Interests

David got his B.S degrees in Life Science and Entomology and M.S. degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology at National Taiwan University, Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience in 2019 in Dr. Anupama Dahanukar’s lab at the University of California Riverside, where he was one of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) international student research fellows. His doctoral research focused on how internal pharyngeal taste neurons mediate insect feeding behaviors in adult Drosophila.

David’s long-term research interest is to understand developmental processes and functional roles of primary senses: vision, touch, hearing, and chemosensation (taste and smell), which are essential for organisms to perceive and interact with the world. His background in entomology and his passion for sensory neurobiology is well aligned with the research conducted in Dr. Claude Desplan’s lab, which is studying visual system development in Drosophila. In Desplan lab, David is interested in addressing how vast numbers of neurons are organized and assembled correctly during development into functional circuits to process sensory information.

Developing neurons face several challenges as to how they are specified into correct cell fates and how they find proper targets to form synapses. A number of guidance molecules have been identified, yet a clear code of how these molecules direct the complex connectivity of the brains is still missing. In addition, we still have a poor understanding of the mechanisms that coordinate neural specification and specific connectivity patterns. The Drosophila color vision circuit is an appealing model to address these questions due to our knowledge of its development, its precise neural connectivity, and powerful genetic tools to manipulate the circuits. In the fly retina, color photoreceptors R7 and R8 are stochastically specified, whereas their synaptic partners in the optic lobe are produced through highly deterministic programs. How do stochastically determined photoreceptor subtypes find their targets in the optic lobes? How is this decision propagated to their downstream targets during circuit formation? What molecular mechanisms and molecules direct these events? David aims to identify novel cell adhesion molecules that direct synaptic partner matching and the molecular strategies for coordinating between cell type specification and the synaptic connectivity in the Drosophila color vision circuit.