From Milliseconds to Millennia: Mapping the Mechanisms of Adaptive Behavior

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Vanessa Ruta, Ph.D., Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Professor and head, Laboratory of Neurophysiology and Behavior; investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Speaker bio(s)

Animals exhibit astonishing variation in their behavior, both within and across species. In this lecture Dr. Ruta will describe how her lab has been using the elaborate courtship rituals of Drosophila to gain insight into the circuit mechanisms of adaptive behavior over different timescales, from how social interactions unfold on a moment-to-moment timescale to how species-specific mating displays arise over evolution. By applying an interdisciplinary toolkit to probe the concise circuits of the fly, they have begun to shed light on how the interplay between internal arousal states and external sensory signals shapes behavior, allowing animals to flexibly navigate complex social landscapes.

Vanessa Ruta received her B.A. in chemistry from Hunter College and, in 2005, her Ph.D. from The Rockefeller University, where she was a member of Roderick MacKinnon’s lab. After conducting her postdoctoral research in Richard Axel’s lab at Columbia University, she returned to Rockefeller in 2011 as an assistant professor. She was promoted to associate professor in 2017 and to professor in 2022. Ruta was appointed as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2021.

Ruta has received multiple honors and awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship and an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, the Larry Katz Award, a McKnight Scholar, a Pew Biomedical Scholar, and a New York Stem Cell Foundation–Robertson Neuroscience Investigator.

FLS lectures will take place in Caspary Auditorium and virtually via Zoom. We recommend virtual participants log out of VPN prior to logging in to Zoom. Please do not share the link or post on social media. This talk will be recorded for the RU community.

Open to

Tri-Institutional