Melville Joseph Wohlgemuth
Work Summary
The Wohlgemuth Lab is focused on how circuits in the brain contribute to sensory-guided adaptive behaviors. The goal is to study how an integrated bottom-up and top-down cortico-fugal network controls behavior on multiple time-scales: from the rapid reactions to arriving sensing information indicative of bottom-up processing, to the longer time-scale governance of categorical behavioral control that is directed by top-down signaling. To study these phenomena, the lab uses the model system of the echolocating bat. The bat provides a way to study how the brain evolved to perform under controlled, laboratory experimentation. To research these questions, the lab employs computer modeling of behavior, multi-channel electrophysiology to relate changes in behavior to changes in brain activity, and optogenetics to test causal hypotheses about the role of different circuit components in sensorimotor integration across time-scales. By combining computational ethology and modeling, electrophysiology, calcium imaging, and optogenetics, the Wohlgemuth Lab offers new insights into circuit-level processing for both rapid control of sensory-guided adaptive behaviors and long-term goal-planning.