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Roland Strauss
It might make for an interesting, albeit exhausting, research project to follow Roland Strauss as he moves through his world observing the ways insects maneuver through theirs. The 43-year-old neurobiologist and gadgetry guru never seems to sit still.
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Roland Strauss
Senior Assistant Professor
University of Würzburg
Würzburg, Germany
Photo: ©Paul Fetters
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Strauss caught the research bug as a high school student. His biology and physics teachers opened the classroom laboratories for one night a week to encourage inquisitive pupils to do independent science projects. For his project, Strauss designed an electronic device to simulate the visual nervous system of the horseshoe crab. It earned him nationwide third-place honors at a youth research contest in his native Germany and provided college scholarships to study neurobiology and physics.
Strauss is consumed by the sophisticated ways in which "simple" creatures navigate their surroundings. Consider the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster: It can buzz to its destination through a stiff breeze, walk on practically any surface, find food over long distances, and choose comfortable living conditions over unpleasant ones.
"We can learn a lot from these animals—not just the locomotion," Strauss emphasizes. How does a fly process the torrent of brain impulses that guide it to walk a straight line, scramble down a twig, or run toward a delectable gash on a rotting peach while keeping firm footing atop the forest of peach fuzz?
Those are tough questions to answer, and Strauss has invented some ingenious tools to aid his investigations. Early in his career, he built an apparatus with lasers and high-speed video cameras that automatically tracks fruit fly footsteps in three dimensions. Then he isolated more than 200 different walking-impaired mutant fly strains and used this high-tech "limping detector" to analyze them, revealing, among other things, seven different ways by which damaged genes can lead to slowed walking.
To probe how his mutant flies adapt their body motions to changing visual cues, Strauss built a device that works something like a "flight simulator" for flies. A fly enters a cylindrical chamber surrounded by a 360° virtual reality video screen. Then Strauss projects various fast-moving images from the screen to simulate a fly's eye view of the world. An overhead camera records every move the fly makes in response to the changing scenery, and a connected computer can change the video image in sync with the fly's moves. From a series of experiments with flies in the chamber, Strauss's lab group worked out the mathematical equations that flies compute in their brains to process visual cues in order to judge distances. "We expect to find that many of these basic principles for seeing motion are also implemented in humans," Strauss explains.
Next year Strauss will bring his mutant flies, technological wizardry, and bold imagination to Janelia Farm, where he plans to further disentangle the neural networks that enable insects to move adroitly in their environments. Aside from making contributions to a basic understanding of the brain, his research could have important applications to engineering, such as the development of robots that can navigate on their own over rough terrain, he says. His lab has already built several "seeing" robots, both on wheels and on six legs, to help test their ideas on insect locomotion and orientation.
Strauss says he looks forward to the creative freedom Janelia Farm promises to its scientists. "I expect to have more time to do hands-on research and interact with colleagues on scientific matters than in standard university environments. At a university you have so many things to worry about—getting your next lecture done, sitting on administrative committees, etc. It sometimes makes you reluctant to talk to somebody else about science, because you have so many things on your agenda that have to be done," he says.
Most of all, says Strauss, he's excited about the opportunity to interact with colleagues who have different fields of expertise but share common research interests in nervous system and brain functions.
Roland Strauss received a V.P. degree from the University of Würzburg in Germany, an M.S. in physics from the State University of New York at Albany, the analogous German diploma, also in physics, from the University of Würzburg, and a Ph.D. in neurogenetics from the University of Würzburg. He acquired Habilitation in neurobiology at the University of Würzburg. He is Senior Assistant Professor at the University of Würzburg and has received the Young Investigator Award of the Würzburg Students’ Societies, and was awarded a five-year independent research program in the BioFuture competition of the German Federal Ministry of Research.
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