Rudy Behnia, PhD

Rudy Behnia, PhD

Research Interest

Sensory Physiology
Synapses and Circuits
Systems and Circuits
Behavioral and Systems Neuroscience: Non-human Models

Research Summary

Animals face complex environments teeming with sensory stimuli. Light, odor, taste, sound and touch need to be properly encoded in the brain to allow them to understand their natural surrounding and adapt their behavior to survive and thrive. Light in particular is an essential cue for many diurnal animals: it is sensed in the eye by photoreceptors; highly specialized neurons that detect photons. How do neuronal circuits in the brain interpret these photoreceptor signals to extract  features of the visual scene, such as object, shape and color? For a given visual feature, our goal is to describe both the underlying mathematic operations ( i.e. algorithms) that govern this transformation, as well as the neural circuits that implement them. 

In addition, we are interested in understanding how the processing properties of visual neurons change with the statistics of the scene as well as with the behavioral state of the animal, in order to optimize visual encoding in different conditions. We also aim to understand how, in turn, visual circuits accommodate for these stimulus and state dependent changes to allow for a faithful, or useful, reconstruction of the visual scene. 

Lastly, my lab is increasingly interested in understanding how animals learn and make decisions in the context of a multi-sensory world and what role sensory integration plays in these processes. 

We use a variety of complementary techniques: in vivo single cell patch-clamp recordings, two-photon activity-imaging, optogenetic, as well as behavioral paradigms. We collaborated extensively with theorists at the Zuckerman Institute to build models of sensory processing that  guide our experiments. We work with fruit flies, not only because well known advantages of this model system such as genetic tractability, which helps us test our circuit models, but also because of the increasing availability of connectomics data in this animal, which we use to ground our computational models. 

Christenson MP, Sanz Diez A, Heath SL, Saavedra-Weisenhaus M, Adashi A, Behnia R Hue selectivity from recurrent circuitry in Drosophila bioRxiv. 2023-07 (2023)

Christenson MP, Heath SL, Oriol E, Mousavi SN, Behnia R Exploiting color space geometry for visual stimulus design across animals Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 377: 20210280 (2022)

Kohn JR, Portes JP, Christenson MP, Abbott LF, Behnia R Flexible filtering by neural inputs supports motion computation across states and stimuli Current Biology 21, 1-12 (2021)

Heath SL, Christenson MP, Oriol E, Saavedra-Weisenhaus M, Kohn JR, Behnia R Circuit Mechanisms Underlying Chromatic Encoding in Drosophila Photoreceptors Current Biology 30, 264-275.e8 (2020)

Matulis AC, Chen J, Gonzalez-Suarez AD, Behnia R, Clark DA Heterogenous temporal contrast adaptation in Drosophila Direction-selective circuits Current Biology 30(2), 222-236.e6 (2020).

Kohn JR, Heath SL and Behnia R Eyes Matched to the Prize: The State of Matched Filters in Insect Visual Circuits Frontiers in Neural Circuits 12: 26 (2018)

Erclik T, Li X, Courgeon M, Bertet C, Chen Z, Baumert R, Ng J, Koo C, Arain U, Behnia R, Del Valle Rodriguez A, Senderowicz L, Negre N, White KP and Desplan CIntegration of temporal and spatial axes generate neuronal diversity Nature 541, 365-370 (2017)

Behnia R and Desplan C Visual circuits in flies: Beginning to see the whole picture. Curr Op Neurobiol 34, 125-132 (2015)

 Behnia R, Clark DA, Carter AG, Clandinin TR and Desplan C Processing properties of Drosophila ON and OFF pathway for motion detection. Nature 512, 427-30 (2014)

Seong HJ, Behnia R and Carter AG The impact of subthreshold membrane potential on synaptic responses at individual spines in the basal dendrites of layer 5 pyramidal neurons. J Neurophysiol 111, 1960-72 (2014)

Johnston RJ Jr, Otake Y, Sood P, Vogt N, Behnia R, Vasiliauskas D, McDonald E, Xie B, Koenig S, Wolf R, Cook T, Gebelein B, Kussell E, Nakagoshi H and Desplan CInterlocked feedforward loops control cell-type-specific Rhodopsin expression in the Drosophila eye.Cell 145, 956-68 (2011)

Johansen JP, Hamanaka H, Monfils MH, Behnia R, Deisseroth K, Blair HT and LeDoux JEOptical activation of lateral amygdala pyramidal cells instructs associative fear learning.Proc Natl Acad Sci 107, 12692-7 (2010)

  • Culturally Aware Mentoring (NRMN/CIMER and HHMI)
  • Supporting trainees in professional development (Pew)
  • Basics of burnout in academia (Dragonfly health)
  • Optimizing the practice of mentoring (University of Minnesota)
  • Crawford Bias Reduction Theory and Training (Zuckerman)
  • Entering Mentoring: Addressing Equity and Inclusion (Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning)
  • Bystander Intervention Training, January 2024 (Columbia Sexual Violence Response Office)