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Fruit Flies to Humans: Evolutionarily Conserved Mechanisms of Decision-Making 

This talk will focus on common behavioral principles that have been observed in decision-making strategies in a variety of settings across various animals and humans. These behavioral observations have spurred theoretical work that has provided scientists and economists with an understanding of the algorithms that could give rise to this behavior. In the core of this talk, Dr. Rajagopalan will walk the audience through how these algorithms and computations have been mapped on to regions and elements in the brain with his own work on decision-making on fruit flies and rats serving as examples for how this scientific process leads to insight into the brain as well how these insights can lead to breakthroughs in mental health care and AI decision-making algorithms.

Speaker

Adithya Rajagopalan is a neuroscientist studying the algorithms governing decision-making. Currently a Leon Levy Scholar in the Constantinople lab at NYU, his work focuses on understanding how complex cognitive representations necessary for decision-making arise.

He graduated from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune, India in 2017. He then earned his PhD in Neuroscience in 2023 from Glenn Turner’s lab at the HHMI Janelia Research Campus. Here he used Drosophila melanogaster to study decision-making at the level of behavior, circuits and theory, leveraging the model system’s genetic tools to expand theories explaining decision-making under uncertainty.