My Research

I am fascinated by how sensory systems process information, to give animals a gateway to the world around us. Since school days, vision has struck me as the most marvelous of all senses (though I know some people beg to differ). At the core of my work is the question of how neurons transport and transform the signals they receive from the eyes into a meaningful output that can guide an animal's behaviour. Thus, I’ve spent a lot of my time listening to neurons fire action potentials, but I also investigate neuroanatomy and behaviour, build computational models and have recently become very interested to quantify the natural visual information animals perceive in their environments. Check out our lab website: insect-vision.com

Pattern use and pattern recognition in insects

During my time in Würzburg, I became very interested in an exceptional behaviour performed by the hummingbird hawkmoth: its abilty to scan patterns on flowers with its proboscis while hovering in front of them. This helps them to efficiently find the nectary, and in many ways is an extraordinary feat for an insect. For once, hawkmoths need to recognise these patterns on flower faces, and orient both their body in flight, as well as their proboscis specifically towards them. We have already shown that they can do this at very high precision, resolving patterns that only activate a single photoreceptor cluster in their eyes (a single ommatidium). Secondly, visually controlled movements of body parts such as legs or the proboscis is extremely rare in insects. By careful behavioural observations, we demonstrated that these moths indeed use their visual sense to guide their proboscis along the flower, and more so, they require it. At Konstanz University, we continue to investigate the mechanisms behind this fascinating ability, including its neuronal control, and will also look closer into the role that flower patterns play in the interaction with insect pollinators, extending our focus beyond hawkmoths.

One major research focus in Konstanz will be to fundamentally understand how insects such as hawkmoths recognise patterns: how they distinguish different features, and how they reliably link these features to a pattern they learned, even if it is modified in size, orientation or contrast. Thus, we are interested in the neural basis of invariant pattern recognition in insects, and will use hawkmoths as our main model for investigation.

Neural adaptationS for dim light vision in hawkmoths

An formative part of my research life has been spent investigating the neural adaptations of hawkmoths for dim light vision - for my PhD thesis at the University of Lund, Sweden, under the supervision of Prof. Eric Warrant and co-supervision of Prof. David O'Carroll. Hawkmoths are a family of very visual insects. The elephant hawkmoth was the first insect shown to see colors on starlit nights. While it is well known that nocturnal insects - like most other animals - possess eyes that are adapted to be highly sensitive, thus increasing the amounts of photons they capture compared to their diurnal relatives - in many nocturnal species, such as the elephant hawkmoth, adaptations of their eyes alone are not sufficient to explain their superb nocturnal vision. I was interested in how their nervous system might help them to bridge this gap. I investigated optic flow processing neurons  in the brain of hawkmoths, which they rely on for flight control, and found that these neurons reveal pooling of visual signals in space and time as light levels decreased - thereby enhancing the sparse signal, and reducing the challenging noise. I also found that such neural summation is tuned to the sensory requirements of different hawkmoth species, and investigated how it affects their flight performance. In addition, I was looking at the neuroanatomy of the individual neurons potentially responsible for this neural summation. I also investigated the overall brain architecture of hawkmoths, to show how a hawkmoth’s preferred light environment can shape the relative investment into its visual system (as compared to its sense of smell).

Spatial processing in hawkmoth vision

As research fellow at Würzburg University I investigated how hawkmoths, and in particular the diurnal hummingbird hawkmoth (Macroglossum stellatarum), see the world. I was interested to understand how they process the spatial detail in the world surrounding them, and whether they use a similar strategy as we do. Vertebrates, and in particular primates, discard finer details for the benefit of gaining higher sensitivity when processing motion, while they optimise their spatial resolution at the cost of sensitivity in their pattern vision. In hawkmoths, I had described neurons in the first visual processing layer of the insect brain, the lamina, which can dynamically change their spatial processing with the ambient light intensity. Highly detailed anatomical investigations of these neurons uncovered that our classification of lamina neurons in this Lepidopteran group had been incomplete, which we are currently revising. Mover, we also demonstrated that hawkmoths spatially separate their visual field into different functional areas: they use information from different parts of their visual field to guide different types of behaviours. The prevalence of this information in the hawkmoths’ natural habitats matches the region in their visual field in which the hawkmoths rely on it — demonstrating how their visual system is adapted to the natural visual cues they perceive.

Population activity in the mouse retina

In 2017, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Ala-Laurila's group at Aalto University in Helsinki. I said goodbye to my beloved hawkmoths, and found another fluffy animal to teach me something about vision: the humble mouse. I still work on processing of visual information in the brain, though the most exposed part of it: the retina. I will investigate how small populations of neurons process information, and what role correlations in their responses play. To be able to do this, I am fine tuning a novel electrophysiology setup and will develop a recording protocol which allows to simultaneously patch-record 4 retinal ganglion cells. This technique will give access to intracellular and extracellular responses, as well as the neuroanatomy of small populations of retinal ganglion cells - a feat currently not possible in the vertebrate retina.  

Electric sense and box jellyfish swimming

After my bachelor studies, I spent a summer working on vision and visually guided swimming in an animal that is generally not associated with having eyes: the box jellyfish. In the lab of Prof. Dan-Eric Nilsson at Lund University I investigated how visual input controls box jellyfish steering responses. My only detour from the path of vision research has been my Master thesis research in the lab of Prof. Jan Benda and Dr. Jan Grewe (then at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Munich), where I worked on the encoding of communication signals in weakly electric fish. These fish produce a weak electric field, which can be modulated for the purpose of communication. Its perturbations are sensed by special electrosensory receptors in conspecifics, which decode the communication signals in 2 different sensory channels.