Highlights from our first year
It’s hard to believe, but by the end of the month the lab will have existed for an entire year!
Here are some of the highlights from our first year.
We had 4 awesome undergraduate students: Crystal Wang, Kaushiki Ravi, Maia Yang, and Lam Nguyen.
All four students helped to validate behavioral setups and generated important pilot data that is being used in lab grants.
Maia, Lam, and Kaush were added as authors to a resubmitted paper on bitter taste processing (preprint here) after spending the summer helping with revision experiments. Hopefully their names will be in print soon!
Crystal’s work on sugar taste processing will be added to a paper that we hope to submit next year.
We’re excited that Crystal, Maia, and Lam are staying in the lab next year!
We had 6 (!!) amazing rotation students from the Neuroscience PhD program:
Arvin Sarkissian took the leap as the lab’s very first rotation student. Despite starting out without any Python experience, he became an expert on connectome analysis and produced a lovely set of results that we added to our revised paper on bitter processing.
Michael Hess and Taylor Pio set up two different brand-new assays for filming fly behavior (and became the resident experts on 3D printing and laser-cutting!).
Abi Grassler performed experiments on foraging behavior using the setup that Taylor built.
Janhavi Bhalerao performed experiments examining how reward pathways modulate feeding behavior.
Marco Garcia Pena is currently performing computational analyses of the foraging data we’ve collected so far and will be helping with calcium imaging experiments.
We hope this year’s rotation students (Abi, Janhavi, Marco) will choose to do their thesis work here!
We wrote two papers (and a commentary)!
Our paper on prolonged modulation of feeding responses was published in iScience (summary here). This work was led by Julia Deere, a former technician at Columbia who worked with Dr. Devineni.
Our paper on bitter taste processing was submitted, revised, and recently resubmitted with many new experiments added. The latest version can be found here. Fingers crossed for positive reviews!
Dr. Devineni wrote a Current Biology “Dispatch” discussing a cool new paper on fly olfactory processing.
We got our first grant! We’re grateful to the Whitehall Foundation for providing three years of funding.
We want to thank all the people who helped us get started! Just to name a few:
All our colleagues in the Biology department (and beyond) who have been so welcoming and helpful! Special shoutouts to Leila Rieder, Robert Liu, Anita Corbett, Gordon Berman, Malu Murugan, Sam Sober, Astrid Prinz, and Dieter Jaeger.
The absolutely amazing Biology department staff, especially Jan Hawes, Malia Escobar, Sonia Hayden, Scottye Davis, and Gwen Puckett.
Lots of people who gave us feedback on papers and grants, including Chris Rodgers, Barbara Noro, Erica Korb, Karla Kaun, and several colleagues in Biology.
We’re looking forward to doing more cool stuff in 2023! And we’re still recruiting more people! Learn more about joining the lab here.
