[Seminar]Understanding what animals do--Prof. Joshua Shaevitz Princeton University

Speaker: Professor Joshua Shaevitz
Princeton University

Title: Understanding what animals do

Abstract: Evolution has provided us a smorgasbord of organisms in the animal kingdom capable of a vast array of amazing behaviors. While this diversity in behavior has long fascinated classical ethologists, we are currently seeing a renaissance in behavioral research driven by new, quantitative methods for probing the actions of individual animals. Combined with recent advances in neuroscience, particularly optogenetic methods for probing and controlling neural activity, we are poised to make considerable progress in the field of animal behavior in the next decade. I will present work my collaborators and I are involved in to understand how neural dynamics control the entire behavioral repertoire of the nematode worm C. elegans and the fruit fly D.