He had been studying optics as part of his astrophysics research (on what happens when two black holes merge) several years ago when the idea popped into his head that mosquitoes find their targets using complexsensory systems.
Rodney Brooks of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nudged the whole field forward in early 1990s when he showed how robots could make faster decisions by responding to sensory data from their immediate environment rather than relying on complex sets of rules.