Alex Haley grew up in Tennessee. He traced his family tree back to his original enslaved, African ancestor, then wrote 'Roots'. He received a Pulitzer Prize for it. Knoxville just banned it 'cause it might make white kids sad.

This Lego model of a biological lab from Chu-Cheng Lin in Cambridge is currently on LEGO IDEAS platform at voting stage. If you'd like to help move it towards a real model to help demystify biology labs, you can also become a supporter.

We’re recruiting! Exciting opportunities in our lab supported by a @wellcometrust.bsky.social Discovery Award. • Postdoctoral researchers • Research assistant/PhD students Join us to study how neural circuits drive decision-making. Deadline 26/04 Learn more and Apply here: rezavallab.org

We’re hiring a lab manager! Looking for someone organized, detail-oriented, and highly motivated to help keep research running smoothly and support a collaborative team. Please share! searchjobs.dartmouth.edu/postings/851...

So so well-deserved! Congratulations Carolina!!

Proud to share that our team made the local news. A big congratulations to Erin, Megan, and everyone on the team who made it happen.Thanks to Ben Hopkins and Artyom Kopp for the Preview piece. www.ox.ac.uk/news/2026-03...

The School of Biosciences @unibirmingham.bsky.social is recruiting five Assistant/Associate Professors working across a range of areas, including neuroscience. Join a vibrant interdisciplinary research environment. Deadline: 14 April 2026 edzz.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

The registration is open! Junior #Drosophila PIs, join us for inspiring scientific discussion, contribute a talk and listen to our keynote speaker, Eugenia Chiappe. We meet in Palmela, Portugal from June 1st to 3rd. Register soon as spots are limited! congressos.mundiconvenius.pt/geral/inseri...

Our new preprint is out! A state-dependent neural circuit resolves approach–avoidance conflicts www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Fantastic work led by Devika Bodas, with key contributions from Marine Balcou, and a great collaboration with Lisa Scheunemann Lab, fearuting Şevval Demirci.

This video on Avatar 2/3 reignited this feeling: youtu.be/ueJTdtmZ5R4?.... Weta Workshop wanted to transfer actor faces to CGI Na'vi faces, which have different facial structure. So they built an anatomically inspired facial muscle model and fit it using gaussian splat meshes from video.

Wonderful team effort with @jan-ache.bsky.social, Fathima Iqbal, @sirinlieb.bsky.social, @merterginkaya.bsky.social, @sanderliessem.bsky.social, and others. Thanks to @erc.europa.eu #HorizonEurope #MSCA and @dfg.de for funding.

Thrilled to start 2026 with our latest preprint, in which we dive into a dedicated forward-walking circuit in the fly brain: doi.org/10.64898/202.... This effort was spearheaded by the fantastic @chrisjdallmann.bsky.social with help from a bunch of talented people in the lab.

Happy New Year from seasonally beautiful Newcastle-upon-Tyne! Get in touch if you are interested in our #PhDstudentship to research the neurobiological basis of social behaviour and its dysfunction in Drosophila melanogaster. Deadline for applications: 23rd January.

Carolin Warnecke together with Hanna, Dennis, Bene & Kerstin from my lab show that re-exposure to reward diminishes multiple associated olfactory memories. We’re hiring 2 postdocs—DM/email me for details. #Postdoc #Hiring www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

How do animals channel sensory information into motor pathways to generate flexible behavioral output? Excited to share a new preprint addressing this question by leveraging the new #maleCNS connectome, behavioral experiments, and in-vivo recordings: doi.org/10.64898/202.... A long🧵...

Deadline for this post-doc position in my lab extended to Jan 11th!

Happy to share our current opinion on the insulin and octopamine systems and their role in shaping neuronal circuits, energy homeostasis, and behavior in #Drosophila, other insects, and 🧑‍🦱.

Exciting news for #drosophila #connectomics and #neuroscience enthusiasts: the Drosophila male central nervous system connectome is now live for exploration. Find out more at the landing page hosted by our Janelia FlyEM collaborators www.janelia.org/project-team....

Now out in @nature.com: Our study discovering a neural circuit in Drosophila that predictively inhibits proprioceptor axons during voluntary leg movements, such as walking and grooming. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Couldn’t be more excited about this paradigm shifting result.

🪰 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

FlyBase, a Drosophila database, will lose a third of its team in early October because the Harvard grant that covered the employees’ salaries was canceled. Scientists warn that losing FlyBase could devastate fly research. By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/community/ha...

Preprint Alert! Walking mostly feels natural and easy to us - but the neuronal control of walking is actually incredibly complex. We leveraged the fruit fly as a genetically tractable animal model with a compact nervous system to ask how the brain controls walking direction: tinyurl.com/flywalk. 🧵..

