Barry J. Dickson (born 1962 in Melbourne) is an Australian neurobiologist who studies the development of neuronal networks in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Dickson is a group leader at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Loudoun County, Virginia and a former scientific director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology(IMP) in Vienna, Austria.
Barry Dickson studied mathematics, computer science and genetics at the University of Melbourne. He received his first bachelor of science in 1984.Until 1986, Dickson worked as a research assistant at the epidemiology unit at the University of Melbourne and at the Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin. He received a second bachelor of science with honors in 1987 for his thesis about “Interactions between multiple operator sites controlling transcription of the aroFtyrA operon of Escherichia coli K-12”.
Dickson gained further research experience working in the Laboratory of Joachim Spiess at the Salk Institute in San Diego between 1987 and 1989. Following this, Dickson took up research for a PhD at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, where he worked in the lab of Ernst Hafen on the visual system development of Drosophila. He was awarded a PhD in 1992 and remained in the lab as postdoctoral researcher for two more years.
In 1994, Dickson joined Corey Goodman for postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he started working on the molecular and cellular mechanisms of axon pathfinding.