The Short Version Returns: In the Fly of the Beholder

A man sits behind a lab bench peering into a white microscope.

Assistant Professor Max Turner's fly neurobiology lab uses AI to understand how vision works in fruit flies' brains, and what that might teach about vision and disease in humans. (Photo by Patrick Dodson)

ALBANY, N.Y. (Jan. 21, 2026) — UAlbany's The Short Version podcast returns from winter break this week with a visit to Assistant Professor Max Turner's fly neurobiology lab.

With the assistance of a fly-sized movie theater and treadmill, of sorts, Turner and his students use Drosophila melanogaster as model species to track how neurons in the fly brain react to visual stimuli, how that translates to movement and what we can learn from fruit flies in the quest to better understand the human brain and how it's impacted by disease.

Turner joined the Department of Biological Sciences in 2023 as part of UAlbany's AI cluster hire, the largest in the University's history.

Read the full transcript here.

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The show will return next week with a conversation with the Department of Anthropology's Professor Robert M. Rosenswig on what it might mean if the most common explanation for why we started using money is... wrong.