Glenn Turner, PhD

Glenn Turner studies how flies form Pavlovian associations. Flies can learn, for example, to associate olfactory cues with different types of positive or negative feedback. To investigate how underlying neural activity patterns are modified by learning, Turner and his team use a combination of electrophysiological recordings to record synaptic plasticity of individual fly neurons and functional imaging methods to examine population-wide changes in neural activity. By pairing these data with behavioral experiments, they can assess how that neural plasticity becomes a meaningful change in the fly’s reaction to an odor.