This seminar will be held online. Register here. 

Navigation creates several challenging problems for the brain. The brain must continuously estimate the organism's position and orientation in space. Moreover, the brain must update its internal spatial maps as the organism moves and the environment changes, integrating multimodal external cues with a working memory of the organism's recent path. At the same time, the brain must continuously compare the organism's current position and orientation with some goal stored in memory. Finally, the brain must use all this information to generate continuous rapid adjustments to locomotor commands. I will discuss our recent work which aims to understand how these computations are implemented in the brain of a specific organism -- Drosophila melanogaster -- at the level of ensemble network activity, detailed network connectivity, and cellular/synaptic physiology.

Those who wish to meet the speaker during their visit should contact Anita Devineni, Axel Lab.

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.