December 2023 – Welcome to Tayler Belton, who is starting her rotation in lab.
November 2023 – Congratulations to Ryosuke Tanaka, Baohua Zhou, Margarida Agrochao, Bara Badwan, Braedyn Au, and Natalia Matos, whose paper on fly optomotor turning just came out in Current Biology. [link] In it, they show that flies have a pathway that detects stationary objects in the field of view, parallel to motion detection. These stationary objects constitute evidence that motion in the visual scene is not caused by the fly’s own self-rotation.
September 2023 – Congratulations to Juyue Chen, Caitlin Gish, and Emilio Salazar-Gatzimas, whose paper just came out in iScience. [link] In collaboration with Bart Borghuis at University of Louisville to make direct comparisons between T4 cells in flies and ON SACs in mouse retina. We found similarities in many aspects, but some interesting differences in response to apparent motion stimuli.
September 2023 – Congratulations to Omer Mano, whose paper just came out in eLife, looking at a counter-intuitive long-timescale behavior he discovered in flies. [link] He worked with other lab members Ryosuke Tanaka, Matt Creamer, Natalia Matos, Joseph Shomar, and Bara Badwan. We also collaborated with Minseung Choi and the Clandinin Lab, who found that this behavior also exists in Drosophila species beyond melanogaster.
September 2023 – Welcome to Juliana Calvert, an undergraduate in electrical engineering working with us this year.
September 2023 – Welcome to Kate Maier, who is rotating this fall.
April 2023 – Congratulations to Braedyn Au, who won a NSERC graduate fellowship!
January 2023 – Welcome to Krystian Loetscher, who will be rotating this spring.
November 2022 – Congratulations to Nirag Kadakia, Mahmut Demir, and Brian DeAngelis, whose paper on odor motion sensing has just been published in Nature! [link] This work beautifully links work we have been pursuing in the visual system with what the Emonet Lab has been pursuing in olfactory navigation, and offers a ton of cool follow up projects.
October 2022 – Welcome to Wu Heng, who has joined the lab!
July 2022 – Congratulations to Annie Gonzalez, whose beautiful work on timing in neurons upstream of motion detection was just published in Current Biology. [Link]
June 2022 – Welcome to Heng Wu, who will be rotating in lab this summer!
June 2022 – Welcome to our summer undergraduate researchers: Jee Hwan Kim and Daniel Otchere.
May 2022 – Congratulations to Ryosuke Tanaka, who has just departed our lab for a postdoc in the Portugues Lab. Ryosuke’s paper identifying inputs to lobula columnar neurons in the Drosophila hemibrain has just come out in eNeuro [link]. In a second paper in Current Biology, he discovered how flies use positional cues – distinct from looming cues – to avoid collisions with other moving objects [link].
April 2022 – Congratulations to Caitlin and Garrett, who were both awarded NSF GRFs!
April 2022 – Welcome to Caitlin Gish, who will be pursuing her physics PhD in the lab!
February 2022 – Congratulations to Dr. Ryosuke Tanaka, who defended his wonderful thesis. Celebrations to come.
January 2022 – Congratulations to Baohua Zhou, whose paper on inference and loom detection was just published in eLife.
January 2022 – Congratulations to Dr. Aneysis Gonzalez, who defended her beautiful thesis work in early January. We’ll celebrate in person soon!
January 2022 – Welcome to Braedyn Au, who is rotating with us this spring and developing new optogenetic techniques in lab.
September 2021 – Welcome to Harsh Vashistha, a new postdoc in lab coming from the Salman Lab at Pitt.
September 2021 – Welcome to Xiaowei Ou, who is rotating in lab this semester to investigate behavioral responses to stochastic stimulus.
July 2021 – Congratulations to Omer Mano, whose paper just came out in Current Biology. It shows how task optimization can explain all sorts of non-intuitive features of the motion detection circcuit in the fly. [Link.]
June 2021 – Welcome to undergraduates Elizabeth Wu and Nanki Chugh, who are joining the lab for the summer (and beyond!).
June 2021 – Welcome to Natalia Castelo Branco Matos, who has joined the lab!
May 2021 – Welcome to Allison Cairns, who has joined the lab from Applied Physics.
