Biology meets engineering
My academic background is in biology, neuroscience, and animal behaviour. Answering the questions I was interested in usually meant building new instruments from scratch — combining biology with computer science, optics, and robotics rather than relying on existing lab equipment.
Targeting neurons with lasers
One project involved developing systems that could precisely target individual fruit flies with lasers to study their neural responses — a way of asking very specific questions about how individual neurons drive behaviour, at a scale and precision that required custom-built optics and control systems.
Thousands of fish, one behaviour
Another line of research involved engineering large-scale behavioural experiments, guiding schools of thousands of fish to study how collective decisions emerge from many individuals interacting — as much a project in precision technology development as it was in biology.
What carried forward
That instinct — building the tool you need when it doesn't exist yet, and staying grounded in the biology rather than just the engineering — is the same one I bring to agtech research today.