Marie Dacke

The discovery of a unique compass organ in spiders gave my career a flying start when reported as my first paper in Nature (1999). I soon established a productive line of cross-disciplinary research to understand the compass system of insects, with the South African ball-rolling beetles as my model system. My current main aim is to drive the future development of biologically inspired solutions for sensation, signal enhancement and cue combination. I have been surprised and impressed by biological solutions to complex problems many times before and expect to be so again.