Basil el Jundi, PhD
Group Leader

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SCIENTIFIC Education

• 2003 - 2008 Diploma at the University of Marburg (Germany)
• 2008 - 2011 PhD at the University of Marburg (Germany)
• 2012 - 2015 Postdocteral Fellow at the Lund University (Sweden)
• 2016 - 2017 Research Fellow at the Lund University (Sweden) 
• since 2017 Emmy-Noether Group Leader at the University of Wuerzburg (Germany)

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Research Interest

My research aims at understanding how insects use different cues in their environment to set and mantain a desired heading, and how these cues are intergrated in the brain. I have started my research as a PhD student in the laboratory of Uwe Homberg (University of Marburg, Germany), where I studied the sky-compass network in the desert locust brain anatomically and electrophysiologically. Afterwards, I was a postdoc and research fellow in Marie Dacke's lab in the Lund Vision Group (Lund University, Sweden) where I investigated compass orientation in South-African ball-rolling dung beetles through electrophysiological, neuroanatomical, and behavioral experiments. Since 2017, I have started my own research group based on the Emmy Noether program of the German Research Council at the Biocenter (Würzburg, Germany). In my group we are focusing on the migratory behavior of the North American monarch butterfly Danaus plexippus. To understand how these animals use different orientation cues to find their way to their overwintering habitat in Central Mexico, we use a combination of behavioral, anatomical, and electrophysiological approaches.

Curriculum Vitae

SElected Publications (FolLow Link for full publication list)

• Beetz MJ, Kraus C, Franzke M, Dreyer D, Strube-Bloss MF, Roessler W, Warrant EJ, Merlin C, el Jundi B (2021) Flight-induced compass representation in the monarch butterfly heading network. Curr Biol, in press.
• Nguyen TAT, Beetz MJ, Merlin C, el Jundi B (2021) Sun compass neurons are tuned to migratory orientation in monarch butterflies. Proc R Soc B 288: 20202988.
• Franzke M, Kraus C, Dreyer D, Pfeiffer K, Beetz MJ, Stoeckl AL, Foster JJ, Warrant EJ, el Jundi B (2020) Spatial orientation based on multiple visual cues in non-migratory monarch butterflies. J Exp Biol 223: jeb223800.
• Dacke M, Bell ATA, Foster JJ, Baird EJ, Strube-Bloss MF, Byrne MJ, and el Jundi B (2019) Multimodal cue integration in the dung beetle compass. PNAS 116:14248-14253.
• Immonen EV, Dacke M, Heinze S, and el Jundi B (2017) Anatomical organization of the brain of a diurnal and a nocturnal dung beetle, J Comp Neurol 525, 1879-1908.