If you are at #sfn2025, please
come by tomorrow! I will talk about energy metabolism, neurons and the winding roads of discovery and careers in science

Interested in metabolism? So are we! My lab has been exploring the cell biology of energy metabolism in the nervous system, and we are looking for postdocs. Cool sensors and microscopy, great work environment. Please help me spread the word!

Vaccination and health mural by Diego Rivera, 1932, painted to highlight how science helped fight disease (Detroit Institute of Art)

My take on DEI: I wrote this letter on Sept 3, 2000, thanking @ascbiology.bsky.social Minority Affairs Committee for supporting my participation in @mblscience.bsky.social Physiology course. Those experiences made me the scientist that I am today. We need to continue them for future generations.

Aug 1945, Captain Parks of US Navy found this message from Japanese scientist in a lab: "You can destroy weapons, but save (scientific equipment) for Japanese students". He complied.

Arguably more humanity in WWII in enemy territory than what is going on at home at peacetime in NIH in 2025.

Ok, me monto tbn con Bad Bunny 😆: DtMF tiene muchos elementos nostalgia y memoria, aspectos fundamentales de la experiencia humana, y grandes misterios en la neurociencia. Aca una reseña de nuestros trabajos investigativos mas recientes buscando entender como funciona memoria 1/

In paper we present data in support of model in which this configuration of electrical synapses is critical for filtering sensory information, and action selection, and when animals lack the electrical synapses, they are sensitive to wrong info and get trapped in isotherms 6/

We collaborated with Zhao-Wen Wang at UConn to show that the uncoupling of the two AIYs have consequences for AIY processing of thermo sensory info. Uncoupling AIYs increase the resistance, makes then hypersensitive to sensory input. Why isotherms? 5/

We figured out site of action for INX-1, and it is required in a single class of interneurons called AIY. AIY are downstream of the temperature sensing neuron, AFD. There are two AIYs, and the gap junctions couple the two AIYs together. In INX-1 mutants, AIY are uncoupled! 4/

We did a genetic screen, and ID a mutant with a crazy phenotype: they do isotherms all the time, outside of correct context (pink tracks to the right, wt in left). The mutant has a lesion in INX-1, a gene that encodes for gap junction. Why INX-1 mutants have this phenotype? 3/

This work took 10 years, and here is the behavior that caught our imagination. Worms remember, and one can train them to like a temp, and when in a gradient, they move to their preferred temp (gradient migration) and then track it (isothermal tracking, track in pink). 2/

Today at 9am I will be interviewing with David Skelley (Yale Peabody Museum) in the CT NPR program "Where we live" www.ctpublic.org/show/where-w... talking about the Peabody exhibit and Neuroscience/@wutsaiyale.bsky.social

La exhibición trabaja tambien el tema de la memoria. Uno de mis objetos favoritos es esta imagen, realizada con AI, sobre una escena ochentosa en Puerto Rico, que uso para explicar como lo que llamamos "memoria" realmente son un conjunto de experiencias diversas en diferentes partes del cerebro 4/

La exhibición luego examina el tema de la percepción: como nuestro cerebro construye nuestra realidad, muchas veces presumiendo cosas y adivinando. Estos atributos se pueden usar para crear ilusiones, que presentamos y explicamos. Ver articulo: www.newhavenindependent.org/article/peab... 3/

Exhibición comienza contando la historia de cómo los cientificos descubrieron que el cerebro esta compuesto de células. Es un descubrimiento fundamental para la neurociencia. Traimos los dibujos originales de los científicos Golgi y Ramón y Cajal, tesoros de gran valor expuestos por primera vez 2/

In Memory, I used AI to tell a story: an image that never existed, but is a representation of a memory from my childhood in Puerto Rico, with my late sister, in the 1980’s family’s station wagon. I use different parts of the image to explain how we store, or not, different memories 8/

We collaborated with Damon Clark, who teaches a class at Yale on the neuroscience of illusions, to engage visitors in mind-bending illusions which we use to explain to visitors how our brains interpret reality….many times making assumptions, or guesses ,which can be wrong, resulting in illusions 5/

For "Butterflies of the Soul" we established an international collaboration between Yale, Legado Cajal (Spain) and Golgi Museum (Italy) and worked together to: 1) identify drawings that have never been exhibited before; 2) tell untold narratives of discovery between these two scientists. 3/