Professor Mason is Director of the University of Guelph’s Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare, and a behavioural biologist with a PhD from Cambridge University and post-doctoral experience at Oxford University who moved in Canada in 2004 to take up a Canada Research Chair. Her research spans zebrafish to elephants, and typically asks ‘is meeting an animal’s physiological needs enough for good welfare, and if not why not?”. She is fascinated by the evolution of emotions and moods, and the knotty problem of how science can be objective about subjective experience.