Bio:

James Strother is an Assistant Professor of biology at the University of Florida Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience. His research examines questions at the interface between neurobiology, physiology, and physics using theoretical approaches, calcium imaging, electrophysiology, and advanced microscopy methods. He began his career at the University of California - Berkeley, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in physics. He went on to receive his Ph.D. from the University of California – Irvine for work on the biomechanics of sensory and respiratory systems in fishes and other aquatic organisms. He then performed post-doctoral research at the Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute’s Janelia Research Campus on the computational architecture of the neural circuits in the visual system of Drosophila. During this time, he pioneered pan-neuronal calcium imaging approaches that provided direct evidence that insects employ independent pathways for light ON and light OFF stimuli, similar to the vertebrate retina. He subsequently established his own research program that applies interdisciplinary approaches to explore the function and organization of nervous systems. Recent projects have employed whole-brain imaging to study the functional architecture of neuromodulatory pathways in the vertebrate CNS using zebrafish larvae, and have examined the sensory physiology of ctenophores to gain insights into the evolution of nervous systems. The Strother Lab also develops novel technologies to advance these research aims, and has introduced new microscopy methods for volumetric imaging and produced open-source software toolkits for data analysis.