OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
A balanced intake of different classes of nutrients is a key determinant of health, wellbeing, and aging. To ensure nutrient homeostasis animals adapt their foraging strategies according to their current and future needs. We want to understand how animals decide what to eat, how these decisions are shaped by brain-body interactions, and how these decisions affect the fitness of the animal. To achieve a mechanistic, integrated, whole-animal understanding of nutritional decision-making we work at the interface of behavior, metabolism, microbiome, and physiology in the adult Drosophila melanogaster. I will discuss how the powerful combination of activity imaging approaches, neurogenetics, connectomics, automated, quantitative behavioral analyses, and nutritional and microbial manipulations is allowing us to achieve a mechanistic understanding of how internal states shape neuronal circuits to optimize complex foraging decisions.
