Brain wiring & behavioral individuality
Why do genetically identical flies raised in the same environment develop their own sleep and activity personalities? My dissertation locates the answer in the brain's structural wiring.
The question
Genetically identical Drosophila melanogaster, raised in the same environment, still develop stable, individual differences in how and when they sleep and move. My dissertation asks why — and tests the idea that these behavioral “personalities” are rooted in inter-individual variability of neural circuit wiring, not just genes or environment.
Approach
- Designed robust behavioral assays for visual and non-visual responses to quantify each fly’s individual sleep and activity profile over time.
- Mapped circuit-level wiring (including clock-output PDF neurons) with confocal microscopy, to relate structure to behavior at the level of the individual.
- Built reproducible Python and R pipelines for high-dimensional behavioral analysis, using mixed-effects models to separate genuine individual variation from group-level and measurement noise.
Key findings
[Add your 2–3 headline findings here — e.g. the specific wiring feature that predicts an individual’s activity profile, and the effect size / statistics. I’ve left this for you to fill from the thesis.]
Why it matters
Sleep individuality in a tractable invertebrate is one of the clearest bridges to human sleep research: the same question — why do individuals differ so much in sleep architecture? — scales from circuits in a fly to people. The methods (reproducible pipelines, mixed-effects modeling, careful assay design) transfer directly to human, high-dimensional data.
Recognition
Presented at EMBO Neuropeptides and Behavior 2024, the Arthropod Neuroscience Network 2024, and the European Drosophila Neurobiology Conference 2022. Disputation grade: summa cum laude.