**This seminar has been cancelled. It will be rescheduled as a virtual seminar for the 2020-2021 academic year.**

This seminar will be held in the Jerome L. Greene Science Center on Columbia's Manhattanville campus (9th floor lecture hall). Columbia University's Intercampus Shuttle Service is the best way to travel between campuses.

Just as the mammalian brain contains a map of head direction, the Drosophila brain contains a map of 'heading direction' — i.e., the direction that the head and body are pointed in — which is often referred to as an 'internal compass'. New data are helping us understand how external sensory cues from multiple stimulus modalities are linked to this map, and how spatial cue associations are updated via sensorimotor experience. 

Rachel Wilson earned an AB in chemistry from Harvard College and a PhD in neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco. She did postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology before joining the faculty in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School in 2004, where she is now the Martin Family Professor of Basic Research in the Field of Neurobiology and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The broad goals of Dr. Wilson’s research are (1) to understand key computations that occur in sensorimotor integration, and (2) to describe the cellular, synaptic, and circuit mechanisms underlying these computations. 

Those who wish to meet the speaker during their visit should contact Anita Devineni, PhD (Axel lab). For general inquiries please contact [email protected].

All entrances to the Jerome L. Greene Science Center are accessible. The south and west entrances can be accessed without stairs, while a lift is available from the east entrance. Assistive listening devices are available upon request.

The Columbia Neuroscience Seminar series is a collaborative effort of Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Department of Neuroscience, the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior and the Columbia Translational Neuroscience Initiative, and with support from the Kavli Institute for Brain Science.