Joseph Fetcho

Over the last 30 years, first at SUNY Stony Brook and then at Cornell University, Joe Fetcho pioneered the use of zebrafish to tie neuronal circuits to vertebrate behavior. His lab did the first imaging of neuronal activity with cellular resolution in an intact vertebrate, made the first transgenic vertebrates with a genetically encoded indicator of calcium to monitor neuronal activity, and pioneered the ability to tie neurons to behavior by laser removal anywhere in the brain. He used these technical innovations to, for example, discover beautiful, orderly ties between development and function in the nervous system, showing that neurons that control movement in the brain and spinal cord are produced and wired by cell type in age ordered patterns that match their patterns of recruitment during behavior. His work has been recognized by a Javits Award from NIH, an NIH Directors Pioneer Award, a McKnight Technological Achievement in Neuroscience Award, election as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, as well as prestigious invited lectures such as the Victor Hamburger Lecture at Washington University and the Forbes lectureship at the Marine Biological Laboratory. His work helped to catalyze growing world-wide use of the zebrafish model to study how the brain produces behavior because the model and some of the tools he initially developed, along with new ones developed by him and others, allow literally watching the structure and function of individual neurons throughout the vertebrate brain during behavior, from embryo to adult.