Research

I stay up at nights wondering how animals use information to guide their interactions with their local environment. Ecology was orginally defined as the study of the relationships between organisms and their environments, and while ecology has traditionally been motivated by describing trophic and metabolic interactions, many of these are mediated by an informational relationship. Animals do get some information from their genes, but most of what they know about events in their local, dynamic environment comes from their sensory systems. What senses do animals have? How do these senses encode biologically important features of the environment? What limits the type and quality of information the animal can aquire?

My particular interest is in cases where the animal's ability to extract information about events in the world is constrained by noise (here noise is activity in a system not related to the signal, rather like static on your television is activity on the screen not related to the station's broadcast).

I have tended to tend to use the tools of neurophysiology to assess what features are encoded by the sensory periphery of the animals, and then to try to look at the local environment to see what kinds of stimuli exist in the animal's natural habitat. This has made me something of a bastard child at meetings; an ecologist among neurobiologists, and a neurobiologist among ecologists. During my postdoctoral work, I'm further confusing matters by mucking about with tools of functional genomics and behavioral studies.

More on my dissertation work ,

My goal for my postdoctoral work is to learn quantitative techniques to measure both fish behavior and the genomic activity supporting those behaviors. Studies of sensory ecology, as I see them, should be developed within a very interdisciplinary framework. I've focused primarily at the level of transduction at the sensory periphery (mostly the retina). In doing so, I've remained pretty ignorant (blissfully?) of the evolutionary pressures and expression levels that sculpt the retina. On the other scale of biological inquiry, I've also tried to put my transduction studies in a behavioral context (since this is usually where differences in sensory ability affect survivorship), but I haven't actually attempted any rigorous behavioral work. Hence, the current project, in which Suzy and I are trying to use functional genomic techniques (including heterologous Comparative Genomic Hybridizations (hCGH)) to try to identify genes which may be responsible for differences in parental behaviors in a group of explosively radiated cichlid fishes.