Rachel Wilson earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCSF and did postdoctoral training at Caltech before joining the faculty at Harvard Medical School in 2004, where she is now the Joseph B. Martin Professor of Basic Research in the Field of Neurobiology. The mission of her laboratory is to understand the neural basis of navigation behavior in Drosophila. Her work combines connectomics, neurophysiology, behavior, and computational modeling. Recent studies from her lab have described how the brain learns the spatial layout of new sensory environments, how the brain transforms travel velocity representations from body-centric to world-centric coordinates, and how world-centric spatial information is re-transformed into body-centric coordinates for motor control.