Title: Olfactory Navigation: Structure of Odor Plumes in the Natural Environment

Abstract:  Animals depend for their survival on the ability to use olfactory cues to locate food, find mates, and 
avoid predators. While animals excel at these tasks, the algorithmic and mechanistic processes that govern these 
behaviors are not well understood.  Our research group has partnered with a team of neuroscientists who are 
interested in understanding how animals navigate within odor plumes.  In this talk I will give a general overview of 
the project, and then discuss specific numerical and experimental efforts that our group is performing to identify 
and quantify odor plume structure and dynamics in natural environments. These studies will be used to identify and 
test phenomenological search algorithms for autonomous robots, and to help build mechanistic models of brain 
function.  I will conclude with some very recent work that we have done to try and quantify odor plumes released by 
human respiration that are used for navigation by insects like mosquitos; this work has direct implications for the 
study of transmission of diseases like the Zika virus.