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The Edward A. Kravitz Lectureship
June 14, 2010 - 8:00 PM, Speck Auditorium
"A Fly's Eye View of Behavior"
Michael Dickinson, Caltech
Michael Dickinson was born in Seaford, Delaware in 1963, but spent most of his youth in Baltimore and Philadelphia. He attended college at Brown University, originally with the intent of majoring in visual arts, but eventually switched to neuroscience, driven by a fascination for the mechanisms that underlie animal behavior. While in college, he studied the roles of neurons and neurotransmitters in the control of feeding behavior in leeches. He received a Ph.D. in zoology at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1991. His dissertation project focused on the physiology of sensory cells on the wings of flies. It was this study of wing sensors that led to an interest in insect aerodynamics and flight control circuitry. Dickinson worked briefly at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, and served as an assistant professor in the department of anatomy at the University of Chicago in 1991. He moved to University of California, Berkeley in 1996 and was appointed as the Williams Professor in the department of integrative biology in 2000. Dickinson moved to the California Institute of Technology in July, 2002 and is currently the Abe and Esther Zarem Professor of Bioengineering and Biology. Dickinson co-directed the MBL Neural Systems & Behavior course from 2005 to 2007 and currently serves as an instructor
in the course.
Dickinson’s research interests broadly concern the mechanistic basis of animal behavior. Specifically, he has studied the flight behavior of insects simultaneously at several levels of analysis, in an attempt to integrate cellular physiology, biomechanics, aerodynamics, and behavior. He has published more than 100 scientific papers in journals including Science, Nature, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His work has been featured in many television programs including NOVA and the Discovery Channel in several countries including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, and Japan. His awards include the Larry Sandler Award from the Genetics Society of America, the Bartholemew Award for Comparative Physiology from the American Society of Zoologists, a Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering, and the Quantrell award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Chicago. In 2001, he was awarded and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. In 2008, he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Edward A. Kravitz is the George Packer Berry Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. He is a graduate of the City College of New York (B.S. in biology and chemistry) and The University of Michigan (Ph.D. in biological chemistry). His post-doctoral studies were at NIH with Drs. Earl Stadtman and P. Roy Vagelos. He went to Harvard Medical School in 1961, becoming a professor in 1969. Dr Kravitz’s research interests have centered on neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, and now focus on explorations of the role of such substances in aggression using the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, as a model organism. In earlier studies, Dr. Kravitz and his colleagues (Kuffler, Potter, Otsuka, Iversen, and Hall) were the first to demonstrate that GABA was a neurotransmitter, and with Tony Stretton was the first to demonstrate that an intracellular fluorescent dye could be successfully used to determine neuronal geometry. The Kravitz laboratory has published over 100 papers in first rank journals. Presently, Dr. Kravitz is supported by grants from NIGMS for his research on aggression.
In addition to being a member of many professional societies including the International Society for Neuroethology where he became president in August 2004, Dr. Kravitz is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, is a fellow of the AAAS, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his awards and honors, Dr. Kravitz is most proud of his Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring award from Harvard Medical School, and the Education Award from the Association of Neuroscience Departments and Programs.
Dr. Kravitz has long-standing interests in education. He has served as the director of the MBL’s Neurobiology course, was the co-founder of the Neurobiology of Disease Teaching Workshops at the Society for Neuroscience, and the first director of the graduate program in neuroscience at Harvard University. He is committed to the education of minorities in the sciences and medicine.
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