When the phone call came in September from the National Institutes of Health, Tom Clandinin thought it might be “part of an elaborate hoax.” Yes, the assistant professor of neurobiology had applied for a Pioneer Award. But the recipients weren’t supposed to be notified until much later. “It was completely out of the blue.”
For his creative approaches to studying how fruit flies see motion and color, Clandinin will receive $2.5 million, over five years. Mark Schnitzer, assistant professor of biological sciences and of applied physics, also received a $2.5 million Pioneer Award to pursue novel multidisciplinary studies of fly neural circuits. The two faculty members will collaborate in the future on imaging technologies.
“The idea is that seeing motion and deciding whether something is moving left to right is something we can do and flies can do—even with a very much simpler nervous system,” Clandinin says. “So if you could figure out how the much simpler system does it, that would tell you about the design principles, perhaps, for how the human brain works.” Says Schnitzer: “It’s a new kind of collaboration for us. Tom is trained as a biologist, and I’m more of a biophysicist.”
