Interests

My long-term interests lie in understanding how cells interpret and respond to external cues during development. During my PhD I studied how a high-turnover adult tissue -the Drosophila intestine – adapts to environmental changes and found that tissue specific microRNAs play a crucial role in this process. In the Desplan lab I will be studying how visual stimuli is interpreted in the fly brain. The visual system in both vertebrates and invertebrates are intricately organized such that the spatial order of projecting photoreceptor neurons in the eye is preserved in the brain forming a retinotopic map. However, it remains unclear how different regions of the visual circuit are functionally organized to retain visual sensory information through multiple layers of processing in the brain. I am currently interested in understanding how Drosophila retinal development is synchronized with the optic lobe neuropils for correct interpretation of visual information.