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Katherine Nagel started her lab at NYU School of Medicine in 2014, after receiving her PhD in Neuroscience from UCSF with Allison Doupe, and pursuing postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School with Rachel Wilson. Before focusing on olfactory navigation in Drosophila, she worked on central pattern generators and auditory processing, always combining experiments with computational modeling. She is fascinated by biological complexity, by neural dynamics, and by the intricate interactions between molecules, cells, and circuits that give rise to behavior.
We are interested in how animals navigate through complex multi-sensory environments, and how brains are organized to effectively combine competing cues that drive behavior.
We use olfactory navigation as a model to understand the neural circuit basis of behavior, and the way the brain integrates internal and external cues to achieve its goals.
We apply a wide variety of tools to study neural function and behavior including whole-cell electro-physiology, 2-photon imaging, quantitative behavioral measurements, and genetic manipulations. We strive to generate simple computational models that relate neural activity to the dynamics of behavior.