Rate My Professor Bruno van Swinderen

Van Swinderen's research utilizes Drosophila melanogaster as a genetic model to investigate neural mechanisms of perception, focusing on selective attention, sleep, and general anesthesia. His group explores how visual perception is influenced by different arousal states, including sleep's regulation of selective attention and predictive processing via novel visual behavioral paradigms combined with molecular genetics. Additional efforts target presynaptic mechanisms of general anesthesia to identify strategies for enhancing recovery post-procedure. Key achievements encompass discovering a presynaptic neurotransmitter release impairment by general anesthetics, identifying distinct active and quiet sleep stages in flies with unique brain activities and functions, and demonstrating sleep's conservation in supporting spatial learning and attention. Representative publications include 'Presynaptic neurotransmission: a bottleneck to recovery from general anesthesia?' (Anesthesia & Analgesia, 2025), 'Wakefulness can be distinguished from general anesthesia and sleep in flies using a massive library of univariate time series analyses' (PLoS Biology, 2025), 'Long-term multichannel recordings in Drosophila flies reveal altered predictive processing during sleep compared to wake' (Journal of Experimental Biology, 2025), 'Neural ensemble fragmentation in the anesthetized Drosophila brain' (Journal of Neuroscience, 2023), and the book chapter 'Sleep in Drosophila' (Handbook of Sleep Research, 2019). His laboratory has received funding from NHMRC, ARC, and the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists.