Brian H. Smith

Smith has maintained a long-standing research program into how associative and nonassociative plasticity modify odor guided behavior and early olfactory processing in the brain. His lab investigates how these learning capabilities work together in different contexts to regulate decision making about statistical properties of odor environments. This work involves evaluating predictions of how distributed sparse representations may be used to for the memories that underlie decision making. He has also investigated how heritable differences in learning plays a role in how social groups respond to different environments as a function of the genotypic composition of groups. He is part of the ‘Active Sensing’ group in Odor2Action, focusing on how insect antennae actively sample the environment. He has developed a program for training PhD students and postdoctoral researchers to understand how to work in both large and small teams of researchers in order to investigate complex problems that require a multidisciplinary approach.