About Easy Behavior

Building the instruments that make behavioral research easier, more reproducible, and more powerful.

Our Mission

Transform biomedical research by providing easy-to-use, automated equipment to measure behavior in model organisms.

Pavel Itskov

MD PhD

CEO & Founder

SISSA, Trieste, Italy

6 years at Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme, Lisbon

3,100+ citations

Published in Cell, Nature Communications, eLife

Google Scholar Profile

Meet the Founder

Pavel Itskov, MD PhD, is a neuroscientist who completed his doctoral training at SISSA (International School for Advanced Studies) in Trieste, Italy. He spent six years as a researcher at the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme in Lisbon, Portugal, where he developed innovative approaches to studying animal behavior.

His research has garnered over 3,100 citations, with publications in leading journals including Cell, Nature Communications, and eLife. He is a co-author of the Bonsai framework paper, which has been cited 689 times and has become a foundational tool in neuroscience research.

Pavel is a collaborator with NeuroGEARS, the team behind the Bonsai visual programming framework for neuroscience experiments. This collaboration ensures that Easy Behavior products integrate seamlessly with the broader open-source neuroscience ecosystem.

Recognizing that many labs needed the same automated behavioral tools he had built for his own research, Pavel founded Easy Behavior to make this technology commercially available to the global research community.

Our Story

2013

flyPAD Developed

The flyPAD (fly Proboscis and Activity Detector) was developed at the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme in Lisbon as a capacitance-based method to automatically monitor and quantify feeding behaviour in Drosophila.

2014

Published in Nature Communications

The flyPAD paper was published in Nature Communications, validating the technology through rigorous peer review. This publication has since been cited in more than 200 papers.

2016

Commercial Launch

Easy Behavior began selling flyPAD systems commercially, making the technology accessible to research labs worldwide. Based in Lisbon, Portugal.

2019

optoPAD Published in eLife

The optoPAD extension was published in eLife, adding closed-loop optogenetics capabilities to the flyPAD platform. This enabled researchers to study neural circuits underlying feeding in real time.

Today

A Complete Product Ecosystem

Easy Behavior has expanded to offer the flyPAD, optoPAD, flyGym, custom multi-species adaptations, video tracking solutions, and interactive environments. Over 200 labs worldwide trust our equipment for their research.

NeuroGEARS Collaboration

Easy Behavior collaborates with NeuroGEARS, the creators of the Bonsai visual programming framework. Bonsai is a free, open-source platform for designing neuroscience experiments, and it forms the software backbone of all Easy Behavior products.

Pavel Itskov is a co-author of the original Bonsai framework paper published in Frontiers in Neuroinformatics (2015), which has been cited 689 times. This deep involvement ensures that Easy Behavior hardware and Bonsai software evolve together, providing seamless integration for researchers.