Lena van Giesen

Associate professor

I am interested in how animals sense, integrate and encode external sensory stimuli to adapt to their specific niche in the environment. To answer these questions, I have worked with a number of different organisms and methods. During my PhD in Fribourg (Switzerland) I studied how the Drosophila larvae encodes a variety of chemical signals with a small number of neurons using calcium imaging in a custom designed microfluidic chip.

After finishing my PhD, I moved to the US, first to Brandeis University (Waltham, MA) where I worked on the genetic basis of temperature sensation in flies and mosquitoes and later to Harvard University (Cambridge, MA) where I started working with marine invertebrates, using a combination of native cell electrophysiology, expression systems, transcriptomic and behavioral data analysis.

Marte Lønnum

Master Student

I did my Bachelor's degree in animal physiology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and will continue at the same University for my Master's degree. For my master thesis I will dive into the intriguing field of sensory biology. I am a homebody who enjoys cooking very much, and I also like hiking. When the weekend arrives, I work as a bartender here in Trondheim.