I study the fly brain. I am interested in how this tiny brain, itself smaller than some single brain cells in your cortex, can enable the insect to navigate through space. To answer this question, I record from brain cells in the animal while it behaves in a virtual reality environment that I can control.

Photo by Celia Muto

What are the big questions driving your research?
At ~10 quintillion individuals, insects are the most numerous animals on Earth. Their nervous systems have evolved to master a vast range of environments and problems, but the core of their nervous system is remarkably similar between species. They can solve problems, such as navigating through the world, on the energy budget of a miniscule piece of banana, when it would take a computer >1000x more energy to solve the same problem. Understanding how teaches us about general neurobiological principles that may port to other kinds of life, as well as artificial neural networks.

What drew you to this area of neuroscience?
I have always been interested in animal behaviour but settled on insects to study because they are small. With only ~150k neurons in the fly nervous system, compared with your ~80 billion, they lie at a ‘sweet spot’ where they have a relatively small number of neurons but a large behavioural repertoire: they can readily run, fly, mate, fight, explore, remember, learn and more.

What is the first experiment you remember doing?
When I was an undergraduate, I did a summer research internship with the Amgen Scholars programme at the University of Cambridge. I recorded from neurons in the muscle wall of larval flies – to do this we took a larva, which is a maggot that is basically a tube, cut through the tube and rolled it out into a flat surface of muscle with the brain still attached. This way, we could image its neurons easily with the brain still controlling attempted muscle contractions. The point of this experiment was to reveal neurons within the muscle wall of the larva in a flat plane for easy imaging. This allows us to monitor how these neurons change over the time course of hours in living tissue.

What has been the most surprising thing you’ve learned in the lab or classroom so far?
The fly brain contains a literal ‘ring’ of neurons, around which a ‘bump’ of activity travels as a reading of the fly’s heading in 2-dimensional space. In other words, the brain contains a circular neural compass, where a ‘bump’ of high activity acts like a compass needle. It is a beautiful thing.