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.
Closed-loop VR in complex environments with changing contexts 3D rendering of virtual reality with ground color (green/blue) as contextual cues. Each of these two contextual spaces employ different contingency rules, i.e., which odors are punished. We use this setup to ask how contextual changes affect the retrieval of aversive odor memories.

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.