A glowing profile of my post-doc advisor. As @yvetteefisher.bsky.social says in the piece, Rachel is truly "...one of these generational scientists who thinks extremely incisively about both the details and the big-picture frameworks." magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/stu...

A great privilege of science is working with remarkable people. A nice piece highlighting @mindyisminsu.bsky.social. Her grit, esp through the pandemic, was foundational to the #BANC project. hms.harvard.edu/news/making-...

Please check out @darbly.bsky.social & @asbates.bsky.social 's thread at bsky.app/profile/darb..., or HMS News at hms.harvard.edu/news/researc... for a quick overview, or read the full paper at doi.org/10.1038/s415... for details.

Now published - the #BANC! A full central nervous system (CNS) connectome of a limbed animal at single-synapse resolution, enabling us to follow sensory-motor arcs and understand how the CNS controls the body. rdcu.be/fncjS. #neuroscience. Video by @quorumetrix.bsky.social 1/18

Hey if the model models 🤷

Warm congratulations to The Brain Prize winners 2026, Professor David Ginty and Professor Patrik Ernfors, for their pioneering work on how the nervous system detects and processes touch and pain. Karolinska Institutet HHMI #Neuroscience #BrainPrize2026

Thrilled to share that my graduate work is officially published in Neuron! 🎉 www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

How does the brain control locomotion? In our new preprint, we uncover a brain circuit in Drosophila that controls forward walking independently of turning. This dedicated locomotor circuit enables flexible motor control and might reflect a shared principle across species. doi.org/10.64898/202...

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🧵...

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Always fun designing the most unnecessarily extravagant posters for our department happy hours 😁

Delighted to share an updated pre-print on how adaptive control in visual pursuit is implemented at the circuit level. New behavior and neuronal data in females (!) shows how two AOTU pathways are key elements in both sexes. Check it out on @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social : doi.org/10.1101/2025...

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...

How it feels pushing a pre-print update (thread coming soon!)

Excited to share our new #biorxivpreprint We discovered that the fruit fly #drosophila erecta requires food odor to mate and arousal is further enhanced by social group motion. Cross-species analysis of brain activity reveals a novel gate evolved from within a conserved circuit shorturl.at/gGYm7

Excited to share our new #biorxivpreprint: “Sexual dimorphism in the complete connectome of the Drosophila male central nervous system” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... We describe the #connectomics reconstruction and analysis of an entire adult #maleCNS #drosophila central nervous system. 1/10

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Wrote a eulogy for the yellow letters in my office window. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Exciting new Ruta lab preprint by @annaryba.bsky.social et al. on the neural underpinnings of intraspecific behavioral variation: Strain variation identifies a neural substrate for behavioral evolution Drosophila www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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

And now for an update on my office window. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

FlyBase needs your help! We ask that European labs continue to contribute to Cambridge, UK FlyBase, whereas US and other non-European labs can contribute to US FlyBase. For more information and how to donate: wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase...

It’s surreal to think that every neuron and synapse in the fly brain + cord that was dissected almost five years ago (the photo’s still on the lab slack!) is now just a click away on Codex codex.flywire.ai?dataset=banc. This wouldn’t have been possible without the incredible team behind it!

We need more papers that start with Steve Urkel quotes. Thank you @kylethieringer.com and @tuthill.bsky.social for this wonderful and fun review of our recent paper describing limb feedback in the visual system! doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

There is so much to learn from this dataset that it's overwhelming. It feels amazing to connect everything, from the "cognitive" regions of the brain all the way down to muscles, internal organs, and endocrine systems. With the analyses in our preprint, we've only just scratched the surface.

Our data support an architecture of distributed, parallelized, and embodied control, reminiscent of “subsumption architectures” from autonomous robotics, where behavior-centric feedback loops are organized s that they can be combined or subsumed to generate complex or resolve competing behaviors.

Moreover, Zaki Ajabi developed a computationally efficient method for quantifying the “influence” any neuron has on any other neuron in the CNS. We applied this method to estimate the pairwise interactions between all cells in the CNS, amounting to more than 20 billion influence scores.

