Dickinson Lab
Principal Investigator: Michael H Dickinson
Institution: California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, CA)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Summary When searching their environment for food, animals often switch from making random changes in direction to reflexively orient upstream when they smell an attractive odor, followed by rhythmic turns when they lose the plume. Random changes in direction are traditionally interpreted as manifestation of a stochastic search process. In this proposal, we test new hypothesis for the role of these random turns: animals turn deliberately to gather information before and after they change direction—allowing them to compute important internal and external state parameters such as wind direction, wind speed, ground speed, and altitude that they cannot directly measure. This idea is theoretically feasible based on the principle of observability, a powerful concept we borrow from control theory and informatics that is critical in the design of autonomous vehicles; here, we apply it to address fundamental questions in neuroscience. To do so, we exploit the natural behavior of flies, which execute rapid turns (called body saccades) as they search during flight. Our research program exploits state-of-the-art experimental techniques pioneered in the labs of team members, which we will lever…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01NS136988-03: The Functional Role and Neural Basis of Rapid Turns in Olfactory Search Behavior (2026)
- 1R01NS150352-01: The neural mechanisms underlying temporal integration (2026)
- 5R01NS136988-02: The Functional Role and Neural Basis of Rapid Turns in Olfactory Search Behavior (2025)
- 1R01NS136988-01: The Functional Role and Neural Basis of Rapid Turns in Olfactory Search Behavior (2024)
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