Welcome to The Samuel Lab

Small animals like C. elegans and the Drosophila larva (shown above, with GFP labeling the two Bolwig’s organs in the larva’s head that sense light) navigate their natural environments through the display of purposeful motile behaviors. Because worms and fruit-fly larvae have small nervous systems, navigational behaviors are encoded in simple algorithms that systematically transform sensory inputs into motor outputs. Because both animals are optically transparent, we can monitor or manipulate the nervous systems of intact individuals as they employ navigational strategies.

We take a biophysical approach to the study of behavioral neuroscience in worms and larvae, using quantitative approaches to define the algorithms that underlie navigational behaviors, and developing methods to probe the encoding of these algorithms in small neural circuits.