Biography

My research focuses on how neural codes translate into behavior. Such questions should guide us in understanding how brains work and hopefully, one day, aid in solving the mystery of consciousness. Our model organism is C. elegans, a tiny, harmless nematode that lives in the soil -- and within Petri dishes in our lab. I am building a system to record long videos of worm experiments, automatically extract and analyze behavior from the video, then populate a large searchable database with these experimental results. Thereafter, we hope to marry this database with concurrent imaging of neurons defining the expressed behavior.