Postdoc Opportunity
University of Nevada, Reno
Contact: fvanbreugel@unr.edu
What information do flying insects gain when making rapid turns? Which neural circuits control these turns? The van Breugel lab seeks a postdoc to help answer these questions through an NIH BRAIN funded position.
Opportunities include using visual virtual reality, optogenetic perturbation experiments in freely flying flies, and the application of information theory.
Candidates should have experience in some of the following areas:
• Drosophila genetics/neuroscience
• Python programming
• Neuroethology
• Analysis of freely moving animals
Career development opportunities include collaborations with:
• Michael Dickinson (Caltech)
• Bing Brunton (UW)
This project builds on recent work on olfactory navigation, and an information theoretic framework for quantifying active sensing.
Our recent olfactory paper in Current Biology uses optogenetics in freely flying flies to show that in the absence of wind they use a previously undescribed search behavior: sink and circle.
Our recent preprint in bioRxiv describes a computational framework for evaluating the role active sensing in various estimation tasks.
BOUNDS method
We developed a computational framework (“BOUNDS”) that makes it easy to discover which movement motifs would allow an animal (or machine) to estimate features of the environment that might be of interest.
For flies, turning and to a lesser extent acceleration, facilitate the estimation of wind direction.
Our open source tool is available on github:
https://github.com/vanbreugel-lab/pybounds