First lab members and data!

The lab is growing! We’d like to welcome several new lab members (whose pictures you can view here):

Deepti Suchindran just joined us as a Senior Research Specialist. Deepti has a PhD from the University of North Carolina, where she conducted electrophysiology experiments investigating synaptic plasticity in the auditory system. She will work on a variety of experiments to push our first projects forward and will also serve as the lab manager, keeping things running smoothly.

Two Emory undergraduate students, Kaushiki Ravi (‘25) and Crystal Wang (‘24), joined us in January. They are testing how different types of taste neurons affect different behaviors, and they just collected the very first experimental data in the lab!

Arvin Sarkissian, a Neuroscience PhD student, is currently spending his second rotation in our lab. He’s analyzing the synaptic connectome of the fly brain to study connectivity in the taste system.

We are still recruiting new grad students and postdocs! Click here to learn more.

Our first behavioral setup is up and running! We use this setup to film flies’ locomotor patterns and spatial preference as we optogenetically activate different types of neurons with red light. See our recent preprint to learn more. Crystal and Kaushiki ran our very first experiments last week, which fortunately replicated the results in the manuscript collected in Anita’s postdoc lab (phew!).