The Data Driven Discovery Initiative and MindCORE will co-host a seminar featuring Mala Murthy on Friday, October 25th, at noon in the SAIL Room (111 Levin Building). Mala and her group work at the forefront of quantifying and modeling behavior, and causally linking behavior to brain-wide dynamics.
If you’re a graduate student or postdoc please also consider joining for Mala’s lunch immediately following the seminar. Email Jessica Marcus to sign up. Mala is a great person to chat with, so please do not hesitate to join.
Friday 10/25 at 12pm – DDDI + MindCORE Seminar
Title: Circuit Mechanisms for Dynamic Social Interaction
Speaker: Mala Murthy (Princeton, Professor of Neuroscience)
Organizers: MindCORE + DDDI
Date: Friday, October 25th, 2024
Time: 12pm – 1:15pm
Location: SAIL Room (111 Levin Building)
Abstract: Our research explores the neural mechanisms underlying flexibility during natural social interactions – how animals process dynamic sensory cues from a partner, make decisions, and pattern the appropriate action for the current context. During Drosophila social interactions, males produce time-varying songs via wing vibration, while females arbitrate mating decisions. We discovered that male song structure and intensity are continually sculpted by the movements of the female, over timescales ranging from tens of milliseconds to minutes, and we have investigated the underlying circuit mechanisms, from visual processing to the sequencing of actions. My lab has also investigated how song representations in the female brain drive changes in her behavior, again across multiple timescales. To uncover these mechanisms, we have developed new methods for quantification and computational modeling of behavior, as well as for brain-wide neural recording, and we combine these with the genetic and neural circuit tools of the Drosophila model system. We also recently generated the first whole-brain connectome for Drosophila, and I will discuss how we are leveraging this resource, to connect circuit architecture and activity at brain scale to behavior.
A pizza lunch will be served. Please bring your own beverage.