How is the nervous system organized to coordinate behavior? To approach this massive question, a team led by @asbates.bsky.social, @jasper-tms.bsky.social, @mindyisminsu.bsky.social, & Helen Yang present the BANC: a Brain and Nerve Cord connectome. Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025... 🧪#Neuroskyence

New preprint from @darbly.bsky.social‬ @briandepasquale.bsky.social‬ and my labs! If you love (or hate) mosquitoes, have a look: doi.org/10.1101/2025... We used TEM to describe the circuitry used for CO2 detection by mosquitoes. As usual with mosquitoes, nothing is as expected! 🌬️🦟

Public access to the first fly connectome that spans the whole CNS - BANC!: codex.flywire.ai?dataset=banc Different from prior connectomes - it is brain + cord (think spinal cord) We use it to ‘embody’ the system and find it resembles ‘subsumption architecture’ doi.org/10.1101/2025...

With @megyounger.bsky.social's lab, et al., we present the first connectomics work in the disease-vector mosquito Aedes aegypti, revealing how its brain is wired to detect host cues. Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025... #Neuroscience #Connectomics #vEM #VectorBiology 🧪

A massive community effort, centred on @harvardmed.bsky.social‬ @princetonneuro.bsky.social‬. EM data from @darbly.bsky.social‬ lab, collected by @jasper-tms.bsky.social‬ ‪@mindyisminsu.bsky.social‬.

Our new preprint: 𝐅𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞-𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭 𝐜𝐨𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧 𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐬𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐮𝐦 𝐠𝐮𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐬 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧. We describe how the LS guides defensive responses by forming critical computations built from functionally and molecularly distinct cells and their afferent inputs. www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-6...

The first full central nervous system connectome dataset of an adult fly, with the most comprehensive annotation of sensory and motor neurons to date. A heroic effort with contributions from many groups, a product of the collaborative spirit of the Drosophila neuroscience community.

Happy Friday! The female adult fly brain-and-nerve-cord (BANC) connectome is now LIVE! Explore the data here: codex.flywire.ai?dataset=banc Check out the preprint here: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

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. 🧵..

New week, new fun story! In a study led by Melanie Basnak, our lab shows how the Drosophila head direction system flexibly remaps by weighing how informative environment cues (e.g. sun, wind) are—prioritizing more reliable inputs when conflicting. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper from our lab! This was such a fun project to be a part of - proof that sometimes following a spurious observations down the rabbit hole leads to awesome findings. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Harvard seemingly caves to Trump, shuts down LGBTQ+ and women's center websites. By Ryan Adamczeski for the Advocate @helloryro.bsky.social @theadvocatebr.bsky.social

(5/5) 🚨 It’s time to flood the zone. NIH scientists just took a huge risk speaking out. Now it’s our turn. 📜 Read the Bethesda Declaration ✍️ Sign the Public Letter of Support 👯‍♀️Follow NIHers doing the work: @nihvigils.bsky.social Read and sign here 👉 www.standupforscience.net/bethesda-dec...

new preprint, led by @ellenlesser.bsky.social, on proprioceptive sensing of the Drosophila wing. tldr, there are a lot of proprioceptors out in the wing and they are wildly diverse and complex (eg, compared to the fly leg). just one example in this image...(1/4) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Happy to announce that our paper examining the function of leg mechanosensory neurons by way of their connectivity is finally officially published! rdcu.be/ekqVt

Every time I see my own pre-print in the wild 🤩

Many animals use "adaptive control" to pursue moving objects, relying on flexible feedback loops to adjust their movement gain over time. But how do neural circuits actually implement this? Here, we show how adaptive control in Drosophila pursuit involves two specialized parallel feedback loops.

As someone directly affected by this, let me be clear: I'd rather lose my job because Harvard chose to fight than keep my job and see a generation of white supremacists parade its corpse around like a war trophy.

We're disappointed to see Ben Barres's powerful book "The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist" among the ~400 titles removed from the Naval Academy Library. Needless to say, we're proud to have published his book and will keep it — and his memory — alive.

Harvard Medical School just announced a "temporary pause" on "all hiring, including academic and administrative positions" (via Dean Daley) so bracing for our funding to be pulled by end of week

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