About the Lab
The Garm Lab investigates how vision, sensory systems, and behavior evolved in early and unusual animals, with a particular focus on marine invertebrates such as jellyfish, starfish, annelids, and sponges. The group studies how animals without complex brains can still sense their environment, process visual information, and perform sophisticated behaviors such as navigation, obstacle avoidance, and learning.
Research combines comparative biology, neurobiology, and evolutionary science to understand how eyes and nervous systems originate and function across diverse animal lineages. The lab uses a wide range of approaches, including microscopy, electrophysiology, molecular biology, behavioral experiments, and gene-expression analysis to study photoreceptors, opsins, and neural circuits. Recent work has demonstrated associative learning in box jellyfish, uncovered diverse visual systems in marine species, and explored light sensitivity and circadian-like behaviors in organisms lacking conventional nervous systems.
By examining simple or early-evolving animals, the lab addresses fundamental questions about the origins of vision, cognition, and sensory processing, contributing to broader understanding in neuroscience, evolution, and ecology. Insights from this research help explain how complex behaviors can arise from minimal neural architectures and how sensory systems adapt to specific ecological environments.
The lab is well suited for students interested in biology, neuroscience, marine science, or evolution. Ideal candidates are curious about animal behavior and sensory systems, enjoy interdisciplinary experimental work, and are motivated to combine fieldwork, laboratory experiments, and quantitative analysis to study how organisms perceive the world.