My lab is interested in how animals acquire and process information about their sensory environments.  Our work focuses on the large, midventral appendages of scorpions called pectines.  These unique chemosensory organs are dragged or swept intermittently across the ground as the animal walks and appear involved in mediating chemically-induced mate-finding and food-locating behaviors.

A novel feature of the pectinal chemosensory system is the existence of synaptic interactions between primary neural afferents.  We are using a combination of electrophysiological and computational techniques to deduce the circuitry and neural coding of chemosensory information within this accessible neural network.