Excited to share my most recent postdoctoral work in the Jeanne lab @yaleneuro.bsky.social ! “Sensory processing reformats odor coding around valence and dynamics” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... We ask: how is a sensory code transformed across multiple stages of processing to inform behavior?

@runewberg.bsky.social congrats Rune and team! This looks really cool

Meet our 2025 cohort of Next Generation Leaders! For the next 3 years, they will network with other rising stars, participate in professional development, and share their ideas for future research directions.

After 13 years in the US, I’ve made the difficult decision to leave. Having packed up everything and rethought about priorities, rather painstakingly, while I’m sad to leave the life I’ve made here, I’m also relieved that I won’t have to plan my life around immigration policies anymore.

Do flies feel pain? Spooky new preprint from our lab on the cells and circuits that mediate nociceptive behaviors in adult Drosophila, led by graduate student (and newly minted PhD!) @jonesjes.bsky.social. 🪰⚡👻🎃 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

What a time to be alive

How does life evolve to adapt to modern cities? Out now in Science, my PhD work with @lindymcbr.bsky.social uncovers the ancient origin of the “London Underground mosquito” – one of the most iconic examples of urban adaptation. 🧵(1/n) @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady4515

there is a special lounge in pape heaven reserved for authors who take the time to aggregate and plot out how species vary across a physical variable

🦎THREAD: We just published something wild in @asn-amnat.bsky.social - lizards missing entire limbs not only survive, but some appear to actually thrive in the wild?! Let me tell you about the "three-legged pirate" lizards 🏴‍☠️ [Paper: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... ] (1/n)

Excited to announce our new pre-print (www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...)! This collaborative work (co-led by Adriane Otopalik and Gerry Rubin) examines how neuronal circuits regulate social behaviors, like courtship🫶 and aggression🥊, across sexes. #neuroscience #Drosophila #WomenInSTEM 🧪1/

The NIH institute director firing last Friday is very bad. I made a video explainer about why. Stay for last post, w link to @science.org story from @jocelynkaiser.bsky.social 1/4 🧪

First snow fly of the season! From our star volunteer collector, Catherine, who was out in the Pasayten this weekend (Mt. Barney). It's rare to find them that far east of the Cascade Crest.

New essay in @currentbiology.bsky.social special brain-body issue! Fly lab meets psychiatrist: how bodily signals shape cognition and mental health. Great collaboration with Albino Oliveira-Maia showing @champalimaudf.bsky.social discovery ↔️ clinic at its best. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Wow, nature is too cool! Structures on stinkbug hind legs that used to be interpreted as ears are actually chambers with fungi. The bugs coat their eggs in those fungi to protect them against parasitoid wasps. 🧪 Defensive fungal symbiosis on insect hindlegs | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

If anyone on here knows how to ID polychaete larva, I’d love to work with you on getting to the species level on these worms I always find in Boston harbor. I could provide a ton of photos, if I knew what to image for an ID. I know they are spionid but that’s it. #sciart #microscopy #plankton

Lab’s 1st preprint! Menstruation is understudied due to societal taboos + a biological challenge: mice (a key system for research + drug discovery) don’t menstruate. @cagricevrim.bsky.social made menstruating mice + used them to discover early events in menstruation. He is on the job market!

Our department started a podcast to let people know about our research and the impact that it has on the public! Please have a listen and subscribe to the series! Also available on Apple podcast, Spotify, and Transistor, www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

peak bloobs right now out in the glacier peak wilderness

Apply now!!! 🔥

1/ We’re delighted to hear that our Reviewing Editor, Shimon Sakaguchi, has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine today alongside colleagues Fred Ramsdell and Mary Brunkell: www.nobelprize.org

🪰 A team of researchers has unveiled the complete connectome of a male fruit fly central nervous system—a seamless map of all the neurons in the brain and nerve cord of a single male fruit fly and the millions of connections between them. 🔗 https://hhmi.news/4o3EJnk

Important article at this point in history: "As much harm as a 40 percent cut to the NIH budget would have on scientific innovation, destroying the peer-evaluation system that decides what science is funded would be far worse." Indeed. It would be like doing away with criminal trial by jury.

thanks for speaking out @markhisted.org

Congrats, Sweta! UBC is lucky to have recruited you and we're so happy to have you back in the PNW neighborhood.

The fiscal year is over. So how was the NIH appropriation committed? A long thread with institute by institute results about where the money went.

last week i spoke with the NPR show @onthemedia.bsky.social about what it feels like serving on an NIH grant review panel as the Trump administration works to defund and destroy US universities and biomedical research www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm...

