Ian Davison, PhD

Ian Davison is an assistant professor of Biology and a faculty member of the Center for Systems Neuroscience. His lab studies the neural circuits that underlie perception and behavior in the olfactory system. Smell is notorious for its links to emotion and memory, and in the animal world, it is also a powerful trigger of innate behaviors like aggression, courtship, and fear. Our overall goal is to establish the circuit architecture and computational principles that the olfactory system uses to map chemical cues onto both stereotyped and learned behaviors.