How does a brain decide which memory to use? I work on that in
Drosophila, combining closed-loop behaviour, two-photon imaging and
circuit-level genetics — and, where it helps, models simple enough to
run in a browser.
Now
Postdoctoral work in the Felsenberg Lab: how visual context decides which olfactory memories are retrieved.
Neuronal mechanisms of context-dependent memory retrievalA fly learns that an odour predicts a targeted infrared laser pulse — but only in one visual context. I built a closed-loop virtual reality to put that context under experimental control, designed so the mushroom body can be imaged while the fly walks through it.
Before
PhD work on the circuits and behaviour of foraging flies, and earlier work on insect-inspired navigation in walking robots.
Genetic manipulation of descending neuronsDescending neurons carry commands from the brain to the motor centres. Silencing and activating identified subsets shows which of them gate the transition between walking and local search.Adaptive vector navigation in embodied agentsA neural model of path integration that lets a walking agent forage away from its nest and return along a home vector, without a map.Front. Neurorobot. 2017 →Adaptive obstacle negotiation in embodied agentsA hexapod robot that learns to anticipate obstacles from its own sensory history rather than being told the terrain in advance.Front. Neurorobot. 2014 →Lower-limb exoskeletonEarly engineering work on a powered lower-limb exoskeleton, before I moved to neuroscience.
Methods & tools
The rigs and pipelines the experiments run on — closed-loop tracking, optogenetics, and the analysis around them.
Closed-loop video tracking of walking fliesReal-time tracking that closes the loop between what a fly does and what it is exposed to, so optogenetic stimulation can be delivered contingent on behaviour within milliseconds.optoPAD, eLife 2019 →
The full list of papers is on the
publications page.
