Dr. Sweta Agrawal is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington. She obtained her BA from Columbia University in Neuroscience, where she worked with Drs. Darcy Kelley and David Grimaldi. As a graduate student in Michael Dickinson’s lab at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Washington, she examined how visual and chemosensory cues shape male Drosophila courtship behavior by building an artificial fly robot that could be programmed to interact with other flies in a large arena. As a postdoc in John Tuthill’s lab, she identified and recorded the activity of central neurons downstream of the largest proprioceptive organ in the fly leg, the femoral chordotonal organ, to understand how proprioceptive sensory information is transformed by the central nervous system and then used in locomotor control. She is currently building a computational model of describe how these central circuits encode natural movements such as walking an grooming, and will then use that model to test for forward models of motor control in Drosophila. Throughout her research, she takes advantage of a broad array of tools, including quantitative behavior analysis, 2-photon calcium imaging and electrophysiology in behaving animals, modeling, comparative morphology, and genetics.
Read the RFAs:
- BRAIN Initiative Advanced Postdoctoral Career Transition Award to Promote Diversity (K99/R00 Independent Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
- BRAIN Initiative Advanced Postdoctoral Career Transition Award to Promote Diversity (K99/R00 Independent Clinical Trial Required)
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