Dr David O'Carroll
BSc (Hons), PhD (Flinders)
David O'Carroll completed his PhD, on the optics of spider eyes, in 1989 at Flinders University, having also worked at RSBS (ANU) and the University of Sussex in the UK. He subsequently worked for 4 years as a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Adrian Horridge and Dr MV Srinivasan at RSBS on object detecting neurons in dragonflies, and as Research Fellow with Simon Laughlin, in the Zoology Department at the University of Cambridge before taking a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle in 1998. Dr O'Carroll relocated to Adelaide in 2001 as a Senior Research Fellow and subsequently as lecturer in Physiology. His work over the last decade has focused on visual ecology and visual processing in nocturnal and diurnal insects and spiders. Much of his present research focuses on signal processing and motion detection by the insect visual system and development of biomimetic chips in analog VLSI based on insect vision.
Selected Publications:
Dror RO, O'Carroll DC, & Laughlin SB, (2001) Accuracy of velocity estimation by Reichardt correlators. J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 18: 241-252.
Harris RA, O'Carroll DC & Laughlin SB, (2000) Contrast gain reduction in fly motion adaptation. Neuron 28: 595-606.
Dacke M, Nilsson D-E, Warrant EJ, Blest AD, Land MF & O'Carroll DC, (1999) Built-in polarizers form part of a compass organ in spiders. Nature (London) 401: 470-473.
O'Carroll DC, Bidwell, NJ Laughlin SB & Warrant EJ (1996) Insect motion detectors matched to visual ecology. Nature (London) 382: 63-66.
O'Carroll DC, (1993) Feature detecting neurons in dragonflies. Nature (London) 362: 541-543.