NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2014

Ho Winnie, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

NSF Postdoctoral Fellowships in Biology combine research and training components to prepare young scientists for careers in emerging areas where biology intersects with other scientific disciplines, in this case with mathematics and physical sciences. The Fellows are expected to lead the nation's scientific workforce of the future. This fellowship combines approaches from sensory biology and applied mathematics to understand how the brain processes complex olfactory signals and supports a research and training plan for Winnie W. Ho under the mentorship of co-sponsors Dr. J. Riffell from the Department of Biology and Dr. N. Kutz from the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Washington. Animal sensory systems process a tremendous amount of information about the environment and serve critical roles in driving situation-appropriate behavior. Although a historical focus on sensory systems important to human perception has generated important insights into how visual and auditory stimuli are processed, there is less understanding of how multidimensional stimuli are encoded by the olfactory system as a single percept of a biologically important stimulus. The intricacy of the neural populations used to encode olfactory information necessitates a computational approach that applies data reduction methods to simplify the data while extracting and retaining structural information to create a representation of odor space. This cross-disciplinary project integrates empirical and computational components to address fundamental questions associated with this complex sensory problem: how does the olfactory system enable coding of complicated, highly dimensional olfactory stimuli, and what are the salient signal features required to generate a biologically relevant percept? The fellowship provides the Fellow with integrative training in sensory neurobiology, chemical ecology, and computational methods that include data modeling and dimension reduction techniques. She is developing teaching and mentoring skills through close working relationships with undergraduate researchers and participation in university-sponsored programs. As part of this project, she is conducting public outreach to communicate the importance of insects and animal behavior through an existing citizen science program (the "urban pollination project") with the potential to reach and educate over 4000 participants.