March 2021 – Welcome to Garrett Sager, who has joined the lab!
March 2021 – Welcome to Raimundo Rodriguez, who is rotating this spring and working on new ways of analyzing imaging data.
February 2021 – Welcome to Natalia Castelo Branco Matos, who is rotating this spring and working aversive behaviors.
January 2021 – Welcome to Evyn Dickinson, who is rotating this spring and working on behavior and imaging.
January 2021 – Welcome to Allison Cairns, who is rotating in lab this spring and working on behavior and imaging.
October 2020 – Welcome to Garrett Sager, who is rotating in lab this fall and investigating neural dynamics and calcium signaling.
October 2020 – Welcome to Tong Gou, who just joined our lab from Electrical Engineering!
August 2020 – Congratulations to Margarida and Ryosuke, whose paper describing common mechanisms for motion illusions in flies and humans was just published in PNAS.
June 2020 – Welcome to Rebecca Greenberg, who is rotating this summer and investigating timing in calcium signals.
June 2020 – Welcome to Amber Young, who is doing her undergraduate research in lab remotely this summer on walking coordination in Drosophila.
May 2020 – Welcome to Sam Danquah, who is doing undergraduate research in lab remotely this summer on computational models of neural activity.
May 2020 – Welcome to Kay Ellison, who is rotating this summer and investigating visual projection neurons.
May 2020 – Congratulations to Ryosuke Tanaka, whose paper on LC11 was just published in Current Biology. In it, he develops a brand new model for small object detection and validates it using a whole suite of optical sensors available in Drosophila. [Link]
April 2020 – Congratulations to Brian DeAngelis, Jacob Zavatone-Veth, and Aneysis Gonzalez, whose paper was just published at eLife. It uses an innovative method for optogenetically activating sensory neurons in single limbs of walking flies, and finds navigational behaviors that depend on both the limb activated and the stepping phase during activation. [Link]
April 2020 – Congratulations to Aneysis Gonzalez, who was awarded a PEO Scholar Award.
April 2020 – Congratulations to Joseph Shomar, who was awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship.
February 2020 – Congratulations to Dr. Juyue Chen, who defended her PhD thesis!
February 2020 – Congratulations to Dr. Catherine Matulis, who defended her PhD thesis!
January 2020 – Congratulations to Dr. Bara Badwan, who defended his PhD thesis!
January 2020 – Congratulations to Catherine Matulis, whose paper on temporal contrast adaptation was just published in Current Biology. Her work investigated how Drosophila’s direction-selective visual circuits adapt to inputs with variable contrast. These experiments revealed contrast adaptation that is heterogeneously distributed among cell types, that can occur on the timescale of membrane voltage responses to light, and that can in principle improve motion estimates in natural scenes. [Link]
December 2019 – Congratulations to Dr. Omer Mano, who just defended his PhD thesis!
November 2019 – Congratulations to Jacob Zavatone-Veth, whose modeling paper was just accepted at Journal of Vision. It presents a simple synaptic model for direction-selectivity in Drosophila and compares the model’s results to a wide variety of data available in the field. Pre-publication, it is available here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/833970v1. [Link]
October 2019 – Congratulations to Omer, whose paper was just published in Nature Communications. It presents a straightforward method to obtain high-temporal resolution receptive fields or mean responses from slow frame rate imaging. [Link]
October 2019 – Congratulations to Juyue, whose paper on light-dark asymmetries in motion detection was just published in eLife. This was work with our long-time collaborator James Fitzgerald. [Link]
September 2019 – Welcome to Baohua Zhou, PhD, who just joined the lab and will be working in collaboration with John Lafferty’s group.
September 2019 – Welcome to Ke Tan, who is rotating in our lab this fall and working on optogenetic experiments.
August 2019 – Welcome to Joseph Shomar (Physics), who is joing the lab for his PhD!
July 2019 – Congratulations to Bara, whose paper on direction opponency in motion detectors was just published in Nature Neuroscience. [Link]
June 2019 – Congratulations to Brian and Jacob, whose paper on walking coordination patterns in flies was just published in eLife. [Link]
May 2019 – Congratulations to Matt, Omer, and Ryosuke, whose methods paper was just published in Journal of Neuroscience Methods. [Link]
February 2019 – Congratulations to Dr. Brian DeAngelis, who just defended his PhD thesis.
