Excited to see our paper describing a stereotyped receptor map for smell (led by @davidhbrann.bsky.social ) out in the world! See below for short thread with open access link to paper www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/s...

Just got the news that Vanessa Ruta, Steve Liberles, and Uli Mueller are all elected to be members of the National Academy of Sciences @nasonline.org. All 3 are incredibly well-deserved. Congrats to all the new members! 🎉

Delighted to share our discoveries about one of the brain's neurotransmitter systems: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Together with colleagues at the @alleninstitute.org, we have learned a lot about a tiny cluster of neurons in the brainstem locus coeruleus (LC) that releases norepinephrine (NE). 1

GIP receptor agonism suppresses inflammation-induced aversion and food intake via distinct circuits

Form follows function, or function dictates form? 📢Preprint: we build Perturb-CLEAR, in vivo screen of neuroanatomy! Disease perturbations produce selective morphology-RNA changes that RNA impact alone cannot predict. Was led by the invincible grad student Boli Wu! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Excited to share our latest work with @antihebbiann.bsky.social, revealing a top-down mechanism regulating the fragmentation of feeding, led by Tianbo Qi. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Special to see this paper out from my former lab: >10 years in the making. Lots of striking results! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to share our latest work in @nature.com showing shared neural substrates for parenting and prosocial helping behavior. Full text available here: rdcu.be/e6PnY

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

New paper from the lab led by @ericmulhall.bsky.social addresses how PIEZO1 and PIEZO2 are tuned to different types mechanical forces. From nanometer-scale super-resolution microscopy to in vivo experiments, links single-molecule observations to physiological function. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

PIEZO2—unlike PIEZO1—is tethered to the actin cytoskeleton, enabling sensory neurons to detect localized mechanical forces such as light touch. Findings reported in @nature.com by @ericmulhall.bsky.social from @ardemp.bskyverified.social's lab link nanometer-scale imaging to sensory function.

New work from the lab on how sickness reduces appetite. Turns out, it’s complicated :) We focused on a single inflammatory cytokine, IL-1b, and even that reduces appetite via multiple mechanism. Thanks to Nik Hayes for leading and sticking with this project and to everyone else who contributed!

Chuffed to see our paper with @geneyeo.bsky.social finally published in @nature.com. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Very grateful to Fede, Susie, and Dave from my lab, and Sammi, Eric, and Pratibha from Gene's lab. What did we find? ⬇️ ⬇️ ⬇️

New lab preprint! Can we study conscious perception of gut sensations in mice to reveal its neuronal basis? Can we train mice to report their gut sensations? Omer Rafael and Stav Shtiglitz in the lab teamed up to discover that…YES! Thread…1/6 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

What if we could see 3D #biodistribution of cancer drugs at the cellular level... throughout an entire model animal? 🧐 A new paper from Li Ye's lab @scripps.edu, Zhengyuan Pang & Verina Leung et al. introduce a technique for doing just that. (1/3) 🧵

Excited to co-host this conference with @marissascavuzzo.bsky.social and Steve Liberles focused on the peripheral nervous system -- No Brainer! Check out the amazing list of speakers and apply for one of the spots for this small, interactive meeting on the beautiful Janelia Campus at HHMI.

www.nature.com/articles/s41... beautiful work from Stephen Liberles’ lab on neural mechanisms of sensing blood volume.

A very nice spinal spatial transcriptomics paper here! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Patagonia was not bad at all!

🧠⚡️💊New @nature.com publication ! Mimicking opioid analgesia in cortical pain circuits We built a brain-behavior framework to decode spontaneous chronic pain in mice—and to biologically mimic morphine with a synthetic opioid gene therapy nature.com/articles/s41... @pennmedicine.bsky.social

Beautiful paper! Somebody should do it in then viscerosensory brainstem.

Fellows-to-Faculty awardee Chen Ran maps the senses of internal organs. Receiving this award — which is currently open for apps — has been crucial in enabling his work: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/autism-and-neuroscience-innovators-awardees-share-their-research-at-the-annual-retreat/ #science

Some news. Exciting new challenges and opportunities ahead.

Thrilled this is out, led by former PD Cameron Ogg (now with her own lab at @rhodescollege.bsky.social!). It was a driven by a desire to see, in real-time, how LC activity/NE release influences downstream targets in behaving animals. SO hard to do, but Cameron did it! www.cell.com/cell-reports...

I was one of those immigrants, and we commit fewer crimes than people born here. “Trump says he wants to “permanently pause migration” from poorer nations and is promising to seek to expel millions of immigrants from the US by revoking their legal status.” apnews.com/article/trum...

