News

Congratulations to Danylo Lavrentovich, who successfully defended their PhD Thesis entitled "Smell and survive: computational prediction of olfactory circuit activity and parasite-induced behavior in Drosophila." Danylo was a student in the Systems, Synthetic, and Quantitative Biology graduate program, and will be wrapping up his time in the lab focusing on one last project on Bayesian modeling of neural dynamics on connectomes.

Lab member Tom Alisch posted a preprint that he co-first authored with Lior Lebovich, a postdoc in Iain Couzin's lab. Other authors include Edward Redhead, Matt Parker and Yonatan Loewenstein. In this study the team examined how predictable future turn decisions in a Y-maze are ahead of the choice. They found surprising predictability far in advance of the maze intersection that evolves in distinct phases and bears signatures of working memory. Interestingly, this pattern holds in humans navigating virtual Y-mazes as well. Read all about it on bioRxiv!

We have posted a new preprint, entitled "Drift in Individual Behavioral Phenotype as a Strategy for Unpredictable Worlds" on bioRxiv. This study was led by lab alum, and now Colorado College professor, Ryan Maloney, and characterizes how individual differences in behavior change over time within an individual's lifespan. Ryan and his team discovered that this plasticity varies by genotype, is regulated by serotonin, and (through theoretical modeling) showed that it may confer advantages in fluctuating environments. This all suggests that the rate of individual behavioral drift may evolve as an adaptive trait.

Today was the first day for postdoctoral fellow Nick Polizos and OEB graduate student Bronwyn Miller. Nick comes to us from Mason Klein's lab at the University of Miami and is interested in the role of learning and plasticity in behavioral individuality. Bronwyn will be studying the evolution of host preference across the Drosophila family tree. Welcome!

Congratulations to Matt Smith (de Bivort Lab alum), who is launching his own laboratory as an assistant professor at Illinois Tech! Matt studied individuality in neural coding and individual differences in learning in our lab. In his postdoc with James Crall at the University of Wisconsin, he developed machine vision methods for tracking individual bee behavior. In his group, he will study the intersection of individuality, learning and collective behavior.

Thank you Stellate Communications for putting together a lovely new website, and accommodating all our quirks and large data files.

Carolyn Elya, assistant professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology was interviewed by The Transmitter, a neuroscience research magazine about her work studying how parasites alter the behavior of their hosts. She studied the host neural circutis that are targeted by the fungus Entomophthora muscae as a postdoc in the de Bivort lab through December 2023. Nice interview, Carolyn!