November 2018 – Congratulations to Emilio Salazar-Gatzimas and Margarida Agrochao, whose paper explaining a common motion illusion was just published in Current Biology. This work was in collaboration with our close collaborator, James Fitzgerald. [Link]
November 2018 – Congratulations to Matthew Creamer and Omer Mano. Their paper on how flies use visual inputs to regulate walking speed was published in Neuron. [Link]
October 2018 – Congratulations to Dr. Matthew Creamer, who just defended his PhD thesis!
July 2018 – Congratulations to Dr. Emilio Salazar-Gatzimas, who just successfully defended his PhD thesis.
June 2018 – Welcome to Ryosuke Tanaka, who just joined the lab for his PhD!
April 2018 – Congratulations to Anneysis Gonzalez, who has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Fellowship.
February 2018 – Welcome to Julia Ding ‘19 and Lenny Khazan ‘21, who are working in lab this semester.
January 2018 – Our collaborative project with the Treisman Lab was just published.
September 2017 – Welcome to Ryosuke Tanaka, who is rotating in lab this semester.
August 2017 – Our collaboration on fly olfaction with the Emonet Lab was just published.
June 2017 – Welcome to Aneysis Gonzalez, who joined the lab!
January 2017 – Welcome to Aneysis Gonzalez, who is rotating in lab this semester.
October 2016 – Damon’s review with Jonathan Demb on computational parallels between the fly eye and mouse retina was just published in Current Biology, and is available here.
October 2016 – Our paper measuring correlation responses in Drosophila elementary motion detectors was just published in Neuron, and is available here.
September 2016 – Welcome to Hongli Wang, who is rotating this semester.
September 2016 – Welcome to Margarida Agrochao, PhD, who just joined the lab.
June 2016 – Welcome to our summer undergraduates, Jacob Zavatone-Veth (‘19) and Adela dePavia (‘19); welcome also to our summer high school student, Ulyana Piterbarg.
June 2016 – Welcome to Bara Badwan, who just joined the lab.
January 2015 – Welcome to Bara Badwan, who is rotating this semester.
October 2015 – Our theoretical collaboration with James Fitzgerald was just published, and is available here.
September 2015 – Welcome to Catherine Matulis, who just joined the lab.
June 2015 – Welcome to Juyue Chen, who just joined the lab.
May 2015 – Welcome to rotation student Catherine Matulis.
April 2015 – Congratulations to Emilio on winning an NDSEG Fellowship.
March 2015 – Congratulations to Brian on winning an NSF GRF.
February 2015 – Damon awarded Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Neuroscience.
January 2015 – Welcome to rotation student Joseph Pottackal.
November 2014 – Welcome to rotation student Jun Zhao.
September 2014 – Welcome to rotation student Juyue Chen.
May 2014 – Congratulations to Holly (‘14) on winning the Belknap Award for Excellence in Biology from the MCDB department.
May 2014 – Welcome to Brian, Emilio, and Omer, who just joined the lab!
May 2014 – Welcome to Aleksandra Zakrzewska (‘17), who will be doing her summer research with us.
April 2014 – Damon wins Searle Scholar Award.
April 2014 – Congratulations to Matt on winning an NSF GRF.
February 2014 – Welcome to Liana Saussy (‘14), who just joined the lab for her senior research.
January 2014 – Welcome to Emilio Salazar (INP), who is rotating this spring.
January 2014 – Paper published on triple correlations and fly/human parallels.
December 2013 – Welcome to Omer Mano (MCGD), who is rotating this semester.
November 2013 – Paper published on a model for dynamic adaptation in photoreceptors.
November 2013 – Damon wins Smith Family Award.
September 2013 – Welcome to Brian DeAngelis (INP), who is rotating this semester.
August 2013 – The lab has moved into our renovated lab.
July 2013 – Matthew Creamer (INP) joins the lab!
June 2013 – Construction starts on renovating lab space.
May 2013 – Holly Mandel joins the lab!
May 2013 – Review published on approaches to cracking circuits in genetic model organisms.