Rate My Professor Bruno van Swinderen

Professor Bruno van Swinderen is a Professorial Research Fellow and Group Leader at the Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland. He earned his PhD in Evolutionary and Population Biology from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1998, where his graduate research examined general anesthesia mechanisms using the Caenorhabditis elegans model through quantitative genetics and molecular approaches. He conducted postdoctoral research at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, from 1999 to 2003, developing methods to study perception in Drosophila melanogaster. He then led a laboratory there from 2003 to late 2007 before establishing his own lab at the Queensland Brain Institute in February 2008.

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.