Fairhall lab

Bill Gates has just declared this week as Mosquito Week, pointing out that the mosquito is the cause of the most human deaths per year of any creature on earth, even exceeding us.  In our lab, in collaboration with Jeff Riffell and Michael Dickinson in the Department of Biology, we are working to understand the neural and computational mechanisms that enable mosquitoes to find their prey using joint signals from the heat and carbon dioxide that we exude. This problem is an especially fun one for theorists: because of turbulent transport, the source signals are complex and time-varying, with interesting statistical properties; and the two signals interact in nontrivial ways, as Leslie Vosshall’s lab has recently shown. Here’s the beautiful graphic from Bill’s blog posting.