Barry Dickson
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
The Neurobiology of Drosophila Mating Behaviors
12:00 pm, Monday 09 October 2017
Location: Oxford Martin School, 34 Broad Street, Oxford
Abstract:
The behavioral rituals that animals perform as they seek out their mates provide ideal models to study the neural control of complex goal-directed behaviors. They are innate, robust, and sexually dimorphic, reflecting the activation of genetically-determined sexually-dimorphic circuits. I will present our current understanding of the neural circuits that control mating in Drosophila, which include sexually-dimorphic components for sensory integration, decision-making, and action selection.
Biography:
Barry Dickson was an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne and completed his PhD with Ernst Hafen in Zürich. Following a postdoctoral position with Corey Goodman at the University of California, Berkeley, he began his independent career at the University of Zürich. He subsequently moved to the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, where he served as Director from 2006 until 2013. He is now a group leader at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.