Sarah Farris

I became interested in science at an early age, spending a great deal of my childhood in small-town Iowa looking through telescopes and microscopes, capturing hapless invertebrates and amphibians, and reading everything I could about the natural world. After taking a particularly inspiring introductory biology course while studying pre-medicine at the University of Iowa, I realized that I was still more interested in bugs and worms than I was in humans. I graduated with a B.S. in Biology in 1993.

I continued this approach to my education by pursuing M.S. (1996) and Ph.D. (2000) degrees in Entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I worked in the laboratories of Drs. Gene Robinson and Susan Fahrbach. I studied the neural correlates of division of labor in the honeybee, with emphasis on plasticity and development of a learning and memory center, the mushroom bodies. Experience obtained by the adult bee (in terms of foraging) leads to a significant increase in lengthening and branching of the dendritic arbors of mushroom body intrinsic neurons, similar to experience-related changes that have been well-documented in mammalian systems such as the rat cortex. Furthermore, differences in the overall developmental pattern between bee and other well-studied insects such as the fruit fly indicate that ecology and evolutionary history may influence mushroom body development. Studies of the universality of developmental mechanisms, whether between insect species or among widely separated animal phyla, have since become an important focus of my current and future research.

My research at the University of Illinois unfortunately caused me to develop a severe allergy to honeybee stings. So in January 2000 I journeyed to sunny southern Arizona to continue studying mushroom body development using a friendlier insect model, the cockroach. As a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Strausfeld's laboratory, I began by characterizing the manner in which axons of mushroom body intrinsic neurons are organized into laminae during nymphal development. Experiments conducted by myself and Dr. Irina Sinakevitch show that the axons of maturing intrinsic neurons in the cockroach undergo a complex reorganization process. We have proposed that these features, which are reminiscent of those of subplate neurons in the mammalian cortex, are involved in guiding extrinsic neurons to the newly incorporated axons. Ongoing and future research will further investigate the mechanisms of this transdifferentiation-like process using cell culture. I will also begin comparative studies of mushroom body development, with emphasis on the influences of ecology and evolutionary history on developmental mechanisms, including the occurrence of intrinsic neuron plasticity in all stages of life.

Please see Curriculum Vitae for references