Speakers > Richard BENTON

Center for Integrative Genomics, Génopode Building, Room 3030, University of Lausanne, CH-1015, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Presentation

Richard Benton received his PhD in 2003 from the University of Cambridge, and was an EMBO/Heley Hay Whitney post-doctoral fellow at The Rockefeller University, New York. He joined the Center for Integrative Genomics in September 2007 as Assistant Professor and promoted to Associate Professor in August 2012. His group’s research has been recognised by award of several prizes, including the Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology (2009), Friedrich Miescher Award (2012), AChemS Young Investigator Award for Research in Olfaction (2012), the National Latsis Prize (2015), and the EMBO Gold Medal (2016). His research has been supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, ERC Starting and Consolidator Grants, the EMBO Young Investigator Programme and an HFSP Young Investigator Award.

Research summary

His group is interested in the genetic, neural and evolutionary basis of sensory perception.

As a model, they investigate the chemosensory systems of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, which control many sophisticated behaviours, but are numerically simple and experimentally highly accessible. They take a multidisciplinary experimental approach, including bioinformatics, genetics, molecular and cellular biology, electrophysiology, optical imaging, and behavioural analysis.

Several conceptually diverse projects are currently being pursued, including the structural and molecular basis of chemosensory receptor function, the anatomical and physiological properties of chemosensory circuits in the brain, the genetic and ecological basis of chemosensory circuit evolution, and the neural underpinnings of chemosensory-dependent social behaviours.