News

Congratulations to Rocío Saavedra Peña for receiving the Damon Runyon Fellowship Award!

Mike’s paper just came out in Nature. Here is the link to the paper, and also a link to a new story about it written by Catherine Caruso.  Congratulations, Mike!

Paper link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07144-2

HMS news: https://hms.harvard.edu/news/how-body-copes-airway-closure

Congratulations to Chen Ran and Chuchu Zhang for securing faculty positions. Chen will begin at Scripps Research Institute while Chuchu will start at UCLA. We look forward to your future work!

Many postdocs and students earned prestigious fellowships!  Congratulations to Adi (Human Frontier Science Program Fellowship), Danny (Goldenson Fellowship and Goldberg Fellowship), Jingyi (Helen Hay Whitney Fellowship), Marito (Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) Bridge to Independence Award and Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) Young Investigator Grant), Maša (American Diabetes Association Fellowship), Nao (Tojuro Iijima Foundation for Food Science and Technology grant), Nipun (Helen Hay Whitney Fellowship), Rachel (Damon Runyon Fellowship Award and Damon Runyon-Dale F. Frey Award for Breakthrough Scientists), and Silvia (Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship and the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Graduate Scholarship)!!

Congratulations to Catherine Gallori for receiving a prestigious Hoopes Prize from Harvard for her senior thesis. We wish you the best of luck during your MD/PhD!

Dr. Narendra Joshi successfully defended his thesis recently.  We wish you all the best!

Congratulations to Danny for his Nature paper on an airway-to-brain sensory pathway that alerts the brain to a respiratory infection through prostaglandin detection, and that evokes sickness responses. Please see the news stories and briefings below for more information:

Nature News: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00675-0

Science News: https://www.science.org/content/article/why-does-flu-make-you-feel-so-c…

HMS News: https://hms.harvard.edu/news/how-brain-senses-infection

Research briefing: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00425-2

The actual paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05796-0

Congratulation to Marito for his eLife paper on enteroendocrine cells and control of feeding and gut motility!
 

We are excited to welcome new postdocs: Masa Josipovic from Cambridge, Meg Allison from Michigan/MGH, Shan Lu from Columbia, and Rocio Pena from Yale!

for his paper in Nature on a visceral sensory homunculus! Here's a story in HMS News with more information:

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/sensory-mystery

We wish you the best of luck at Novartis! The baroreceptor field will not be the same without you.

Congratulations to Chuchu for her paper in Cell Reports on a nausea suppression pathway.

We are pleased to welcome new postdocs Jingyi Chi (from Rockefeller), Nipun Basrar (from Rockefeller) and Zhikai Liu (from Wash U) to the lab, and a belated welcome to Abdul Alabi (from Stanford/MGH) too! We are also excited that Silvia Huerta-Lopez has joined the lab as an MD/PhD student. Finally, we are lucky to have Lindsay Vincelette and (also rather belatedly) Ella Douglas as research technicians!

We will miss her, but wish her the best of luck as she starts in her new lab.

Congratulations to Sara Prescott for winning the prestigious 2021 Warren Alpert Distinguished Scholars Award. I also want to give a shoutout to co-winner Dheeraj Roy, who was in the lab as a technician many moons ago! Great to see them both doing well!

Congratulations to Nao, whose work reveals a neuronal mechanism by which hunger gates attention to food odors:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03299-4

Congratulations to Chuchu for her publication in Neuron that investigates cell types of the area postrema, a sensory circumventricular organ that mediates nausea, vomiting, and sickness responses to ingested poisons. For more information, see the original article or a story from Kevin Jiang of Harvard News:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627320308886?dgcid=author

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/sensing-sickness

A belated congrats to Danny (Banting Fellowship), Soohong (American Heart Association), Rachel (American Diabetes Association), Chen (Goldenson Fellowship), Chuchu (Damon Runyon), and Sara (LSRF) for receiving post-doctoral fellowships!

Congratulations to Sara and Ben on their recent Cell paper. Everyone please stay safe. 

Congrats to Dr. Ben Umans and Dr. Zecai Liang as they successfully defended their PhDs. Good luck in your new adventures!

Welcome to Marito Hayashi and Danny Bin!

Rui Chang just left to start his new lab at Yale! Best of luck to him, and glad that he is still relatively close by!

Welcome new postdocs Nao Horio, GaYoung Lee, Soohong Min, Jinfei Ni, Chen Ran and Chuchu Zhang!

Congratulations to Qian and Rui for securing faculty positions! Qian obtained an Independent Investigator position at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, while Rui will begin a faculty position at Yale this fall. Best of luck! We will miss you!

....for their paper in Cell!!!!
'Sensory neurons that detect stretch and nutrients in the digestive system'

Here is a nice HMS news story from Liz Cooney:
http://hms.harvard.edu/news/gut-feelings

We are excited to have Sara Prescott join the lab after a terrific PhD thesis at Stanford with Joanna Wysocka. 

Congratulations to Swathi for receiving the Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellowship, to Rui for getting a fellowship from the American Heart Association, to Nikhil for receiving the Damon Runyon Fellowship, and to Ben for obtaining an NRSA. 

Good luck with the rest of medical school! We hope your extensive knowledge base on the vagus nerve comes in handy. 

