Drosophila Connectomics funding

The group is currently funded by a number of awards:

A 2025, 6 year ERC-funded project (€11.9M) to generate connectomes for multiple Drosophilid species (plus a beetle) with the aim to understand how neural circuits evolve to generate species-specific behaviours. This is a large, multi-year international collaboration involving the MRC-LMB, the University of Cambridge, Rockefeller University, and the Rovira i Virgili University in Spain.

A 2025 Wellcome Discovery Award granted to Dr Gregory Jefferis and Dr Elizabeth Marin and international collaborators including Dr Wei-Chung Allen Lee (Harvard Medical School) and Dr Meg Younger (Boston University) to generate the first connectome for the mosquito Aedes aegypti. Our main neurobiological goal here is to elucidate the neural circuits that underlie human host-seeking, which involves the integration of carbon dioxide, body temperature, human host odour, and visual cues.

A 4 year Wellcome Trust collaborative award (£4.1M) to continue our successful collaboration with co-applicants University of Oxford, MRC LMB in Cambridge and HHMI Janelia Research Campus (USA) from October 2020. This award follows the initial 4-year collaborative award from the Wellcome Trust (£3.25M) to the Zoology department as lead applicant, in 2016. Our co-applicants were the same as now: the University of Oxford, MRC LMB in Cambridge and HHMI Janelia Research Campus (USA).