Howard Hughes Medical Institute - HHMI

12/05/2025

To capture the most detailed images to date of chromatin condensates — droplet-like structures formed by compacted DNA — you're going to need a verrry big microscope, like the one pictured here.

HHMI Investigator Michael Rosen and team (not pictured) visualized the molecules inside the droplets using cryo-electron tomography, a microscopy technique that creates 3D reconstructions of biological samples at high resolution.

Visualization of the assembly process (as seen in this video) will help researchers better understand how DNA is packaged inside cells, and how disruptions may lead to diseases like cancer and neurodegenerative conditions. “I’m certain we’re only at the tip of the iceberg,” says Rosen. https://hhmi.news/4iFBIrV

11/28/2025

A perfect model for coming together this season: mouse skeletal muscles undergoing fusion, obviously.

In this mesmerizing confocal microscopy video, nuclei are labeled in green & cell bodies are labeled in red. Credit: Yue Lu, Elizabeth Chen Lab, UT Southwestern Medical Center

11/26/2025

"My advice to other undergraduates: Just go for it!" — Lalitha Ravipati, alum, Summer Undergraduate Research Program

Rising junior or senior who's interested in working alongside some of the nation's top scientists this summer? Apply now: https://bit.ly/CechFellows

11/19/2025

Which came first — the sponge or the comb jelly?

HHMI Investigator Nicole King and her team used a new method to answer an old question, and their results offer strong evidence that sponges may have evolved first.

Knowing which animal roots the tree of life helps researchers understand how organisms are related to each other, and how complex features like the nervous system evolved.

Read more:

HHMI Investigator Nicole King and her team implemented a new method to determine which animals evolved first. The new research strongly supports the hypothesis that sponges root the animal tree of life.

11/18/2025

Calling all rising juniors & seniors: Applications for our ’26 Summer Undergraduate Research Experience Program are now open! Interested in a career in biological or biomedical research? Nine weeks, hands-on research, generous stipend, & mentorship from some of the nation’s top scientists — learn more about the Cech Fellows Program today: bit.ly/CechFellows

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 ...

10/10/2025

Allison Truhlar is a Software Engineer on the Scientific Computing Software team at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus, developing web applications that help scientists conduct and publicize their research.

Allison created the Janelia Open Science Software Initiative (OSSI) website, which showcases software developed at Janelia. https://ossi.janelia.org/

She also works on apps that directly support researchers, including an app for controlling imaging experiments & an app to transform how image data are shared at Janelia.

Allison values how Janelia encourages collaboration among researchers at all levels and minimizes barriers to trying new ideas and making mistakes.

“It's really that experimental atmosphere here of, ‘Just try it out and see how it works.’”

Allison first became interested in science when she joined the environmental club in high school.

“I liked the side of science where you can do things to benefit society or the Earth.’”

That desire to do meaningful work guided Allison’s education, leading her to earn a bachelor’s degree and PhD in biological and environmental engineering from Cornell University. She also holds a master’s degree in biological sciences from the University of Cambridge.

After her PhD, Allison did a postdoc with the NYS Water Resources Institute, focusing on road culvert flooding risk. She then worked as a research fellow for the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and as a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowships Fellow and program manager at the U.S. Department of Energy.

Allison then followed her curiosity to pursue a new technical role supporting science. With encouragement from her wife and a financial gift her father had left her, she took classes in web development, gaining skills that aligned with a position at Janelia.

“It was scary, but it felt like it was the right time for it.”

Outside of work, Allison enjoys running. She also bakes with her 3-year-old son, who likes to help her use the stand mixer.

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.