Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)

Researchers in the Vosshall lab have discovered the first evidence of what happens when a female mosquito chooses to mate for the one and only time in her life. A female mosquito only gets one shot to get reproduction right: She mates just a single time in her entire life. With the stakes so high, it would make sense for these insects to be quite choosey when it comes to selecting a mate. And yet a long-standing assumption in the field was that males controlled the process, and females were simply passive recipients of sperm. “There’s an inherent contradiction in this assumption,” says Rockefeller University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute mosquito expert Leslie Vosshall. “If females have no say, then multiple males should be able to mate with them all the time. So how can a female mosquito both be a helpless creature but also the decision maker?” Puzzled by the paradox, Vosshall and her team dove into the moment-by-moment, nuts-and-bolts of mosquito mating. The resulting study, recently published in Current Biology, uncovered the first evidence that scientists had it backwards: What makes mating possible is a subtle behavior of the female—a physical movement of her genitalia. Moreover, no subsequent physical pairings trigger this behavior again, regardless of how many males try, or how often they try—and they try a lot. “It’s a very fast, very subtle change, but it entirely dictates whether mating occurs,” says lead author Leah Houri-Zeevi, a postdoctoral scientist in the lab. “If she makes this movement, it happens. If she doesn’t, it doesn’t matter what the male does—no successful mating will occur.” Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/e9Wrxjac

Michelle Quiambao is a Lab Administration Specialist at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus, serving as a bridge between several research groups and the campus’s operations teams. ⭐ As a lab administration specialist, Michelle enjoys the challenge of working on a range of requests from Janelia researchers and interacting with different groups around the research campus. “You never know what researchers will ask you to do. You can’t say, ‘I don’t know how to do that.’ You have to deliver.” 📝 In her role at Janelia, Michelle often draws on the values of respect, kindness, and hard work that she learned from her parents, who were civil servants in the Philippines, where Michelle was born. 🌋 Growing up on the island nation, Michelle also learned resilience. As a child, she experienced a 7.8-magnitude earthquake. A year later, Mount Pinatubo erupted, forcing her family to evacuate. 🚧 When they returned home, the bridge Michelle and her sisters traveled to school had collapsed. They found new ways to reach school, such as using a river cart pulled by water buffalo. “I learned that life goes on, and you just have to adapt.” 🌐 Michelle started her career as a consular clerk at the Canadian Embassy in Manila. In 2002, she married her husband, whom she’s known since kindergarten, and moved to the US, where she worked as a sales associate at a department store and in federal contracting. 🔬 Michelle joined Janelia in 2012 as a Campus Services Administrative Assistant and became a Lab Coordinator in 2014. “I was curious about the scientific side of Janelia life. I heard about an opening on the LC team. I decided to try my luck, and I got the job.” 🥘 Michelle loves to cook, recreating dishes like pork adobo from memories of watching her mom in the kitchen. She ran a marathon the year she turned 40 and likes to read, including novels by Filipino author F. Sionil José. “As a teen, and later as a college student, I read whatever I could borrow from classmates, since books were expensive. I live near a public library now, and I hope to read Dickens, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, and other authors I couldn’t access while growing up. I want to make up for lost time.”

Paying for your own publishing rights? That’s what some publishers are proposing. HHMI's Bodo Stern and UK Research and Innovation's Rachel Bruce explore an alternative: a transparent fee-for-service model. #OpenAccess #OpenScience

🚨 Final call to finish your application! Janelia’s Theory Fellow competition closes Nov. 3 at 3PM ET. Don’t miss this opportunity to: ✅ Join a fully funded 3-year fellowship ✅ Work at the intersection of computation, theory & biology ✅ Collaborate across disciplines and receive expert mentorship If you're an early-career researcher or soon-to-be PhD, this is your chance to pursue bold, interdisciplinary research in a uniquely collaborative environment. 👉 Finish your application: https://lnkd.in/ezd-36rS #HHMIJanelia #ScienceCareers #ComputationalBiology

4 HHMI Investigators have been elected to The National Academy of Medicine!     Election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine. Learn how these investigators are advancing our understanding of biology and human health: https://hhmi.news/4oxodfS #NAMmtg

