Campus Directory

Division Physical & Biological Sciences Division

Department/College/Unit Molecular, Cell, & Developmental Biology Department

Title Assistant Professor

Affiliation Faculty

Web Site

Primary Office Location Sinsheimer Laboratories
151

Mail Stop MCD Biology

Biography, Education and Training

Dan received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics from Yale University in 2008. Motivated to try to combat climate change, he then went to research new solar cell technologies in the lab of Prof. Harry Atwater at Caltech, where he received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics in 2013. Over the course of his Ph.D., Dan became convinced that policy, not technology, is the true bottleneck to solving climate issues. At the same time, he became fascinated by the brain and decided to apply his hard won research skills to understanding this complex organ. He joined the lab of Dr. Vivek Jayaraman at the HHMI Janelia Research Campus. There, he developed bottom-up approaches to deconstruct neural circuits, focusing on a neural circuit that encodes head direction in the fruit fly brain. This head direction circuit acts like an internal compass or sense of direction, helping the animal to navigate. Similar head direction circuits have been found in other insects, fish, birds, and mammals. Dan joined the UCSC faculty in 2021, where he continues to develop bottom-up approaches to reveal the computations and dynamics at play in neural circuits in the brain.

Research Interests

The brain is an incredible organ. Its tens of millions of neurons can each connect to thousands of partners, forming a complex network that holds our thoughts and our feelings and guides our actions. The human brain, and brains in general, consist of linked computational units, known as “neural circuits,” that control specific cognitive processes. In our lab, we ask how do different types of neural circuits generate specific computations through unique combinations of neural network connectivity and cellular biophysics?

Rather than start with the full complexity of the human brain, we instead turn to a far simpler—yet still surprisingly complex—model organism: the fruit fly. The central brain of the fruit fly has 100,000 neurons. These neurons guide the animal as it navigates, allow it to remember attractive and repulsive odors, and orchestrate courtship behavior. Recently, all of the neurons in the fly central brain were imaged at high resolution with electron microscopy, allowing the connectivity between the neurons that drive these behaviors to be thoroughly mapped. We use these neural connectivity maps to define computational motifs and then generate hypotheses about how the structure of these motifs leads to their individual functions. These hypotheses are then tested with the powerful set of genetic tools that are unique to the fruit fly. Almost every neuron in the fruit fly brain can consistently be identified across animals, and each neuron’s activity can be monitored, excited, or inhibited.