I picked up Sathish from the airport yesterday and took him in a tour de force from office to office: sign the work contract, register with the local authorities, move into new aparment. Then we got him a new keyboard and mouse with his new computer and he installed his OS. Today, we got him a bank account, health insurance and filled in some more forms he'll need to submit in the coming days. Not bad for day one and two! Especially when you're coming from balmy southern India to a Berlin of a couple of degrees below freezing and have temperature shock in addition to culture shock and jet-lag

Sathish's is our new graduate student and his project will be to study the spontaneous turning behavior of wildtype, mutant and transgenic flies in stationary flight. He will use mathematical tools to analyze the temporal structure of the behavior in order to localize the brain regions in the fly brain which are important for proper decision-making. He will thus learn basic Drosophila genetics as well as behavioral biology, data evaluation and some programming besides the neuroscience which is the basis of all our work here in the department. The project is the next step after our initial study on spontaneous behavior in the fruit fly Drosophila.

Welcome Sathish!

UPDATE: I can't believe I forgot to mention the blog post about one of Sathish's competitors for the position. Needless to say, if Sathish is dreaming about a Nobel Prize, he hasn't told me about it (yet?).