Andrew Barron

Andrew Barron completed his PhD at Cambridge University UK in 1999 on the nature of memory in the fruit fly brain. He has spent the last twenty years revealing the spectacular capacities of the insect mind: working out what they think and how they do it. He is presently a research fellow at Macquarie University in Sydney where he leads an international team to build a functional model of the honey bee brain as the vital prototype for understanding larger and more complex brains. His research on the effects of cocaine on honey bee dance behaviour was named the third Most Pointless Scientific Research Project of 2009 by WIRED magazine. He was beaten by a study on what cat food tastes like, and has never eaten cat food since.