Barry Dickson completed bachelor's degrees in mathematics and molecular genetics in Melbourne, Australia, a PhD in developmental biology in Zurich, Switzerland, and a postdoc in neuroscience at Berkeley. He established his own laboratory in Zurich in 1996, before moving in 1998 to the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna Austria, where he served as Scientific Director from 2006-2013. Barry then moved to the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia. He returned to Australia in 2021 to take up his present position at the Queensland Brain Institute.
Barry has pioneered studies of how instinctive behaviours are genetically programmed into an animal's nervous system, focussing as a model on the reproductive instincts of the fruit fly Drosophila. He has also developed powerful genetic tools for probing the functions of individual genes and neurons in Drosophila.
Barry is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a recipient of the Wittgenstein Prize from the Austrian Science Fund.
Professional position
- Professorial Research Fellow, Queensland Brain Institute, University Of Queensland
