Acknowledgement: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2443158.
Disclaimer: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Award number: 2443158
Expected duration: 1 July, 2025 to 30 June, 2030
Award title: Identifying and modeling sensorimotor pathways in whole-brain connectomes
Project goals: The ability to precisely measure the connectivity of large networks of neurons, even entire brains, has rapidly grown due to advances in microscopy and image processing. The resulting connectivity diagrams, or "connectomes," promise detailed knowledge that can be used to inform models of brain signaling and, ultimately, the biological basis of intelligent behavior. This project will develop theoretical methods for the analysis of these datasets. This project's research involves two approaches: analysis of whole-brain sensorimotor pathways and their relationship to behavior, and structural analysis techniques to identify interpretable low-dimensional organization in connectome data. In the short term, these approaches will accelerate investigations of the connection between structure and function in fruit flies, in particular how diverse behavioral responses across contexts are generated by a common wiring diagram. In the longer term, the principles that we uncover will lay the groundwork for applications to larger datasets in other organisms, including mammals.