Ive seen this work from Prof Liqun Luo’s presented a few times now and its stunning and heroic.

A beautiful paper on the role of Piezos in uterine biology. I have known first author Yunxiao Zhang since 2012. Yunxiao is rare talent (and a wonderfully kind human being) now on the job market!

Deeply honored to receive this year's Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Young Investigator Award from @sfn.org Grateful to all lab members and my mentors.

Actively hiring! Video made by Sora-2 but the job post is 100% real. Apply here: hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...

1.5 years in the making, only two weeks to go! Can’t wait to see everyone here at Scripps!

This great primer from our #brain–body special by @dulaclab.bsky.social explores the many ways in which the brain and the immune system interact in the diseased state. 🧠 www.cell.com/current-biol...

Scripps is a wonderful place to do science. Hard to imagine better colleagues and students…

Finally out: our recent work with Nick Betley is a view into how the brain reshapes its behavior in the face of competing survival needs- and also a potential angle on treatment targets for enduring pain. A brief rundown... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We’re hiring! My new Gut–Brain Axis Lab at Northwestern is looking for a Research Technologist 2 to help build the lab and explore how the nervous system shapes gut health and disease. 🔬 Apply here: myhr.northwestern.edu/psp/hrnu/EMP...

Submedius Thalamus Modulates Orbitofrontal Cortex Representations During Maternal Behavior in Mice https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.18.677207v1

Very interesting paper—>must read- and the first author will be looking for a job soon: one of the strongest scientists I could imagine. I learned so much from Yunxiao since my graduate school days.

New preprint alert! The uterus expands ~500-fold in pregnancy, yet we know little about how pressures are sensed. Led by @yunxiao-dr.bsky.social, we show PIEZOs are required for contractions and birth in mice, with dual roles of PIEZO1 in muscle and PIEZO2 in neurons www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨 New preprint from an ongoing collaboration with the Pang lab. Project led by rising stars @rohansavani.bsky.social and @lewang1.bsky.social showing how individual GLP-1R neurons in the paraventricular hypothalamus track ingestion across energy states. Preprint: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Lots of interesting data there!

Thanks Misha for the shout-out! It has been a truly mind-opening journey. WHOLISTIC is one step towards whole-organism neuroscience and a true physiological observatory - with extensions on the way! I am continually amazed by what the data reveals - so much remains to be discovered and mined.

We are looking for a postdoc fellow to join the group. Focus on studying feeding-relevant slow dynamics in the brain using invivo microscopy approaches. Please share with anyone interested. Thank you. www.training.nih.gov/jobs/pdf-inf...

I wrote a Comment on neurotheory, and now you can read it! Some thoughts on where neurotheory has and has not taken root within the neuroscience community, how it has shaped those subfields, and where we theorists might look next for fresh adventures. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Amid lots of uncertainty, anger, and exhaustion I am excited to share this work from my incredibly talented MSTP and @nuincomm.bsky.social student Haley Province. In it we explore the fascinating and powerful anti-aversive properties of GIPR agonists

UCSD is holding a town hall with @repscottpeters.bsky.social this Wednesday to urge him to oppose proposed research funding cuts in the FY2026 budget, set for a vote in September. Please RSVP below and share widely. Everyone is welcome. form.laborbase.org/251675765832...

Happy to share our new work in Sci Adv! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...　We found a robust representation of pup retrieval in the orbitofrontal cortex of female mice, which positively regulates VTA dopamine neurons during the acquisition of maternal behavior. Congrats to Gen-ichi and the team!

Thrilled to share our latest work in @nature.com studying inter-brain neural dynamics in both biological and artificial intelligence systems — amazing work by @nobrainxz.bsky.social and Nguyen Phi, and fantastic collaboration with Jonathan Kao! Read the full article here: rdcu.be/euu5Z

Excited to share the first 2(!) preprints from the Kebschull Lab. The amazing @hyopilkim.bsky.social developed MAPseq2 & POINTseq and used them to map the dopaminergic cells of VTA and SNc. tl;dr MAPseq2=10x cheaper, 4x better; POINTseq=easy cell type specific barcoding; DA neurons=very cool.

Our new paper is out in Science. We identified a subgroup of cholinergic neurons that mediate sensory modality-specific attention. They change their funcitonal properties within secs of behavioral context change. Congrats to Bin for the great thesis, and the team! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Congrats to @xinjin.bsky.social @tinakim-neuro.bsky.social and many others!

I spoke with Jade Hindmon, host of @kpbssandiego.bsky.social Midday Edition, about the consequences of the current administration’s cuts to science funding. Please share to help spread the word and raise awareness. www.kpbs.org/podcasts/kpb...