drosophila Neural circuits and behavior

In the area of neuroscience, I studied how development set up neural circuits to produce sequential movement. I was a postdoc working with grooming behavior of fruit flies in the Seeds-Hampel lab. My main project was to identify the origin of a group of interneurons that elicit different head grooming movements. I am interested in how development set up the circuits that produce behaviors and in the long-term to understand how evolution produced and shaped these neural circuits.

In addition, I was part of the project to characterize the neural circuits that elicit grooming behavior in fruit flies. We used optogenetics to activate specific neurons in Drosophila and immunofluorescence techniques to identify and characterize the neurons responsible for the behavior.​

microscopy

I worked as a microscopist at the Nikon Center of Excellence of the University of Puerto Rico- Institute of Neurobiology.