By Studying Fruit Flies, Rachel Wilson Is Changing How We Understand the Brain

Harvard Medicine profiles Rachel Wilson, the Joseph B. Martin Professor of Basic Research in the Field of Neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School, whose work with fruit flies is advancing understanding of how nervous systems produce behavior. For more than two decades, Wilson has helped pioneer techniques that allow researchers to observe activity in individual neurons as fruit flies sense, move, and navigate their environments. Her lab’s research has revealed important principles of sensory processing, internal navigation, and the neural circuits that help animals understand where they are and where to go next. At the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, Wilson is also contributing to the field of connectomics, using detailed maps of the fruit fly nervous system to study how distributed neural networks give rise to coordinated action. Wilson was also a 2014 Laureate in Life Sciences in the inaugural Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists. Her work reflects the Foundation’s commitment to supporting exceptional scientists and institutions pursuing fundamental discoveries about biology, behavior, and human health. Read the article here.