Clara is fascinated with the power of using the fly Drosophila melanogaster to study common neurobiological processes. This passion came about during the curricular year of her PhD, when she realized the variety and complexity of behaviours the flies display, and the breadth of available tools for detailed architectural and functional understanding of the underlying neuronal circuits. Clara studied olfactory learning and memory and decision-making processes in individual flies, obtaining her PhD from the University of Oxford. Clara then set out to study social modulation of fear responses in groups of flies, a pervasive feature of social interactions across the animal kingdom, at the Champalimaud Foundation. For this purpose, Clara developed a novel setup and found that flies use social cues from the group to infer both danger and safety. This paradigm and these initial findings open up a vast array of research questions that Clara’s research group is now pursuing at Northumbria University. Find out more from the lab’s website.

Established in July 2023, the Ferreira lab aims to uncover how social cues are detected and processed in the brain to guide behaviour in groups. Find out more from the lab’s website.