The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) awarded a $383,521 Project Grant (CFDA 93.279 - Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs) to President and Fellows of Harvard College to study the acoel worm, Hofstenia miamia, as a new model system for understanding how animal brains control complex behaviors. The key objectives are to: 1) develop methods for quantifying the worm's behavior and its environmental interactions, 2) perturb both the organism and its environment to uncover mechanisms of behavioral control, and 3) integrate neural activity data with behavioral and environmental data to reveal how distributed computations in the brain enable the animal to navigate its environment and capture prey. This innovative research project leverages Harvard's expertise in behavioral neuroscience, engineering, and computational modeling to shed light on general principles of how distributed neural networks control animal behavior, particularly in species with non-regionalized brain structures.