This isn't a coincidence, IMO. The fly community is generally super rigorous - because there are so many tools and techniques available, people expect you to really nail things in order to get published (and keep getting funded)

We're hiring! Two exciting opportunities in our Lab @unibirmingham.bsky.social Come work with us on decision-making and neural circuits in Drosophila. Please share! Senior Research Technician + Postdoctoral Research Fellow Deadline: 10 July More info here: www.rezavallab.org

Very happy to share that the awesome @merterginkaya.bsky.social was awarded a @dfg.de #WalterBenjamin scholarship for his postdoc project on mechanisms for action-selection in visual sensorimotor pathways. The more Mert the better. 🎉

It’s a wrap for the 2025 Crete Fly Circuits meeting! Huge thanks to our friends at the OAC for hosting us, our fantastic speakers for sharing their latest and greatest unpublished works, and to Eugenia, Marion, Nilay, and Richard for the fun we had organizing this. See you all in 2027!

New preprint from lab: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Sexual dimorphism arises not through wholesale transcriptional reprogramming, but via selective sex-specific survival of neurons defined by birth order and shared developmental programs.

The sky knows what’s up. Happy #pridemonth! 🌈

Very happy that we were able to contribute a few recordings from our favorite #insulin producing cells to this great story from @buelowlab.bsky.social!

Hey spinal/ventral nerve cord folks. we’re organizing this cross species “cords” meeting @hhmijanelia.bsky.social . Hurry up and upload your abstracts. As a trainee these were my favorite meetings (small and focused) where I got the most useful feedback. DM in case of any Qs.

#CharlotteFörster #Farewell #Symposium #Chronobiology #GermanClockClub2025 #CircadianClock #Drosophila #Fruitfly #Würzburg #KatharinaBeer #RudolfoCosta #BambosKyriacou #OrieSchäfer #MonikaStengl #SheebaVasu #TaishiYoshii #CharlotteHelfrichFörster #Circadia_Clock @uni-wuerzburg.de

Excited to share my PhD paper is out! We studied how motion vision is processed beyond the optic lobes to help flies walk straight. It has been a wonderful collaboration with @michaelreiser.bsky.social, @dddavi.bsky.social and many others not in bluesky! Paper + digest here: bsky.app/profile/cham...

I could not be more proud to present the the first PhD graduate from my lab - @ritujabisen.bsky.social! Rituja basically walked into an empty lab in the beginning of 2020, helped build the lab’s first ephys rig from scratch, and then patched her heart out over the following years…

Yay - the extensive review Ansgar Büschges and I wrote on insect motor control and the many things insects can teach us about our own nervous systems just came out in Physiological Reviews @apsphysiology.bsky.social. Check it out - it's free: journals.physiology.org/doi/epdf/10....

the Dunkin’ logo has never felt more accurate

Join us for a fully funded, 4-year PhD, a collaboration between Northumbria, Durham and Mainz Universities to study the evolution of the neuronal basis of defence behaviours in Drosophila! Application and full PhD advert: www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

I know there's a 𝒍𝒐𝒕 going on right now, but I couldn’t be prouder to share this long-incubated labor of love: the complete connectome of the male 𝐷𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑜𝑝ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑎 optic lobe 🧠🪰 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'm very excited to share joint work from the project I have been working on with great colleagues during the first year of my PhD. You can hear all about it tomorrow at 11:00 in Symposium 11 - Wired for motion: perspectives on motor control. @neurowissg.bsky.social #NWG2025

The lab‘s getting ready for the NWG meeting 2025 @neurowissg.bsky.social! Our plotting service @uni-wuerzburg.de was so excited about the work of @sirinlieb.bsky.social that we got six copies of her poster - make sure to check out what all the hype is about…

Our third paper on the neuronal control of insulin release in flies was published in @elife.bsky.social! This was a great team effort spearheaded by Tina Held, Rituja Bisen and our collaborator @zandawala.bsky.social. You can find the paper here: elifesciences.org/articles/99548. 1/3

Today I lost an NIH grant training clinicians to do research about intimate partner violence with perinatal women. More women are murdered in the perinatal period than die of obstetric complications. I didn't just lose a grant. We lost an entire cohort of people building careers to prevent that.

Registration started for the Janelia meeting on spinal cord and brainstem circuits for sensorimotor adaptation across species. Spinal cord is more than a hub, it does supercomputing! www.janelia.org/you-janelia/...

Very happy to share the latest paper from the lab, which just got published in eLife in its final form: elifesciences.org/articles/98514 This project was spearheaded by PhD student extraordinaire Rituja Bisen, with help from Fathima Iqbal, Feffo Milani, and our visiting scientist Till Bockemühl.

The #insulin system of the fruitfly #Drosophila is very similar to that of humans. @jan-ache.bsky.social now reports new findings on the mechanisms controlling insulin release in live flies @elife.bsky.social. ➡️ www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-...

Fruit flies have a different type of blood to us, and their insulin comes from neurons instead of pancreatic cells. But important similarities mean scientists could use them to better understand human health. https://elifesciences.org/digests/98514/a-closer-look-at-insulin-producing-cells?utm_sour…

The activity of insulin-producing cells depends on the nutritional state in Drosophila. https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/98514?utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic