Posted July 2026 - originally posted January 2, 2026
January 1, 2026 marked Sweta Agrawal’s first day as an Assistant Professor in Comparative Physiology in the Department of Zoology at UBC. Sweta's research focuses on "the neural computations underlying proprioceptive control of movement and how those computations are shaped by the animal’s motor needs”.
Where were you before joining Zoology at UBC-Vancouver?
Before coming here, I was at Virginia Tech, where I started my lab in 2023. Before that, I had been at University of Washington where I did my PhD and Postdoctoral degrees. Actually, I started Grad school at Caltech in Pasadena with Michael Dickinson as my advisor but then ended up moving to the University of Washington where I finished out my PhD. For my Postdoc, I worked with John Tuthill who got hired during my last year of my PhD and happened to be working on a topic which I had wanted to work on since I was an undergrad. So, it kind of worked out nicely.
Is this the research area you are still working on?
Yeah, exactly: the neural circuits of proprioception. I'm really interested in understanding the neuroscience of how we move through the world. In particular, this focus on our sense of proprioception, which is the sense of our body and where it is in space. Sometimes people call it the 6th sense. It's like the one that often people don't really think of when they think of their senses. When you close your eyes and you know where your body parts are in space, that’s proprioception. For instance, with your eyes closed, you can move your hand and touch your nose. This is due to all of these sensory neurons that are embedded in your muscles, in your joints, and in your skin. It turns out that sense is actually really important for movement because you have to know where your limbs are if you want to move them to where you want to go.
People didn't even really know for sure that it was a sense until late 1800’s and early 1900s with the experiments done by Charles Sherrington – a British neurophysiologist - and collaborators when they discovered that there are sensory neurons in human muscles and joints that actively participate in motor control. A lot of the neurological processing of proprioception is housed in the spinal cord, where these neural circuits are really hard to access and measure. As a result, even now, our knowledge of proprioception lags behind what we know about other senses.
Are there specific diseases in humans associated with proprioception?
There are a few rare cases of people that have lost their sense of proprioception and they end up being more or less like paralysed, debilitated, and it's not because their muscles don't move. Their muscles still work it is just that without proprioception, they aren't able to coordinate the movement of those muscles and the right sequence to move properly. It is a really important sense and yet, despite its importance, it's the sense that we know the least about. Maybe the reason it has been overlook is in part because it happens unconsciously in the background and we aren't aware of it in the same way that we are of vision or smell.
However, there isn’t a particular disease that you can point at that's associated with it. But proprioception can definitely be impaired, and it can have debilitating consequences. For example, proprioceptive sensory neurons can be killed off via some sort of peripheral neuropathy affecting the function of peripheral sensory neurons. In some cases, it can be linked to autoimmune diseases that targeted these sensory neurons or even certain chemotherapy drugs. Ageing or neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson likely lead to impairments of the proprioceptive system too. However, the truth is – we don’t really know because few have really thought to look. Most research in humans has focussed on what's happening on the motor side and not so much on the sensory side.
Proprioception seems a very important sense for humans, but you study this sense in fluit flies, why?
A lot of the processing of the proprioception information happens in the spinal cord and in vertebrates, it's really hard to access those circuits because it is all encased in the spinal cord skeletal structure. Invertebrates are great model systems in general and in particular because there is no internal skeleton. They have an exoskeleton and basically, we can just gain access to the neural areas through the exoskeleton easily and study what is happening in the central nervous system outward towards the information downstream to the periphery.
In addition, because Drosophila has been so extensively studied, we have all of these genetic tools that allow us to identify particular neurons, the same one from fly to fly. We have the ability to turn on or off those neurons using some of these different genetic tools. We can record the activity of these neurons in awaken behaving flies. In addition, we also have the fly connectome: a high spatial resolution model of the neural connections in the fly brain. This tool allows us to see all of the neurons and how they connect. It is an anatomical ground map that allows us to compare and use it as a framework when trying to understand how this information is being processed in the brain.
Do you use different types of Drosophila flies for your work?
Thanks to the efforts by the fly community over like the last 15 to 20 years or so tools have been developed that allow to genetically label subsets of neurons in the fly central nervous system. With this kind of label system, we can then do things like express specific genes that will produce a particular protein of interest, study anatomy, or use a fluorescent protein to understand activation. We probably have something like 200 transgenic flies in the lab to label different subsets of neurons. This allows us to dissect out the function of these neural circuits.
How did you become a biologist?
I was interested in biology from a pretty young age in spite of my family’s expectations - they would have preferred for me to choose Medicine or Law. Then in high school, I discovered the brain and neuroscience and ended up pursuing it for both my undergrad and PhD. Neuroscience is a pretty big field in itself. Initially, I thought I wanted to focus on the cellular and molecular aspect of it. I worked in a whole variety of different labs as an undergrad on topics ranging from yeast genetics to ion channel physiology to neuroethology.
What are your hobbies?
Between family and research, there isn’t much time for hobbies these days! But perhaps my most unusual hobby is that I really enjoy going mushroom hunting, learning mycology, and anything mushroom related. I used to be very active in the local mycological society in Seattle: the Puget Sound Mycological Society. I was a field trip guide and I really enjoyed going out into the woods and go treasure/mushroom hunting. It's like a fun way to engage with nature. The people that attend mycological society meetings are not necessarily biologists, they are people from a variety of backgrounds, variety of ages, and they know everything about mushrooms: it is like biology is their hobby. Another aspect of mushrooms that I really enjoy is how they are a source of natural dyes for fibre and yarn. You can get almost every colour of the rainbow.