Howard Hughes Medical Institute - HHMI

10/31/2025

Happy Halloween! 🎃🦇

Bats are more than just Halloween icons — HHMI scientists are studying them to explore fundamental questions about the brain and behavior.

HMMI Investigator Michael Yartsev and Freeman Hrabowski Scholar Gerald Carter utilize the unique attributes of bats, such as their flight abilities and complex social systems, to study memory formation, spatial mapping, and cooperation and bonding.

Their discoveries could have important implications for other species, including humans. Read more: https://bit.ly/434gm18

Photo 1: Vampire bat, Credit: Gerald Carter
Photo 2: A pair of Egyptian fruit bats, Credit: Wudi Fan (Yartsev Lab)

10/28/2025

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 s***m.

“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://www.rockefeller.edu/news/38501-when-it-comes-to-mating-female-mosquitoes-call-the-shots/

10/28/2025

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.”

10/20/2025

"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.”

10/17/2025

Jeffrey M. Friedman 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, who is Rockefeller’s Marilyn M. Simpson Professor, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and head of the ...

10/01/2025

Joaquín Lilao-Garzón is a Postdoctoral Scientist in the Espinosa Medina Lab at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus, where he works on creating 3D visualizations of how nerves that connect to the pancreas form during development.

Figuring out how each neuron knows where to go could help scientists better understand how to treat diseases of the pancreas.

Joaquín applied to Janelia after meeting Group Leader Isabel Espinosa Medina at a conference in Portugal. Isabel was looking to hire someone with Joaquín’s experience, and she pitched a project to him.

“I was like, ‘OK, yeah, that’s what I want to do.’”

At Janelia, Joaquín loves his work and the opportunity to explore the visual facets of scientific research through the advanced imaging technologies available at the research campus. He also appreciates the growing developmental biology community and the atmosphere that his colleagues have created.

“I've been here for two years, and I haven't found a person that is not nice. That's impressive, to have that kind of community.”

As a child, Joaquín liked nature and was curious about the world. His parents gave him a microscope as a gift, a functional toy he loved so much that he still has it today.

After high school, Joaquín wanted to stay near his hometown of Teruel, Spain, so he enrolled in a two-year vocational training program to become a hospital lab technician.

When he struggled to find a job during the Great Recession, Joaquín started a five-year bachelor’s degree program in biology at the Universitat de València - UV.

“It was hard, but I decided to try, and I actually loved it.”

With that success, Joaquín became the first in his family to get a university degree.

Joaquín also earned his master’s degree in molecular, cellular, and genetic biology at the University of Valencia. He eventually pursued his PhD in applied research in health sciences at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC).

While living in the Canary Islands, Joaquín took up scuba diving, which he loves for its combination of tranquil settings and technical challenges.

“It's peaceful, and you feel like you're floating, and you have no gravity.”

When he can’t dive, Joaquín likes to swim. He also enjoys visiting family and friends in his hometown Teruel and giving science toys to his 4-year-old nephew, and – carefully – showing him the toy microscope.

10/01/2025

09/25/2025

New research led by HHMI Janelia Research Campus Senior Group Leader Meng Wang shows how longevity may be passed from parents to children through the epigenome—a set of chemical tags that control the ability to turn genes on and off.

The findings provide new insights into how changes that help organisms deal with environmental stress are conferred to their offspring.

New research from the Wang Lab reveals a novel connection between lysosomes & the epigenome and provides new insights into how lysosomes regulate longevity over generations & drive the histone-based transfer of epigenetic information between cells.

09/24/2025

Molecular biologist David Liu, PhD, has been selected as the recipient of the inaugural FNIH Montrone-Seigel Prize in Biomedical Sciences. Dr. Liu is being recognized for leading the development of innovative gene editing technologies that are being used worldwide to study and treat genetic diseases, including in at least 23 clinical trials targeting cancer, blood diseases, metabolic disorders, and other conditions. He will receive the Trailblazer Prize at the 13th Annual FNIH Awards Ceremony on October 22, 2025, in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Liu is the Richard Merkin Professor and director of the Merkin Institute for Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, vice chair of the faculty at the Broad Institute, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

Learn more: https://fnih.org/news/david-liu-named-inaugural-montrone-seigel-recipient/

Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Howard Hughes Medical Institute - HHMI
Harvard University

09/23/2025

Tzuhsuan “Maz” Ma is a Postdoctoral Scientist at Janelia, where he studies the cognitive architecture underlying complex behavior in the Hermundstad Lab.

Maz joined Janelia a few years after presenting at a Junior Scientist Workshop – a specialized meeting designed for students and postdocs – at the research campus. The workshop inspired Maz, since it was a rare opportunity to build on ideas and theories alongside his peers.

“Usually in neuroscience, you don't have a lot of theorists all being in one room.”

Maz grew up in Taiwan. In the ’90s, as personal computers became more widely available, he participated in a new educational program at his elementary school. He entered several contests that used computer programs to paint. These early experiences fostered his love for computers and art.

In high school, Maz was drawn to the logic and explanatory power behind physics, and he later went on to pursue a PhD in condensed matter physics. His love of art and visualization enabled him to see beyond the constraints of standard physics equations and led him to discover the first realizable design of a photonic topological insulator.

“Art and science are both about creativity, and that's what I use as a guideline to pick my scientific projects.”

Late in his PhD, Maz discovered computational neuroscience, and he switched the focus of his PhD. He felt that biology offered a much bigger playground for creative scientific discoveries.

“Biology is very different from physics. While math is useful for describing physical phenomena, it’s far more useful to use computer code to understand biological phenomena.”

Maz wants to make discoveries in places where biology differs most from physics. He is studying complex behavior, because it’s a place where he feels that conventional physics approaches have not made significant progress.

“With the power of modern computers, we can search an enormous space of hypotheses about what animals might be thinking. This was unfathomable in past decades. It’s the perfect place to explore the differences between physics and biology.”

09/19/2025

Congratulations to HHMI Investigators Clifford Brangwynne and Akiko Iwasaki, the two winners of the 30th annual Keio Medical Science Prize. This international prize, awarded by Keio University Global Page in Tokyo, honors scientists who have made major contributions to the fields of medical or life sciences.

Clifford Brangwynne studies phase separation in cells and its role in intracellular signaling, which could potentially help researchers better understand diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Akiko Iwasaki's work focuses on antiviral immunity and viral disease pathogenesis, with the goal of developing and improving vaccines and therapies.
Please join us in congratulating them in the comments below.