Talk Title: TBD
Principal Investigator & Associate Professor, Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology
University of Michigan
Our lab seeks to understand how neural circuits are organized in the brain to allow animals to perform survival behaviors–like feeding, fighting, fleeing, mating, parenting, and sleeping–under the right circumstances. We think the best way to do this is to study the recipes (or algorithms) that development uses to construct neurons and circuits. While brain structure can seem enormously complex, we think the algorithms that generate neurons and allow them to wire into circuits are graspable. By analogy, I can write down a recipe on an index card using far less information than it takes to completely describe a finished dish. In biology, these recipes are not written on index cards, but instead are written in DNA. We focus on chemosensory circuits, as we know that there are different kinds of neural circuits that use chemosensory information to different ends–for instinctual interpretations versus flexible interpretations guided by learning. The circuits that perform these different classes of interpretation have different forms, and we hypothesize that they are constructed using distinct developmental recipes. Our experimental work is conducted in fruit flies due to the interpretable characteristics of their brain organization and development, and due to the 100 years of history in the field that allows us to stand on the shoulders of others.