Research in the laboratory of Professor Charles Higgins is in the areas of computational neuroscience (focusing on dipteran visual motion processing), biologically-inspired engineering systems (including biologically-inspired robotics), and hybrid bio-robotics (robots incorporating living insects as sensors). The laboratory is currently supported by the National Institutes of Health and by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

The unifying goal of all our projects is to understand the representations and computational architectures used by biological systems, which are quite different from (and in many cases functionally superior to) conventional engineering systems. These projects are conducted in close collaboration with "wet" neurobiology laboratories who perform anatomical, electrophysiological, behavioral, and histological studies in insects.

In the area of computational neuroscience, we do mathematical and computational modeling of identified or postulated neural systems at levels from the biophysical to the highly abstract. This work is exemplified by our recent explorations into the neuronal basis of elementary visual motion detection in flies (Higgins, Douglass, and Strausfeld, Visual Neuroscience, 2004).

Higgins lab research as a whole attempts to address the question of how engineers can best learn from the representations and computational architectures demonstrated by neurobiology. To address this question directly, we study the brains of living insects (flies, moths, and dragonflies) using electrophysiology, and do behavioral experiments (honeybees and bumblebees). Projects in this area range from intracellular studies of fly visual interneurons to robotics incorporating living organisms as sensors.

This page updated on 1/8/09.