Insect Neurobiology
Insects provide exciting opportunities to study how individual neurons process sensory information, and how neuronal responses control behavior. Neuronal activity lies at the heart of any behavioural decision, whether that be to locate food, find mates, or avoid objects during flight. Understanding how that neural activity translates into behaviour is one of the key questions in neuroscience today.
Claire Rind and Peter Simmons both work on the locust visual system, with the aim of understanding how synapses work, and how neurons process visual information. They are particularly interested in understanding the neural circuitry that controls collision avoidance. This work also has important industrial value, and has lead to a collaboration with Volvo to design and build a collision-detection device for cars based on the locust visual system.
Jeri Wright studies how complex chemical signals are perceived and processed by honeybees, with the aim of understanding how they learn to use floral odours in their foraging choices. Her work has found that honeybees have an incredible ability to discriminate among very similar odours, and is now pursuing how these scents are encoded using computational modelling and physiological techniques.
