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The Masakazu Konishi Endowed Lectureship in Neural Systems & Behavior
7/18/07 - 8:00 PM - Speck Auditorium
"Memory is Cheap: The Desert Ant's Navigational Toolkit"
Rüdiger Wehner, Institute of Zoology, University of Zürich
Rüdiger Wehner received his Ph.D. with Martin Lindauer at the University of Frankfurt in 1967. From 1986 to 2005 he was Head of the Department of Zoology of the University of Zürich, Switzerland. Since his official retirement in 2005, he works as a Research Professor at the Neuroscience Center Zürich, a joint organization of the University and ETH Zürich. Rüdiger is a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the German Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina. He is the principal author of the leading Animal Biology textbook in the German speaking world, the WEHNER/GEHRING.
Over the past three decades Wehner's research has revolved around the general question of how a 0.1-mg brain of a 10-mg insect solves complex computational tasks. He has focused on the extraordinary navigational skills of visually guided desert ants, Cataglyphis, which he has made a model organism for the study of animal navigation. This interdisciplinary enterprise has led to the analysis of a number of dedicated neural systems that deal with particular aspects of the ant’s overall navigational task. This research has led him to the elucidation of the insect’s polarized-light detecting system.
Most recently, Wehner's studies of how insects acquire and use their spatial knowledge have startled the artificial intelligence and neuroinformatics communities. Joint projects with the Informatics Department have led to the design and construction of robots.
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Dr. Masakazu "Mark" Konishi is the Bing Professor of Behavioral Biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He has worked extensively for three decades on the auditory systems of barn owls, which can use their acute hearing to home in on mice on the ground, even in total darkness. The research has led to an understanding of how the owl's brain manages to "compute" precise locations in two dimensions, and how the neural pathways and circuits are involved. Dr. Konishi's work has implications for better understanding the human brain and perhaps even for future interventions in certain neurological disorders. Dr. Konishi received a B.S. and M.S. from Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Following post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Tübingen and Max-Planck-Institut in Germany, Dr. Konishi was appointed an assistant professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He subsequently held assistant and associate professor positions at Princeton University. He has been a professor at Caltech for the last 32 years. Dr. Konishi is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as numerous professional organizations. He has received many awards, including The Peter Gruber Prize in Neuroscience.
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