I did my PhD at the Philipps-University Marburg in Germany with Uwe Homberg, analyzing the processing of polarized light information in the brain of the desert locust. I then joined the University of Massachusetts Medical School (USA) as a postdoctoral fellow (with Steven Reppert) and worked on the neural basis of the sun compass orientation of the migratory monarch butterfly. After joining the Lund Vision Group as a Marie-Curie postdoctoral fellow in December 2012 (with Eric Warrant), I started to set up my independent research group in 2015 as one of eight principal investigators of the Lund Vision Group.

In my work I analyze how sensory information is transformed into behavioral decisions in insect brains across several species of moths and bees, focusing on a highly conserved brain region called the central complex. From January 2017 onwards, my work was funded by an ERC Starting grant, that aimed at developing the insect central complex as a simple 'brain in the brain' model for complex brain function. This work included several new directions of research and novel methods, including connectomics work based on block-face electron microscopy (together with the Center for Microscopy and Microanalysis at the Queensland Brain Institute, Brisbane, Australia), computational modeling and robotics (together with B. Webb at the University of Edinburgh, UK), behavioral work, and electrophysiology on behaving bees and moths.

With a new ERC Consolidator grant, I now have built on the basis provided by this earlier work and am now focusing on unraveling the evolution of neural circuits underlying navigational decisions across insects. In my group we combine comparative connectomics, behavioral and electrophysiological experiments, and link the anatomical circuits to functional data by computational models. That way we aim at directly illuminating what consequences small changes in the neural circuitry of the central complex have for the behavioral abilities of the animal. Doing this across many species will enable us to reveal an ancestral state of these circuits, and thus get us closer towards understanding the evolutionary origin of context dependent action selection. Furthermore, comparing these circuits across species with similar behaviors, but from different branches of the insect phylogenetic tree, will show how evolution has modified an ancestral core circuit to find solution to concrete ecological problems in each species. 

Finally, we are also beginning to translate the fundamental insights into neural control of behavior into technology applications. Funded by a grant by the European Innovation Council (EIC), I contribute biological insights to an international consortium of physicists, chemists, computer scientists and engineers to construct novel forms of computer technology, inspired by the functional principles of the insect central complex.

Media

• Press release about our bee work, including nice videos of brains, neurons, and robots (lunduniversity.lu.se)
• German radio broadcast about our recent bee work (Deutchlandfunk)
• Swedish TV coverage of the Current Biology paper on path integration (TV4 play)