Kenta Asahina

B.S., The University of Tokyo
Receptors, Neurons and Circuits Supporting Odor Detection
presented by Sidney Strickland (on behalf of Leslie B. Vosshall)

In the summer of 2002, Kenta Asahina left The University of Tokyo and his family behind and moved to New York to pursue Ph.D. training abroad. Although the rest of his class started graduate school in September, Kenta arrived in July so that he could spend a few months acclimating to Rockefeller, New York City, American culture and conversational English. By the end of the summer, he had acclimated perfectly and was in fact completely hooked by American culture, scientific and otherwise.

For his Ph.D. project, Kenta studied how a simple animal — the larva of the Drosophila fruit fly — could respond to a large number of different odors.

At the time, there were a few labs using calcium imaging to measure odor responses in adult insects, but no one had attempted this in larvae. Kenta went to an imaging lab in California for a week to learn calcium imaging and returned not only with a viable prep for imaging the larval brain but with data on odor-evoked neural activity in the larval brain. Since then, he has systematically decoded the odor sensitivity of a large number of larval olfactory neurons and tracked that activity to higher areas of the larval brain. These experiments required a dazzling array of novel genetic tools to be built and crossed into flies, something that Kenta did amazingly well. Interestingly, he identified three olfactory neurons that respond to the same fruity odor but that do so at vastly different threshold concentrations. Together with Matthieu Louis, a former postdoc in the lab, Kenta explored how the larval brain processes odor information across a vast range of stimulus concentrations, an important problem for all animals that smell.

In a few weeks, Kenta will leave for a grand European tour, after which he will move to Pasadena to start postdoctoral training at the boundaries of neurobiology and ethology at Caltech with David Anderson, himself a Rockefeller graduate. I expect great things from Kenta and wish him the best in his new life in Southern California.