The fruit fly uses its senses, its memory, and its internal states to make decisions about where to lay an egg, what to eat, and whether to pursue or accept a mate. This project seeks to discover the neural pathways and circuits in the fruit fly’s brain that enable it to flexibly make decisions. These parts of the brain are difficult to study with traditional methods. The recent availability of connectome data – full reconstructions of entire brain volumes – now provide researchers with access to the parts of the fly’s brain that ostensibly combine sensory information with memories and internal states to effect an action. This project will analyze the fruit fly connectome using methods that have traditionally been used for studying social networks. Network science tools can identify groups of neurons that interact with regions of known function, thus enabling the discovery of neural circuits that support cognitive-level function in the fruit fly. This project will advance our understanding of how flexible, context-dependent interactions happen in the brain. Current technology cannot autonomously emulate these flexible and context-dependent behaviors at such a small scale. The project’s education plan will broaden participation in scientific research through innovative workshops and courses for middle school, high school and college students that engage the next generation of researchers in learning basic coding and network analyses, and in exploring the connectome. The public availability of connectome data also makes it possible to engage young people in computational neuroscience research at scale. In addition to strengthening the U.S. domestic workforce through student training, this project will increase national competitiveness in science and engineering – specifically in pursuit of elucidating the parts of the fly’s brain that endow it with flexible, context-dependent behavior. The neural circuits that perform context-dependent computations are largely unk