Dennis Goldschmidt

I am a postdoctoral fellow in the Felsenberg Lab at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland. I study how a fly’s memories are re-evaluated — and how what it sees decides which memories get used at all.

A smell that meant danger yesterday may mean nothing today, and a smell that means danger in one place may be safe in another. My work asks how the brain holds both of those facts at once: the neuronal circuit mechanisms of memory re-evaluation, and specifically context-dependent memory retrieval.

Closed-loop visual VR A fly walks on an air-supported ball while the panorama around it turns with every step it takes, so it steers through a visual world that never moves it.
Tracking and local search After finding food, a fly stops walking in straight lines and starts circling the spot it left. The trace is coloured by time, and the search tightens as the minutes pass.

How I work on it

I build experimental systems for real-time closed-loop two-photon imaging, sensory stimulation, optogenetics and video tracking.
I measure and analyse fly brain activity during ongoing behaviour and learning.
I genetically manipulate activity in the neural circuitry of fly brains.
And I develop computing pipelines for automated data analysis and visualisation.

More on the research and publications pages, or get in touch.