Engineering Newsletter

Aurel Lazar | Electrical Engineering

Mosquitoes find humans by smelling their sweat—and then help themselves to a “blood meal.” In the process, they can transmit diseases like malaria and dengue fever, which each kill more than a million people a year.

Working with fruit flies, Aurel A. Lazar and his team are trying to figure out how insects’ brains discriminate one smell from another. The brain gets information as “spike trains”—brief electrical pulses that respond to a stimulus, such as a smell. Collaborating with Richard Axel, a winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize for his olfactory work, Lazar is working on how a fruit fly’s brain acquires and processes such smells. Building on a firm understanding of olfactory system circuit anatomy, he uses time encoding machines—computer models of olfactory sensory systems —that represent odors as “spike trains”. His primary interest is to understand the sense of smell as a memory-based odor-object recognition system.

While Lazar is not tackling a specific disease, his work can eventually lead to learning how to control the transmission of diseases such as malaria and others whose spread are affected by insects’ sense of smell.

Lazar received his PhD from Princeton. He teaches Computational Neuroscience: Circuits in the Brain, an advanced undergraduate/graduate introductory-level course, along with follow-up graduate-level courses.