Sensory Systems & Behavior

How do organisms sense and respond to their environment?

Our ability to sense the outside world is undeniably important—but how do we, and other forms of life, do it?

My research uses techniques in molecular, cellular, and organismal biology to understand how life transforms environmental signals into useable information. Here, I primarily leverage the model organism Drosophila melanogaster in order to track sensation through the nervous system, from the sensory receptor to eventual behavior.

Select Publications:

• How maggots discriminate touch and cold (Himmel et al, 2023)

• An unexpected neural basis for insect cold acclimation (Himmel et al, 2021)

• Drosophila menthol sensing and its ancient origins (Himmel et al., 2019)

Evolution

How have sensory systems evolved?

Sensory nervous systems are very old, and the molecular sensors that make them work may be even older. How did these molecules evolve? When did they gain a sensory function? How does the environment shape sensory systems, and by which genetic mechanisms?

By comparing sensory systems across taxa, both experimentally and bioinformatically, my research seeks to understand what ancestral sensory systems looked like, and how they've changed over the course of millions to billions of years, as far back as the Last Universal Common Ancestor of life.

Select Publications:

• Identification of the 7TMIC superfamily (Himmel et al., 2023)

• Surprise human homologs of insect receptors (Benton & Himmel, 2023)

• The evolution of TRP channels (Himmel & Cox, 2020)

• Identification of the TRPS family (Himmel et al., 2020)