Panagiotis Eleftheriadis

Dear Friends of the MBL, I am reaching out with news about the Marine Biological Laboratory's relationship with the University of Chicago. Today, MBL and the University of Chicago announced that, following a 12-year affiliation, MBL will once again be a fully independent organization, effective June 30, 2026. MBL will continue to collaborate closely with the University of Chicago across education, research and graduate training, with the University of Chicago remaining one of MBL's valued academic partners. The University has made extraordinary programmatic, leadership, and financial contributions to the MBL. University leaders, including presidents and provosts, served as active members of the Board of Trustees. We are grateful for this support and look forward to continued academic collaboration. This partnership has fueled significant research collaborations and publications, as well as joint programs established around common research themes. Examples of these include the MBL/University of Chicago Graduate Research Fellowship Program and scientific collaborations that resulted in the development of innovative instruments, enabling high-resolution, three-dimensional visualization of cells and tissues. The outlook for an independent MBL is bright. For example, our efforts in recent years have significantly raised the ambitions of MBL's fundraising. In August of 2025, the Marine Biological Laboratory received an unrestricted gift of $25 million from MBL alumnus Mark Terasaki, the largest private contribution in our 137-year history. Additional substantial funding has been received for graduate training, named positions, facilities, courses, faculty hires, scholarships, and lectureships. Together, these extraordinary investments reflect our donors' confidence in MBL's mission and future and strengthen our financial foundation as we move forward. They build on a commitment MBL made in 2023 to achieve financial self-sufficiency, supported by the expansion of our Bo…

MBL's existing academic programs and collaborations with the University of Chicago are expected to continue as before, including research collaborations, participation by University of Chicago undergraduate and graduate students, and University of Chicago-affiliated courses and programs. The academic links that we have built over the last 12 years will serve both institutions well in the future. There are no significant changes to MBL's budget, staffing levels or operations and MBL will retain full ownership of its endowment. University of Chicago representatives will step down from the MBL Board of Trustees in June 2026, which will otherwise remain the same. I am deeply grateful for your continued engagement and belief in MBL. Your support and connection to this institution make this next chapter possible, and I look forward to sharing more in the weeks ahead as we continue our work together. With appreciation, Nipam H. Patel, Director Marine Biological Laboratory

Interesting news: The Marine Biological Labs at Woods Hole (MBL) is once again becoming an independent institution. University of Chicago will remain a partner, but only one of many. MBL is an amazing place for science and science training and I hope it will thrive in this new status.

Excited to share my first PhD preprint! w/ Sören Kannegieser and @anna-stoeckl.bsky.social @insect-vision.bsky.social

We investigated how hawkmoths coordinate lateralized sensory and motor control for appendage guidance, revealing similar control principles to vertebrates doi.org/10.64898/202...

The first paper from the lab is now out in Science Advances: Multimodal social context modulates larval behavior in Drosophila
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
We find that fly larvae keep their distance to conspecifics in the absence of food, enjoy reading! @cbehav.bsky.social @uni-konstanz.de

Several fly larvae are crawling on an agar surface.

The second paper from the lab is now available on bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
We discovered that cannibalistic behavior in fly larvae is social-context dependent. Larval groups avoid dead conspecifics; individuals show high attraction. They only do it when no one is watching 😉

New paper from the lab, led by @ronjabigge.bsky.social, in collaboration with Kentaro Arikawa. We reconcile contrast and spatial processing functions of lamina monopolar cells by integrating 3D morphology, connectivity and neurophysiology in the hummingbird hawkmoth. tinyurl.com/mvnh3325
For more 👇

Why does life explore so few of the forms it could possibly take? Using fractal descriptors, this #scienceadvances paper shows that Earth’s biosphere clusters around simple shapes, reflecting deep evolutionary constraints. @artemyte.bsky.social @manlius.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Fun! Link to original research: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.

My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

Plastic landmark anchoring in zebrafish compass neurons Nature - Using two-photon microscopy with a panoramic virtual reality setup, how head direction cells in larval zebrafish integrate visual landmarks and optic flow to track orientation is revealed.

1/6: New publication from the lab: “Plastic landmark anchoring in zebrafish compass neurons” by Ryosuke Tanaka (@ryosuketanaka.bsky.social) and Ruben is available here:
rdcu.be/eX1L4

Neuronal calcium spikes enable vector inversion in the Drosophila brain In the fly central complex, PFNa neurons switch from firing classical sodium spikes when depolarized to firing non-canonical T-type calcium spikes when hyperpolarized. This bidirectional spiking allow...

