K, Armbruster-Genc DJ, Riva MA, Fiebach CJ, Gass P, Vollmayr B (2014): Touchscreen-paradigm for mice reveals cross-species evidence for an antagonistic relationship of cognitive flexibility and stability. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 8: 154


Richter SH, Schick A, Hoyer C, Lankisch K, Gass P, Vollmayr B (2012): A glass full of optimism: Enrichment effects on cognitive bias in a rat model of depression. Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience, 12: 527-542.


Richter SH, Garner JP, Auer C, Kunert J, Würbel H (2010): Systematic variation improves reproducibility of animal experiments. Nature Methods, 7: 167-168.


Richter SH, Garner JP, Würbel H (2009): Environmental standardization: cure or cause of poor reproducibility in animal experiments? Nature Methods, 6: 257-261.

Academic CV


Since 2017 Professor (W2) for Behavioural Biology and Animal Welfare (W2), University of Münster, Germany
2014 - 2017 Postdoctoral researcher and head of the mouse experimental unit, Department of Behavioural Biology, University of Münster, Germany
2010 - 2014 Postdoctoral researcher, Animal Models in Psychiatry, Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim & Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Mannheim/ Heidelberg, Germany
2010 Postdoctoral researcher, Animal Welfare and Ethology, Veterinary Medicine, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Germany
2007 - 2010 PhD student, Animal Welfare and Ethology, Veterinary Medicine, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Germany
2004 - 2005 Research projects on (i) the social organisation in Sooty Mangabeys, Primatology Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany; (ii) tropical marine ecology, El Quseir, Red Sea, Egypt; (iii) welfare in cattle, Division of Animal Welfare, Central Science Laboratory, York, UK

Honors and Awards

Since 2017 Manager of the Ethologische Gesellschaft e.V.
Since 2016 Member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts (“Junges Kolleg” NRW)
2016 Call for a W2-S-professorship for “Animal welfare and refinement in animal experimentation”, Freie Universität Berlin and Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung, Berlin, Germany (declined)
2013 Raising of “Margarete von Wrangell Habilitation” fund of the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts
2012 Call for a junior professorship for “Ethology of Farm Animals”, Landwirtschaftliche Fakultät, Rheinische-Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität Bonn, Germany (declined)
2011 “KlarText! Klaus Tschira Preis für verständliche Wissenschaft 2011“, Heidelberg, Germany