Sweta Agrawal

Sweta is an assistant professor in the Department of Zoology at UBC. She completed her BA in neuroscience at Columbia University and a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Washington. Throughout her career, Sweta has been fascinated by the evolution and function of diverse sensorimotor systems. She first encountered a comparative approach to neuroscience as an undergraduate, when she worked with Darcy Kelley (Columbia University) on the evolution of Xenopus vocal behaviour and with David Grimaldi (American Museum of Natural History) on the evolution of the haltere, a proprioceptive organ important for flight in flies. As a graduate student in Michael Dickinson’s lab (California Institute for Technology and UW), Sweta studied how visual and chemosensory cues shape complex behaviours like courtship by developing a novel behavioural assay consisting of an artificial fly robot that could be programmed to interact with other flies. As a postdoctoral researcher in John Tuthill’s lab (UW), Sweta sought to understand how sensory information is transformed by central circuits to mediate behaviour using in vivo electrophysiology, 2-photon imaging, and optogenetic manipulations during behaviour to develop a powerful new model system for studying the central processing of proprioceptive information in Drosophila. She has continued this work in her own lab, embracing a cross-disciplinary approach that spans neurophysiological dissection of neural circuits, systems neuroscience, computational modeling, and evolution.