David McFarland is Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, having retired from his post of University Reader in Animal Behaviour at the Department of Zoology in 2000. Since then he has held a post as Professor of Biological Robotics at the University of the West of England, and is currently President of Casa Cantarilla, an Association of Teachers in the Arts and Sciences in Spain. He has also held posts as Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and Lecturer in Psychology at the Universities of Durham and Oxford.
He has published in the fields of animal behaviour, philosophy, physiology, psychology and robotics, and has written numerous books, most recently <i>The Oxford Dictionary of Animal Behaviour</i> (2006).