Assistant Professor of Biology, Department of Physics
Emory College of Arts and Sciences
Biography
Gordon Berman, PhD, and his research team use theoretical, computational and data-driven approaches to gain quantitative insight into entire repertoires of animal behaviors, aiming to make connections to the neurobiology, genetics and evolutionary histories that underlie behavior. In particular, Dr. Berman's team is interested in more than the precise physical and physiological mechanisms behind the performance of a single behavior or motion; they focus on the intricate interactions that underlie the temporal ordering, control and evolution of an organism's movements, attempting to unearth general organizing principles that apply across species. The team's studies include building new computational tools for measuring behavioral structures across many time scales, studying the behavioral and neural dynamics of pair bonding in prairie voles ( in collaboration with
Dr. Robert Liu and
Dr. Larry Young), and using data from optogenetic and targeted genetic introgression screens to probe the neurological control of behavioral commands and the evolution of behavior in fruit flies.
