Understanding Sensorimotor Circuit Function and Design Through Neural Engineering

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

4:00 PM-5:30 PM

BIOMED Seminar

Title:
Understanding Sensorimotor Circuit Function and Design Through Neural Engineering

Speaker:
Catherine von Reyn, PhD
Assistant Professor
School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems
Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, College of Medicine
Drexel University

Abstract:
Animals adapt their behavior according to specific sensory features present within their environment. How an animal’s nervous system extracts and integrates sensory information to guide an appropriate behavioral response remains a major question in the field of neuroscience. Within recent years, a surge in the development of genetic technologies for probing and characterizing the nervous system has brought a new level of neural accessibility to answer this question.

Here, I describe how we apply and develop neural engineering tools and take advantage of the relatively small central nervous system (approximately 200,000 neurons) of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster to map neural circuits driving sensorimotor transformations. We focus on highly conserved transformations: avoidance responses to objects approaching on a direct collision course.

As a failure to recognize an approaching threat can be deleterious, animals from fruit flies to humans are capable of detecting approaching objects and employing rapid maneuvers to avoid collision or predation. Using whole cell electrophysiology and detailed behavioral quantifications, we uncover the sensorimotor circuits involved in avoidance responses and the algorithms responsible for transforming the visual information from an object’s approach into an optimal motor strategy.

Biosketch:
Dr. von Reyn received her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, where she investigated molecular mechanisms leading to neural circuit dysfunction after traumatic brain injury. She then did post-doctoral research at the Janelia Research Campus, where she investigated the neural circuits underlying sensory to motor transformations in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.

Dr. von Reyn joined Drexel University as an Assistant Professor in 2016 and heads the Neural-Circuit Engineering Laboratory in the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems.

Contact Information

Ken Barbee
215-895-1335
barbee@drexel.edu