During my studies of Biology, I have become increasingly interested in animal orientation and the neural correlates of orientation behaviors. As a Bachelor student in the lab of Basil el Jundi, I was interested in understanding how Monarch butterflies use different visual cues, such as a simulated sun and local landmarks, for orientation during flight. I continued as a Master student investigating the Monarch butterfly brain with electrophysiological tetrode recordings. My focus in this project was to study the neuronal tuning of the heading-direction system in the Monarch butterfly central complex.
My PhD project further builds on my previous experiments by investigating the integration of multimodal sensory information in the central complex and how orientation decisions are made based on these signals.