Columbia University in the City of New York

Sep 24, 20194:00 pm
Seminar

Straighten Up and Fly Right: Navigation and Motor Control in Drosophila

Featuring Michael Dickinson, PhD, the Abe and Esther Zarem Professor of Biology and Bioengineering at Caltech

September 24th, 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm at the Jerome L. Greene Science Center (9th floor lecture hall)

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.

Michael Dickinson, PhD was born in Seaford, Delaware in 1963, but spent most of his youth in Baltimore and Philadelphia. He attended college at Brown University, originally with the intent of majoring in Visual Arts, but eventually switched to Neurobiology, driven by a fascination for the mechanisms that underlie animal behavior. While in college, he studied the roles of neurons and neurotransmitters in the control of leech feeding behavior. He received a PhD in Zoology at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1991. His dissertation project focused on the physiology of sensory cells on the wings of flies. It was this study of wing sensors that led to an interest in insect aerodynamics and flight control circuitry. Michael worked briefly at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, and served as an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Anatomy at the University of Chicago in 1991. He moved to University of California, Berkeley in 1996 and was appointed as the Williams Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology in 2000. Dr. Dickinson moved to Caltech in July, 2002 and is currently the Abe and Esther Zarem Professor of Bioengineering and Biology.

Dr. Dickinson’s research interests broadly concern the mechanistic basis of animal behavior. Specifically, he has studied the flight behavior of insects simultaneously at several levels of analysis, in an attempt to integrate cellular physiology, biomechanics, aerodynamics, and behavior. His awards include the Larry Sandler Award from the Genetics Society of America, the Bartholemew Award for Comparative Physiology from the American Society of Zoologists, a Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering, and the Quantrell award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Chicago. In 2001, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

 

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

 

 

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.

Venue: the Jerome L. Greene Science Center (9th floor lecture hall)
3227 Broadway, New York, NY 10027

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