"Why bats?" That's a question that HHMI Investigator Michael Yartsev, who spends his days trying to understand the neural computations that are happening in their brains, gets asked a lot. For Michael, the head of the Neurobat Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, the flying mammals offer a unique opportunity to study how the brain represents 3D space. Bat research is also a challenge. The more other scientists tell Michael, “This sounds crazy. This research will never work,” the more excited he becomes. “Most days, I’m honestly just shocked that anyone is paying me to do this.” Michael studies the relationship between brains and natural behavior. Bats have extraordinary navigational, communication, and social skills, which have been studied under controlled laboratory settings. Michael and his team study how these behaviors work together in a naturalistic foraging situation. The team develops wireless neural recording technologies that allow them to record hundreds of neurons simultaneously. The bats are in rapid, spontaneous flight during those recordings, creating an added technical challenge. “My lab always starts with the most interesting question we can think of, and we assume that the question is answerable—we take a leap of faith. Only then do we start wondering how we’re going to answer it.”

Congratulations to Rockefeller's Jeffrey M. Friedman, who has been awarded the 2025 Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, one of the nation’s most prestigious prizes in biomedicine. Friedman is recognized for his discovery of the hormone leptin, which established a biological basis for obesity, led to a life-saving treatment for people with lipodystrophy, and opened the era of molecular exploration in the field of obesity research. He discovered that the mutated gene in a mouse model of obesity encodes a peptide hormone, leptin, which is made by fat cells, and showed that leptin levels increase in parallel with body fat, reducing appetite and stimulating activity. Conversely, genetic loss of leptin promotes obesity with nearly insatiable appetite in humans as well as mice. Friedman’s work provided the first demonstration that obesity was not simply attributable to a lack of willpower. Learn more below.

🎉Congrats to Freeman Hrabowski Scholar Ishmail Abdus-Saboor on receiving the The National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award! Ishmail’s research will explore how sense of touch contributes to communal behaviors. Uncovering the neural pathways, genes, and molecules that underlie these behaviors could help develop treatments for conditions like autism and depression in which these behaviors are weakened.

Allison Truhlar is a Software Engineer on the Scientific Computing Software team at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus, developing web applications that help scientists conduct and publicize their research. Allison created the Janelia Open Science Software Initiative (OSSI) website, which showcases software developed at Janelia. https://ossi.janelia.org/ She also works on apps that directly support researchers, including an app for controlling imaging experiments & an app to transform how image data are shared at Janelia. Allison values how Janelia encourages collaboration among researchers at all levels and minimizes barriers to trying new ideas and making mistakes. “It's really that experimental atmosphere here of, ‘Just try it out and see how it works.’” Allison first became interested in science when she joined the environmental club in high school. “I liked the side of science where you can do things to benefit society or the Earth.’” That desire to do meaningful work guided Allison’s education, leading her to earn a bachelor’s degree and PhD in biological and environmental engineering from Cornell University. She also holds a master’s degree in biological sciences from the University of Cambridge. After her PhD, Allison did a postdoc with the New York State Water Resource Institute, focusing on road culvert flooding risk. She then worked as a research fellow for the American Geophysical Union and as a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowships Fellow and program manager at the U.S. Department of Energy. Allison then followed her curiosity to pursue a new technical role supporting science. With encouragement from her wife and a financial gift her father had left her, she took classes in web development, gaining skills that aligned with a position at Janelia. “It was scary, but it felt like it was the right time for it.” Outside of work, Allison enjoys running. She also bakes with her 3-year-old son, who likes to help her use the stand mixer.

📢 Apply by Dec. 3 to pursue your PhD thesis research at Janelia. Janelia offers two graduate research opportunities in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Spend your first year at Hopkins completing courses and rotations, then carry out your thesis research in a Janelia lab. 🧠 Joint Graduate Program in Neuroscience: Explore neuroscience at every level, spanning cellular, behavioral, computational, and systems neuroscience. 🧬 Cross-Disciplinary Graduate Program in Biomedical Sciences (XDBio): Design a personalized curriculum guided by your interests, with training options that bridge biology, engineering, computer science, physics, chemistry, and medicine. In both programs at Janelia, you can collaborate with tool-builders and shared resource teams to accelerate discovery. 🔗 Learn more and apply: janelia.org/graduate