Stanley is interested in how insect brains construct representations of the external world that enable these animals to successfully orient in their environment. These representations are built up by integrating visual information from the eyes (and possibly other sensory modalities) and extracting relevant features that allow to encode the body orientation of the animal with respect to the external world. The compass-like arrangement of this information in the brain might provide the neural basis for all directed behavior of insects. Which information is specifically used to achieve this, and in what form this representation is laid down in the neuroarchitecture of the brain, likely depends on the evolutionary history of a species, as well as its sensory environment and behavioral strategy.
To develop an understanding of these fundamental neural mechanisms underlying animal orientation, Stanley performs intracellular recordings from individual neurons in the central brain of several insect species, as well as detailed neuroanatomical studies of these animals. To examine how fundamentally shared features of this system have been shaped by evolution to optimize each species’ performance in its particular environment, insects from different habitats around the world (e.g. Panamanian rainforest bees, Australian migratory moths) are used and compared.
Stanley conducted his PhD at the Philipps-University in Germany under Prof. U. Homberg, analyzing the processing of polarized light information in the brain of the desert locust. He joined the University of Massachusetts Medical School (USA) as a postdoctoral fellow (with Prof. S. Reppert) and worked on the neural basis of sun compass orientation of the migratory monarch butterfly.
While in Lund (starting December 2012), he will be working as a Research fellow with Prof. E. Warrant (Vision Group) and analyze the representation of skylight compass cues in the central complex of insect brains and the adaptations of this internal compass in different species.
