Gregory Jefferis
Gregory Stephen Xavier Edward Jefferis is a British
Education
Jefferis studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, graduating with a BA from St John's College, Cambridge in 1998. He was awarded a PhD in Neurosciences for his work on the 'Wiring specificity in the olfactory system of Drosophila' in 2003, supervised by Liqun Luo at Stanford University. He became a Fellow of St John's College in 2004.
Career and contributions to science
Jefferis has made significant contributions to our understanding of how neural circuits process sensory information and transform it into behavior. His PhD uncovered principles of brain development using the olfactory system of the vinegar fly, Drosophila melanogaster. He found that central neurons in the brain are pre-specified to form connections with specific incoming sensory neurons.[3] Surprisingly, central dendrites can target independently of incoming sensory axons, suggesting a principle of independent coarse maps refined by contact-mediated matching.[4] Returning to Cambridge in 2004 as a Wellcome research fellow, Jefferis combined genetic single cell labelling and image registration to build a 3D atlas of higher olfactory centers in Drosophila, showing that odors of different behavioral significance are spatially segregated.[5]
Jefferis joined the Neurobiology Division at the
Jefferis' group has also made significant efforts in the development of experimental and computational tools for circuit mapping.[9][10] He is also a principal investigator of the Virtual Fly Brain online resource.[11]
In 2016, he was the lead applicant of a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award that is using EM connectomics to study the neural circuit basis of memory storage and retrieval; this established the Drosophila Connectomics group at the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge. He has also received Starting and Consolidator grants from the European Research Council.[12][13]
Awards and honors
Jefferis has received numerous awards through his career. For his PhD work, Jefferis received a
References
- ^ "Gregory Jefferis - MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology".
- ^ "Gregory Jefferis - Department of Zoology - University of Cambridge".
- S2CID 4431800.
- S2CID 4431800.
- PMID 17382886.
- PMID 20832311.
- PMID 20832315.
- PMID 24360281.
- PMID 27373836.
- ^ "Jefferis Lab resources".
- ^ "Virtual Fly Brain".
- ^ "Neural Basis of Olfactory Perception in Drosophila".
- ^ "ERC Consolidator Grants 2014" (PDF).
- ^ "The Royal Society - Francis Crick Medal and Lecture".
- ^ "Greg Jefferis awarded Francis Crick Medal and Lecture by the Royal Society". 2018-07-19.