Research

The group is focused on four main research areas centred around an integrative quantitative understanding of biological phenomena:

Mechanistic Integrative Theory of foraging: 

Foraging is one of the most fundamental behaviours that animal do and constitute a rich natural decision-making process. Our group is particularly interested in developing quantitative models to help uncover mechanisms underlying foraging and its extension to the social realm. These models aim to bridge evolution, behaviour, and animal biology in a way to provide an "integrative" understanding of foraging behaviours. We are currently applying those models to a variety of model systems in collaboration with experimentalists in Konstanz and all over the world. The model systems that we are working with to date are: locusts, rodents (mice and rats), marmoset monkeys, and human subjects. 

Collective (neuro)economics:  

The field of neuroeconomics has emerged sometime ago to study in depth the neural circuits underlying economic decision-making. Often neuroeconomics focuses on the cognitive abilities of individuals thus what results is the understanding of how the individual performs an economical decision-making but what about a group of individuals or how the individual perform economical decision-making in a group? In our group, we term this collectivist perspective "Collective (neuro-)economics".

A central concept of collective (neuro-)economics is that the collective (societal) structure which binds individuals shapes greatly how individuals perceive value, utility, and rewards. We are developing quantitative methods to study how those collectivist effects manifest behaviourally and neurally using rats as a model system. 

Global brain-behaviour dynamics:

There is an increased interest in methods that record from many brain areas simultaneously. Nevertheless, the development of a "language" to describe interpretable global brain dynamics is still in infancy and relating it to animals' ongoing behaviour is a rapidly evolving field of research. Functional ultrasound imaging has emerged as a pioneering technique that can image neural activation indirectly via changes in cerebral blood volume. Our group has developed protocols and methods to perform functional ultrasound imaging in both freely moving rats and marmosets to study global brain dynamics underlying behaviour. 

Biophysics of excitability:

Excitability is a ubiquitous property across biological cellular systems, from cardiac cells to neurons. All too often, excitability has been studied with an exclusive focus on its electrical component. Our research focuses on integrating the mechanical, thermal, chemical and electrical phenomena into a more complete picture of how excitability is shaped by a myriad of biophysical factors. In 2015, along with Ben Machta from Yale University, we have proposed the existence of mechanical surface waves "Action Waves" that co-propagate with action potentials. Our research group builds on this theoretical proposal, proposing novel hypothesis and design quantitative experiments to address the question of how mechanics shape (neuronal) excitability.