Every day we coordinate eye, head, and body movements seamlessly to go about our daily activities. Similarly, flying insects coordinate eye and body movements to orient in space. A challenge in studying vision is that moving eyes are coupled to a moving body. Another challenge is that movement is inherently closed-loop: e.g., information flows from the eyes to the body and back. How should moving eyes be coordinated on a moving body to enable agile movement? In this talk, I will present a framework to quantify how the brain controls movement by integrating experimental and theoretical approaches at the interface of neuroscience, biomechanics, and control theory. Emphasizing the sense of vision, I will draw on control tasks in flying insects and describe how active eye movements coordinate and synergize with body movements. I will describe how our vision model, although derived from flies, exhibits task-level optimality and recapitulates classic primate head-eye coordination responses, suggesting convergent mechanisms across phyla.

BIOGRAPHY
Jean-Michel Mongeau is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Penn State University. He directs the Bio-Motion Systems lab which studies the neuro-mechanics and control of aerial and terrestrial locomotion in animals and machines. Dr. Mongeau received a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Biophysics and a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University. He is the recipient of the AFOSR Young Investigator Program (YIP) award and is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Neuroscience. Dr. Mongeau was a NSF IGERT and NSF Graduate Research fellow. Prior to joining Penn State, he was a post-doctoral scholar at UCLA sponsored by HHMI and ARO.