Interview for Faculty Position

Understanding a small neural circuit (piece by piece)

David Biron

Harvard University

All organisms obtain information about their environment, process it and respond with behavioral output. Often, but not exclusively, this processing of information is performed by networks of neurons in the brain. However, studying complex brains is extremely challenging both conceptually and technically, and often forces a coarse grained approach. I will briefly discuss the behavioral and physiological responses of the nematode C. elegans to long and short term changes in the temperature of the environment (a behavior called “thermotaxis”). Specifically I will show recent results on the molecular and cellular hardware underlying to aspects of thermotactic behavior long term thermal memory and navigation of a thermal gradient using a biased random walk strategy. Our observations suggest that both long term memory and the stochastic may originate in part by a combination of deterministic and stochastic sensory responses. I will conclude with describing what I find to be interesting future direction of our work.