Peacock spiders

How has the environment at the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme influenced your work? We develop and use high resolution, dynamic, quantitative readouts of behavior. This is a real strength at the institute and strongly resonates with me due to the approach I developed while working on the cell biology of trachea morphogenesis. For me, biology is about regulating dynamic processes and if you really want to understand what is going on you need to get a handle on the dynamics of the system. In cell biology, modern microscopy gave the field access to a rich understanding of the behavior of cells. In behavior we often use a bar graph to describe the complex behavior of the animal. There is no way we will understand behavior if we stick to that level of description. And I am not talking about getting rid of reductionism; I would call it ‘enriched reductionism’. This type of approach is common to many groups at the CNP, and we would not have pushed that aspect of our work as much somewhere else.