Congratulations to Qian Li, Yaw Tachie-Baffour, Zhikai Liu, Maude Baldwin, and our colleague Andrew Kruse for their paper in eLife, 'Non-classical amine recognition evolved in a large clade of olfactory receptors'.

Congratulations to Rui Chang, who was given the Outstanding Post-doc Award by the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School, as part of National Post-doc Appreciation Week. 

Wishing you the best of luck as you move forward with your career. We will miss you here!

Congratulations to Rui, Dave, Erika, and Ben for their paper in Cell which describes the genetic identification of vagal sensory neurons that differentially control breathing. Please find a summary of this work in HMS news:
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/breath-taking

Congratulations to Maude Baldwin, and colleagues Yasuka Toda, Tomoya Nakagita, Mary O'Connell, Kirk Klasing, Takumi Misaka, and Scott Edwards for their publication in Science on hummingbird taste!
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/929

A nice perspective from Gary Beauchamp and Peihua Jiang:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/878.summary

News stories:

NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/26/science/the-hummingbirds-special-swee…

LA Times
http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-81146546/

Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2014/08/21/hu…

National Geographic:
http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2014/08/21/scientists-solve-mys…
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/08/21/birds-lost-their-swe…

HMS News:
http://hms.harvard.edu/news/sweet-feat

New Scientist:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26089-hummingbirds-turned-savoury…

The Scientist:
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/40810/title/How-H…

Congratulations to David Ferrero, and our collaborators Ashiq Hussain, Luis Saraiva, and Sigrun Korsching for their PNAS paper! This work describes zebrafish TAAR13c as an olfactory receptor for the death-associated odor cadaverine.

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/48/19579.short

Here is a write-up in BBC News:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24874173

and the Harvard Gazette:
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/01/something-doesnt-smell-ri…;

Congratulations to David Ferrero, Qian Li, Dheeraj Roy, and our good friends and collaborators Marc Spehr and Kazushige Touhara for their recent Nature paper. This work identified ESP22 as a juvenile pheromone that inhibits sexual behavior through the vomeronasal system.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v502/n7471/full/nature12579.html

More information can be found in articles from:

The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/08/science/how-young-mice-tell-older-ones...

The Scientist:
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/37744/title/Pherom...

NBC News:
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/pheromone-tears-helps-young-mice-ward-fri...

And a video interview of the lab, "Tears for Fears":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrCPsgPsk_U

Congratulations to Dr. David Ferrero, who successfully defended his thesis in record time (n=1). We are proud of you, although this is a bitter sweet moment- you will be missed. We wish you the best of luck moving forward!

Welcome to BBS graduate student Zecai ('CC') Liang, who joined the lab, and is excited to study pheromone responsive neural circuits! Also, congratulations on passing your PQE!

Congrats to Qian Li and colleagues for their paper in Current Biology: "Synchronous evolution of an odor biosynthesis pathway and behavioral response"!
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(12)01268-7

For more information, see an article at HMS News:
http://hms.harvard.edu/content/scents-and-sensibilities

and a Dispatch from Current Biology:
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(12)01431-5

Congratulations to Dheeraj Roy, and our colleagues Gilad Barnea and Stavros Lomvardas for their recent paper in PNAS:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/25/1206724109.abstract

Welcome to our new lab research assistant: Yaw Baffour, who comes to us by way of Ghana and Columbia University. Also welcome back to our master fisherman, Adan Horta, who is returning for the summer SHURP program before his senior year at Vanderbilt!

Steve and Brad Lowell just received the Harvard/MIT Joint Research Grants Program in Basic Neuroscience for their collaboration, "Molecular and genetic analysis of the vagus nerve".

https://neurodiscovery.harvard.edu/research_community/harvard_mit_grant…

Congratulations to David, Miguel, Maude, and our Scripps friends for their new paper on TAAR ligands and structure!

"Agonists for 13 TAARs provide insight into the molecular basis of odor selectivity"

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cb300111e

Last year's SHURP summer student Miguel Roque was accepted to the Harvard School of Dental Medicine! Congratulations!

We are excited that Erika Williams has joined the lab as an MD-PhD student! Welcome!

Alex Kuznik visits us for 6 months from Aachen, Germany, so it is quite possible that he is a Charlemagne descendent. Alex is a joint master's student with our good friend Marc Spehr.

Congratulations to David Ferrero and all of our colleagues for their PNAS paper!

PNAS link to David's paper, "Detection and avoidance of a carnivore odor by prey"
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/06/13/1103317108.abstract

Story in Nature news: "The smell of a meat-eater"
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110620/full/news.2011.375.html

Harvard Focus magazine: "The smell of danger"
http://www.focushms.com/features/the-smell-of-danger/

Harvard Systems Biology blog: "The fear chemical?"
http://ittakes30.wordpress.com/2011/06/29/the-fear-chemical/

Physorg.com:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-small-prey-predators-chemical-urine....

HMS Podcast available on iTunes:
http://podcast.hms.harvard.edu/2011/07/26/episode-14-under-6-and-overwei...

PNAS Podcast Interview:
http://www.pnas.org/site/misc/stephenLiberlesPodcast.mp3