The CrickConnect team are delighted to be able to invite community members to join us for the institute's regular Crick Lecture.

Crick Lectures provide a broad insight into biomedical research from leading scientists. Not to be missed, the one-hour lectures are the event of the week for the Crick community to come together. The lectures aim to be accessible to scientists across different disciplines, while also offering something for the specialist.

There is also an opportunity to catch up with colleagues and friends over refreshments after Crick Lectures from 17:00. If you are able to join us in person at the Crick please let us know at connect@crick.ac.uk so we can arrange access.

The Jefferis lab aims to understand how smell turns into behaviour in the fruit fly brain. They currently use a combination of genetic labelling and manipulation, targeted in vivo whole cell patch clamp recording and high-resolution computational neuroanatomy to study olfactory circuits.

They are particularly interested in how odour information is processed by the higher olfactory centres that mediate innate and learned behaviour.

One special interest is understanding how third order olfactory neurons of one of these higher centres, the lateral horn, integrate information from specific olfactory channels.

Greg Jefferis is joint head of the Neurobiology Division at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He is also a Director of Research in the University of Cambridge Department of Zoology, where he leads the Drosophila Connectomics Group. Greg studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge before obtaining a Neuroscience PhD at Stanford in 2003. He returned to Cambridge as a research fellow of St John’s College before taking up his LMB position in 2008. He is a former EMBO Young Investigator and FENS-Kavli Scholar. In 2019 he was awarded the Royal Society’s Francis Crick Medal.

Greg’s group studies the neural circuit basis of behaviour using Drosophila olfactory system as its main model. They were the first to identify widespread sex differences in fly brain neuroanatomy and to uncover a sex-specific switch in connectivity and information flow in an animal brain. Recent work has combined electron microscopy whole-brain connectomics with in vivo physiology and behaviour to understand the interaction between learned and innate behaviour. All of this work builds on molecular and computational tools for cellular and synaptic resolution brain mapping. Most recently, this has included leading roles in delivering the first synaptic resolution connectomes for both the brain and nerve cord of an adult animal.