My research area is biological physics with the aim of understanding complex behavior as it arises in the natural world. The complex behaviors we are interested in include locomotion, sleep, feeding, and collective phenomena that may arise from interaction among multiple individuals. We focus on the model organism Drosophila melanogaster to understand these behaviors and take advantage of its built-in timekeeper, the circadian clock, as a starting point in tracing the molecular and neuronal pathways that generate complexity in this ‘simple’ animal. The laboratory utilizes time-lapse fluorescence imaging to detect molecular kinetics in individual fruitfly cells and combines infra-red and video tracking technologies to capture dynamics of behaving flies.