I study how memories alter behavior. What changes in our brain when we have an important experience—an experience that will affect how we behave in similar situations in the future?

Tell us more about how memories alter behavior. How do you study this?
Thousands of people have worked on this problem over many decades, but we don’t really understand how humans or other animals do almost anything—and it’s not easy to study changes in something you don’t understand. But we actually do know quite a lot about how male fruit flies decide to sing and dance for a potential mating partner.

So, I study what happens if a male fruit fly has a bad experience during his courtship. He remembers and is reluctant to get into that situation again. What’s cool is that I can take just one gene away from a group of 20 neurons and he’ll never learn from that bad experience.

 What is the hardest part about your work?
Figuring out what that gene is doing in those 20 neurons as the fly learns about the consequences of his behavior! There are many experiments I could do…but which ones will lead to the kinds of impressive results that make you really believe that you understand a system? That’s hard.

What has been one of the most exciting or surprising moments in your career so far?
Maybe being asked to answer these questions for HBI? Aside from that I’m constantly amazed by the discoveries my labmates Stephen Zhang and Stephen Thornquist have been able to make just by sitting around and talking about how a system might work, conjuring up a simple experiment, doing it, then talking some more. They’ve inspired me to aim for really clever and cool experiments—but also to just do a lot of them.

What are your hopes for the future?
To figure out what’s going on in those 20 neurons! And I’m starting my PhD in the fall, so I’ll be looking for other ways to make important discoveries. I’m really inspired by a lot of the work I’ve seen around here so it shouldn’t be hard.

Portrait Photo by Celia Muto