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

We had a lot of fun working on this project (led by Itzel Ishida, not on bluesky). Some interesting highlights from the paper -

Gregor Mendel spent seven to eight years crossing and scoring tens of thousands of pea plants. In contemporary terms, this is known as “a postdoc”

Can biological tissues "learn"? Our new preprint shows that epithelial tissues exhibit emergent behaviors akin to unsupervised learning. Local tension remodeling allows cell networks to store long-range memory and program global elasticity properties.

Read more here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Decoupling of visual feature selectivity in the retinocollicular pathway Schwartz and Matsumoto et al. show that visual feature selectivity for luminance and motion is coupled in the retina but becomes decoupled in the superior colliculus. This transformation reorganizes t...

Excited to share our new work on visual information processing in the retinocollicular pathway. We discovered that while luminance responses can predict motion responses in retinal ganglion cells, this prediction does not hold in the superior colliculus cells.

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Really excited to see this great work published! It was an honor and unforgettable experience to be part of this joint effort in @scottvedwards.bsky.social lab!

Congratulations to the lab's first PhD student @maxcapelle.bsky.social for defending his PhD last week! Max not only helped shape the lab from day one, but also made outstanding scientific achievements, which have laid the foundation for future research. Wishing him all the best 🥳

Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance Please enable JavaScript to proceed.

Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: Twists and turns in the story of learned avoidance

Evidence that learned avoidance of a pathogenic bacterium can be transmitted to future generations in C. elegans is growing.

🔗

CeDNe: A multi-scale computational framework for modeling structure-function relationships in the C. elegans nervous system https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.03.683805v1

Zebrafish use spectral information to suppress the visual background Vertebrate eyes first evolved in water, where spectral content rapidly fades with distance. Zebrafish exploit this loss by antagonizing cone signals to suppress the background, pointing to distance es...

Excited to share our paper now published in Cell!
'Zebrafish use spectral information to suppress the visual background'

Huge thanks to @neurofishh.bsky.social & @teuler.bsky.social

@cellpress.bsky.social @cp-cell.bsky.social

👇🏻
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

sure, if you enjoy the horrifying limits of human perception

Behavioral and circuit principles of temperature gradient navigation Behavioral thermoregulation is critical for survival across animals. Balakrishnan and Haesemeyer discover that thermoregulatory behavior in larval zebrafish is organized into longer-term swim modes. T...

Out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social led by Kaarthik A Balakrishnan: We identify medullary circuits that represent the valence of thermal stimuli and control both long-term strategies of cold-avoidance and short term hot avoidance behaviors to enable thermoregulation. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Understanding consciousness as a fractal What if you are a pixel in a higher-level consciousness navigating through extra dimensions of time? Meet the 'Nested Observer Window Model' of Jonathan Schooler, PhD, who is Distinguished Professor o...

What if you are a pixel in a higher-level consciousness navigating through extra dimensions of time? Meet the ‘Nested Observer Window Model’ of Jonathan Schooler, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences UCSB.
www.essentiafoundation.org/12750-2/seei...

one of the cool things about rock climbing as a hobby is that you gradually lose the ability to be recognized by fingerprint scanners

A multisensory, bidirectional, valence encoder guides behavioral decisions A key function of the brain is to categorize sensory cues as repulsive or attractive and respond accordingly. While we have some understanding of how sensory information is processed in the sensory pe...

How is valence computed in the brain? Check out our new preprint about a single cell that integrates excitatory and inhibitory input across modalities according to valence and impacts behavioral decisions. An exciting collaboration across many labs. Enjoy reading!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

a black and white dog is sitting on a couch with its tongue sticking out . ALT: a black and white dog is sitting on a couch with its tongue sticking out .

👁️The retina — strikingly conserved across vertebrates, but an oddity among bilaterians!

So how did it evolve?

With @mikebok.bsky.social, @neurofishh.bsky.social and @denilsson.bsky.social, we argue that retinal complexity may 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑦𝑒 𝑖𝑡𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑓.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
1/n

Congratulations to Anna Stöckl receiving the prestigious Walther-Arndt award from the German Zoological Society. #dzg2025 @anna-stoeckl.bsky.social 🥳🥂

Multiplexing behavioral signals in sensory representations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.04.674251v1

Amazing work on bee photoreceptors by my good friend @gkolyfetis.bsky.social!

How do brains make decisions when faced with multiple, potentially conflicting cues? In our latest preprint, we show how #zebrafish use an additive strategy and process multiple visual features through anatomically distinct parallel pathways tinyurl.com/mvkn8em9 Thread 👇

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!

Hillel Adesnik lecturing in the MBL Visual Neuroscience course. Clear as a bell, as usual.