Navigators hold their second annual team retreat in Pittsburgh, PA
Principle investigators and trainees associated with the NSF Odor Navigation grant held their second annual team retreat. This year’s retreat was held at the University of Pittsburgh. The team reviewed recent results and made plans for future collaborations and publications.
Navigators have 3 papers accepted in July 2018
Three team publications were accepted in top journals in July 2018: Connor, E.G., McHugh, M.K. & J.P. Crimaldi, Experiments in Fluids accepted July 2018 Alvarez-Salvado, E. Licata, A., Connor, E., McHugh, M., King, B., Stavropooulos, N., Crimaldi, J. and K.I. Nagel, “Elementary sensory-motor transformation underlying olfactory navigation in walking flies.”, Elife, accepted August 2018 S.D.…
Nagel awarded McKnight Scholar Award
Congratulations to Katherine Nagel on her 2017 McKnight Scholar Award! Nagel was one of six faculty members chosen from across the country to receive the award by the board of directors of The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience. According to the organization’s website, the McKnight Scholar Awards “are granted to young scientists who are in…
SIAM features article on odor navigation project
Bard Ermentrout recently published the first of two articles for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The article lays out the goals of the project and discusses the nature of the odor landscape and a few algorithms that we have begun to employ. >> Read the Article
PBS Newshour running 3-part series on our project
PBS Newshour will be featuring the Olfactory Navigation project in their new Science Scope segment over the next several weeks. We’ll archive them here as they become available online! John Crimaldi: What a smell looks like, June 9 Lucia Jacobs: Inside the nose of a search-and-rescue dog, Aug. 12
Project welcomes new researcher
Sebastian Boie has recently joined the project and will be based in the Victor Lab. He did his PhD research in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His work will focus on developing phenomenological models for olfactory navigation, mostly based on data from Drosophila (fruitflies) from the Nagel Lab.
Nagel wins prestigious research fellowship
Katherine Nagel was honored as a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship. These fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars “whose achievements and potential identify them as rising stars—the next generation of scientific leaders,” the Sloan Foundation said in announcing this year’s fellows. Congratulations to Kathy! >> Read More
Flume arrives in new Crimaldi laboratory
John Crimaldi’s team is moving into a new lab at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Sustainability, Environment and Energy Complex. As part of the move, they received delivery of a new flume, which holds up to 40,000 pounds of water when full. For the Odor Navigation project, they will use the flume to make measurements…
NSF awards $15 million to crack the olfactory code
Since the early 19th century, scientists have worked to unravel the mystery of olfaction, the sense of smell. Olfaction is critical for the survival of species across the animal kingdom. Yet how the brain processes and identifies odors–and how this information influences behavior–remains, largely, an enigma. To help solve this mystery, and advance our broader…
