Trevor Sorrells, PhD

Trevor Sorrells received his B.S. in Biology from Stanford University in 2009. For his PhD, he joined the lab of Alexander Johnson at the University of California, San Francisco where he pioneered molecular biological and genomic approaches in non-model yeast species to understand how transcription regulatory networks evolve. This work provided a mechanistic understanding of how network architecture and molecular function dictate the ways in which biological systems change over time. As a postdoctoral fellow with Leslie Vosshall at Rockefeller University, Trevor discovered a persistent behavioral state in the mosquito Aedes aegypti that sustains their pursuit of humans over time. To do this, he innovated the use of optogenetics in this important vector of disease. The Sorrells lab studies the neural circuits that control the ability of mosquitoes to bite humans and how this behavior evolved from their non-biting ancestors.