📻👂On this week’s show: scientist @tuthill.bsky.social on what is being lost at the NIH, @joshuakeating.bsky.social on Trump’s ever expanding use of the word “terrorist.” And the always essential @matthewdtaylor.bsky.social on the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk. 👂📻 www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm...

Whether you think limiting student visas to 4 years is a good or bad thing, please comment. Be heard.

1/ Starting next year, @hhmi.org will require all authors to share their research as preprints under a CC BY 4.0 license as part of its new Immediate Access to Research policy. buff.ly/NrHlEKD

This paper does a great job with a "It's a Wonderful Life" scenario about NIH, supposing the consequences of the bottom 40% of the funding NIH grants never existed. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... tl:dr The world would lose a lot, but directly and indirectly

New cures feel sudden, but the seeds were planted decades ago by basic scientists. Which seeds will turn into cures? Unpredictable looking forward, a straight line looking back. 🧪🧬 🧵

Ed Kravitz passed away yesterday. He was a remarkable scientist and mentor- brilliant, curious, creative, and kind. I am grateful to have learned from him. His legacy will endure through his science and through the many people he inspired. We will miss you, Ed.

The final version of our paper on how ants and possibly other insects use a crazy mechanism involving extensive transcriptional interference to regulate odorant receptor expression is now open access in my favorite journal, @currentbiology.bsky.social authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

Thesis defense for Jess Jones happening tomorrow! DM me if you'd like the zoom link.

And we are live! Excited to announce the 2025 Multi-Agent Behavior Challenge on cross-lab supervised action recognition in mice 🐁🐀🖱️ Running on Kaggle until December 15th, with a $50,000 prize pool going to the top five submissions! www.kaggle.com/competitions...

new pape from our lab, led by the indefatigable @chrisjdallmann.bsky.social. i am very proud of this one.

The first nerve net connectome is here, and it belongs to a comb jelly. This ancient lineage could crack open research into the evolution of sensory motor coordination, researchers say. By @siddhantpusdekar.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/connectome/f...

🪰 How do dozens of tiny fly muscles cooperate to move a leg? We’re excited to share the first 3D, data-driven musculoskeletal model of Drosophila legs based on Hill-type muscles, running in OpenSim and MuJoCo simulation environments. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2509.06426

finally got to visit NIH intramural campus in Bethesda for a seminar, which was originally cancelled last feb when the federal travel ban came down nice to check in on old friends and make some new ones. didn't get to see my boy jay b in person but he was certainly omnipresent 🤨

When I was living in Missoula after college, our buddy cold-called David Baltimore & asked if we could come meet him (we’d all studied biology at Swarthmore, like him), and amazingly said yes. He couldn’t have been nicer to such a rag-tag bunch. Rest in Peace to a giant. @tuthill.bsky.social

Biology, what are you doing? Follow the rules. www.science.org/content/arti...

🍂 Applications are now open for our ML-for-Behavior 5-day course at Jackson Labs in Bar Harbor, ME. Talks and hands-on workshops cover pose estimation, supervised/unsupervised behavior quantification, and downstream behavior analyses. Financial aid is available! www.jax.org/education-an...

Our science photo book The Radiant Sea is out Sept 2nd!! 30 years of research, 10 years of "we should", and a year of collating pix and writing. Sönke and I show (mostly for the first time) images of how organisms produce, use, and interact with light in the sea. #bioluminescence #fluorescence 🦑🧪🌊

Neuronal diversity is written in transcriptional codes 🧬. But what is the logic of these codes that define cell types and wiring patterns? To find out we built a #scRNAseq developmental atlas of the Drosophila nerve cord and linked it to the #connectome 🪰🧠 #preprint thread ⬇️1/8

bon voyage to grant chou who, after 3 years in our lab, is now extremely well calibrated and starting his phd @princetonneuro.bsky.social this week.

It was a good experience to step back and briefly take stock of the amazing progress in connectomics since I started working on this stuff (20 years ago!) thanks as well to @natrevneuro.nature.com for the constructive editorial interactions.

Over 20 years after Julius’s lab and mine cloned TRPM8, it is rewarding to see this science helping patients. The TRPM8 agonist Tryptyr treats dry eye by increasing tear production. A reminder that NIH-funded curiosity-driven research translates to medicines. tryptyr.myalcon.com?gad_source=1...

Total disaster for the #drosophila community if flybase disappears

congratulations to our own Juan Ispizua on being selected as a pew latin american postdoctoral fellow www.pew.org/en/projects/...