Submitted by Rachel Aucott on Fri, 14/08/2020 - 09:50
We are delighted to offer our congratulations to Dr Marta Zlatic, Principle Research Associate, and former student and research fellow, in the Department on the award of the Royal Society’s Francis Crick Medal and Lecture. She receives the award for discovering how neural circuits generate behaviour by developing and disseminating definitive techniques, and by discovering fundamental principles governing circuit development and function.
On receiving the award from the Royal Society she said "I was thrilled and extremely honoured to receive this award” before going on to say thanks to her “outstanding lab members and collaborators who have worked with me over the years and have made this award possible”.
Marta was a Natural Sciences student in Cambridge concentrating on Neuroscience and Chemistry before becoming a PhD student in the Department with Professor Michael Bate. Her PhD entitled: “Establishment of connectivity in the embryonic central nervous system of Drosophila”. After that she spent some of her early career as a Postdoc in the department and as a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, where she is now a Fellow. She became a Group Leader at the HHMI Janelia Research Centre in 2009 to study the circuit basis of behaviour. More recently she has returned to Cambridge where is she is now a Programme Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Principle Research Associate in the Department.
Her lab is studying the circuit basis of learning and action-selection. Her group has pioneered an interdisciplinary approach in the tractable Drosophila larva that combines behavioural and functional connectivity studies with synaptic-resolution circuit mapping using electron-microscopy to study the circuit implementation of fundamental brain functions. In collaboration with the Cardona lab they are generating comprehensive synaptic-resolution connectivity maps (connectomes) that reveal the structural circuit motifs that could store memories, compute predictions, and make decisions. In parallel, they are generating whole-brain neuron activity maps in intact living animals during learning and decision-making to discover which neurons were actually active during learning and decisions-making. By using genetic tricks to artificially activate or silence individual neurons they can then test whether the observed activity is important for behaviour.
Marta and her group hope that this work will reveal the basic functional principles of an entire learning and decision-making circuit in an animal which will be important not only for neuroscience, but also machine-learning and robotics.