Achievement

Andrew Hein, a biology fellow, continued work that he started last year with his math co-advisor, Scott McKinley, modeling target location by motile organisms in complex environments. They modeled an organism's intrinsic movement behavior while allowing the behavior to adjust based on sensory input data, where signals were infrequent, exhibited large fluctuations, and contained little to no directional information. Andrew received funding through QSE3 IGERT to spend a month in Iain Couzin's lab at Princeton University. Iain is one of the leading researcher's in the field of how organisms process information and use it to make decisions. Andrew participated in Couzin's lab, learned about their experimental set-ups, and new modeling techniques that he subsequently incorporated into his research on this topic. He has since completed a manuscript on the work which is currently being reviewed at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.