Welcome to my personal site! I am a Ph.D. student at Harvard University in Ben de Bivort’s lab studying individuality in odor preferences in fruit flies.
Hello!
Interests
- Quantitative animal behavior
- Neural circuit modeling
- Bayesian inference
Education
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Ph.D. in Systems Biology, expected completion Summer 2024Harvard University
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B.S. in Biological Chemistry & Statistics, 2018University of Chicago
Research Projects
Recent Publications
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Matthew Churgin*, Danylo Lavrentovich*, Matthew Smith, Ruixuan Gao, Edward Boyden, Benjamin de Bivort
Neural correlates of individual odor preference in Drosophila
bioRxiv
Behavior varies even among genetically identical animals raised in the same environment. However, little is known about the circuit or anatomical origins of this individuality. We show individual Drosophila odor preferences (odor-vs-air and odor-vs-o…
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Carolyn Elya, Danylo Lavrentovich, Emily Lee, Cassandra Pasadyn, Jasper Duval, Maya Basak, Valerie Saykina, Benjamin de Bivort
Neural mechanisms of parasite-induced summiting behavior in ‘zombie’ Drosophila
eLife
For at least two centuries, scientists have been enthralled by the “zombie” behaviors induced by mind-controlling parasites. Despite this interest, the mechanistic bases of these uncanny processes have remained mostly a mystery. Here, we leverage the…
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