About me

I am interested in how the physiology of animals leads to useful behavior. The diversity of organisms and the elegance of their solutions allows me to hope that my work will result in useful insights for those interested in understanding biological principles, building artificial devices, and potentially fighting disease. In particular, I am interested in neural functions involved with flight control in flies. I am pursuing these interests as a post-doc in the lab of Michael Dickinson.

Ongoing Projects

Vision and control of flight

My primary research project concerns the control of flight of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. The tool I built, in collaboration with Michael Dickinson and Titus Neumann, is a multiple camera fly tracking system, which is capable of resolving the position and orientation of flies (or bees or hummingbirds) over a large volume with minimal ( <30 millisecond ) latency.

Vision Egg - visual stimulus generation software

I developed and maintain the Vision Egg, an open source library for the display of visual stimuli.

Peer reviewed publications

(You may also want to search PubMed for "Straw, AD" or view my ResearcherID page)

Dickson, W.B., Straw, Andrew D., Dickinson, M.H. (2008) Integrative Model of Drosophila Flight. AIAA Journal 46(9). doi: 10.2514/1.29862

Straw, Andrew D., Rainsford, Tamath, & O'Carroll, David C. (2008) Contrast sensitivity of insect motion detectors to natural images. Journal of Vision 8(3). doi: 10.1167/8.3.32

Maimon, Gaby, Straw, Andrew D. & Dickinson, Michael H. (2008) A Simple Vision-Based Algorithm for Decision Making in Flying Drosophila. Current Biology 18(6): 464-470. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2008.02.054

Fry, S. N., Rohrseitz, N., Straw, A. D. and Dickinson, M. H. (2008). TrackFly- Virtual Reality for a behavioral system analysis in free-flying fruit flies J. Neurosci. Methods. doi: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2008.02.016

Michael Epstein, Stephen Waydo, Sawyer B. Fuller, Will Dickson, Andrew Straw, Michael H. Dickinson and Richard M. Murray. (2007) Biologically Inspired Feedback Design for Drosophila Flight. 2007 American Control Conference (ACC).

Straw, Andrew D., Warrant, Eric J., & O'Carroll, David C. (2006) A 'bright zone' in male hoverfly (Eristalis tenax) eyes and associated faster motion detection and increased contrast sensitivity. Journal of Experimental Biology 2006 209(21): 4339-4354. doi: 10.1242/jeb.02517

Dickson, William B., Straw, Andrew D., Poelma, Christian, & Dickinson, Michael H. (2006) An Integrative Model of Insect Flight Control. Proceedings of the 44th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit. AIAA-2006-0034

Shoemaker, Patrick, O'Carroll, David C. and Straw, Andrew D. (2005) Velocity constancy and models for wide-field motion detection in insects. Biological Cybernetics, Vol. 93, No. 4, pp. 275-287. doi: 10.1007/s00422-005-0007-y

Fry, S. N., Müller, P., Baumann, H.-J., Straw, A. D., Bichsel, M. & Robert D. Context-dependent stimulus presentation to freely moving animals in 3D. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, Vol. 135(1-2), pp. 149-157. doi: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2003.12.012

Other talks and papers available online

Fuller, Sawyer, B., Epstein, Michael, Waydo, Stephen, Dickson, William B., Straw, Andrew D., Dickinson, Michael H., and Murray, Richard M. (2007) Flight control in a flapping-wing fruit fly simulator. The Neuromorphic Engineer, 12 November 2007

Straw, Andrew D. Realtime Computing with Python. talk at the SciPy 2006 Conference.

Straw, Andrew D. (2003) Neural Responses to Moving Natural Scenes. Ph.D. Thesis, The University of Adelaide.

Andrew D Straw & David C O'Carroll (2003) Motion blur applied to eliminate artifacts in apparent motion displays [Abstract]. Journal of Vision, 3(9):782. Abstract for poster at 2003 Vision Science Society (VSS) meeting.

See also my open-source software resources.