Associate Professor
Kavli Neural Systems Institute
The Rockefeller University
Gaby Maimon has a longstanding interest in cognitive neuroscience. In his early career, through graduate school, he studied this topic in primates, where he aimed to better understanding how actions are initiated through neurophysiological recordings in awake, behaving monkeys. As a post-doc, Gaby transitioned to studying flies, where he developed a preparation for recording the electrical activity of neurons in behaving Drosophila for the first time. Dr. Maimon’s lab uses this preparation, alongside free behavior and anatomical experiments, to study the neural basis of behavior in flies, with a focus on navigation. The long-term goal of this work is to use Drosophila to develop a deeper, cellular and molecular, understanding of higher brain functions, from behavior, through electrophysiology, to molecular mechanisms that govern the dynamics of neural circuits. Such an understanding in flies could provide a blueprint for more complete understandings of higher brain functions in larger brains, such as our own.