Sung Soo Kim
University of California-Santa Barbara, CA·Neuroscience·Early-career
Many animals use vision to find their way, yet scientists know little about which visual features actually feed an animal's sense of direction. Fruit flies, for example, steer using cues such as vertical stripes and polarized light, but these may be only part of what they use.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biology
- Topics
Drosophila
fruit fly
visual processing
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2030
What they work on
- Identify which visual features two types of ER neurons extract in the fruit fly anterior visual pathway, using two-photon calcium imaging of tethered flies viewing stimuli in a 360-degree full-color virtual-reality arena.
- Trace how visual information is transformed from MeTu to TuBu to ER neurons on its way to the EPG compass neurons that encode the fly's sense of direction.
- Build anatomically and experimentally supported computational models of the full circuit from peripheral vision to the head-direction sense.
More about the research
This project follows visual information through an entire brain circuit in the fruit fly. The circuit runs from the eye to the neurons that act as an internal compass. The goal is to identify which visual features matter for navigation and how the brain processes them.
Why it matters
Understanding how a brain turns raw visual input into a sense of direction adds a mechanistic picture of a complete neural circuit. Validated models of this circuit could inspire computer vision algorithms that pick out task-relevant features. They could also guide robots that navigate on their own in hazardous places where GPS is unavailable.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jianhua Cang
University of Virginia, VA·Neuroscience
Confirm that Cbln4-positive neurons in the mouse superficial superior colliculus are inhibitory and direction selective, map their shape and connections, and manipulate them to test whether they adjust motion responses based on surrounding context.
Jay Gottfried
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience
Test whether healthy volunteers can learn the spatial positions of a set of odors in a virtual reality arena where odors are the only informative cues, and whether grid-like fMRI brain responses arise during odor navigation.
Erin Barnhart
Columbia University, NY·Neuroscience
Compare calcium signals in the cytosol and in the endoplasmic reticulum, the neuron's main calcium store, across defined Drosophila motion vision cell types, using simultaneous in vivo imaging in living flies.
The school
University of California-Santa Barbara: 17 labs on PI Pages, $303M a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.
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