Jason Somers is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the UCL Ear Institute Fly Lab.
I have always been interested in how things ‘work’, from pulling apart broken appliances to assembling computers and, more recently, to the biology of living organisms.
I completed my PhD in Melbourne, Australia where I used insecticides to probe the function of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. This fostered my interest in using Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism to dissect the function of genes to understand their roles in behavioural paradigms.
My current project at the Ear Institute aims to use Drosophila melanogaster to uncover the molecular network that permits mechanosensory entrainment of the circadian clock.