van Breugel Lab

Floris van Breugel

Asst. Prof. at University of Nevada, Reno

Mechanical Engineering
Integrative Neuroscience
Ecology & Evolution

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Flies, DATA, AND Robots

I run an interdisciplinary lab at the intersection of neuroscience, ecology, engineering, and data science. We focus on studying insects to learn how brains integrate information from different types of sensors across space and time to make complex sequences of decisions. Our lab specializes in real-time tracking, high speed video, and virtual reality to study freely moving flies. Then, aided by modern machine learning tools and control theory, we analyze the behavior, and implement the principles on robotic systems to verify that they actually work. One area of particular interest is how insects use odor, visual, and wind information to track chemical plumes.

Floris van Breugel earned his PhD from Caltech in 2014 in Control and Dynamical Systems under the support of NSF and Hertz graduate fellowships while working with Michael H Dickinson on insect flight biomechanics, control, and multi-sensory integration. He subsequently went to the University of Washington to work with Jeff Riffell and J Nathan Kutz as a Postdoc to work on insect search strategies and machine learning approaches to system identification of complex systems, supported by a Sackler Fellowship in Biophysics and a Moore-Sloan-WRF Fellowship in DataScience. Floris joined the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering at UNR in January 2019, and received a Sloan Fellowship in Neuroscience in 2020.

Scientific Imagery

Long exposure of an illuminated fly as it approaches a fermenting strawberry.

Using genetic tools, my colleague Thad Lindsay expressed a green fluorescent calcium indicator in the steering muscles of a fruit fly.

Hundreds of alkali flies take flight on the shore of Mono Lake.

An alkali fly, safely encapsulated inside a protective air bubble.

Catching alkali flies on the shores of Mono Lake for some experiments.

Self portrait, with a macro-fisheye lens.

A fruit fly tethered in a LED-powered virtual environment.

Fluorescence image of a fruit fly brain by my colleague Marie Suver. Green shows neurons that release a neuromodulator, Octopamine.

An unfortunate short eared grebe. Grebes, and many other species, rely on the alkali flies at Mono Lake to fuel their long range migrations.

One of our study sites - Mono Lake - is famous for its picturesque tufa towers, composed of calcium carbonate.

Self portrait in a volcanic fissure near Mono Lake. I took this image at night under short wave ultraviolet illumination, which causes certain minerals to emit a variety of colors.

Strobe image of a hovering drone with four sets of wings (you see 8 wings because the strobe light fired twice during the exposure).