Affiliation: New Jersey Institute of Technology, Department of Biological Sciences

Gal Haspel is a neuroethologist who studies the neurobiology of locomotion, mostly in the nematode C. elegans. He is particularly interested in understanding what makes locomotion behavior resilient to variability and changes in neurons, circuits, and the environment.

His BSc degree, in 1996 at the Ben-Gurion University (Israel) was followed by a PhD in Neuroscience and Life Sciences in 2003 at the same university under the mentorship of Frederic Libersat, on the nervous -system-targeting behavior-changing sting of the parasitoid wasp Ampulex compressa and its effect on the motor output of its cockroach prey. During graduate school, he took the Neurobiology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory, where during a 12-hour period he heard a lecture on the emerging technology of genetically encoded calcium indicators from, the now late, Roger Tsien, followed by an introductory lecture about the neurobiology of C. elegans from Anne Hart. Combining the two ideas, Gal began studying the neurobiology of C. elegans during a summer of independent research as a Grass Fellow also at the MBL. Before the word optogenetics was coined, he expressed three opsin-related proteins in nematode neurons and muscle and tested the induced effect of light on behavior. He joined the laboratory of Anne Hart at Harvard Medical School (USA) in 2004, and then the laboratory of Michael O’Donovan at the National Institutes of Health (USA). Since 2013, his laboratory at the New Jersey Institute of Technology studies the connectivity, activity, and recovery from injury of the locomotion circuit in C. elegans and other small creatures, using optical and transgenic technologies and approaches.