Lab News
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Lindsay passes her candidacy exam 👏
The candidacy exam is a major milestone in any PhD student’s academic career. Proposal revisions, late nights, and reviewing for curveballs questions can add significant stress. However, Lindsay soared over all of that when she passed her exam on Fri Jul 18th 2025 with her proposal titled The role of the nMLF in modulating swimming speed in larval zebrafish during thermoregulatory navigation. Congrats, Lindsay! 🤩🥳
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Martin teaches at MBL
Martin taught a zebrafish module with Ruben Portugues and Emanuele Paoli as part of the NS&B course at the Marine Biology Laboratories in Woods Hole. Students learned about optomotor behaviors, lightsheet calcium imaging and performed their own projects.
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Lindsay published in PLoS Computational Biology
Stimuli can be the result of changes in the environment or be caused by actions we take. We might experience a mechanical stimulus because someone touches us or because we touch someone else. Distinguishing these cases helps us to optimize the interpretation of stimuli. We discovered, that larval zebrafish distinguish whether changes in temperature are the result of their own behavior or not. If changes in temperature are caused by behavior, it signals to the animal that it can use behavior to thermoregulate. Larval zebrafish will accordingly pay more attention to temperature stimuli under these conditions. This manifests as a larger influence of temperature on behavior. This presumably optimizes behavior for thermoregulation while suppressing such actions under conditions where the environment does not allow for behavioral thermoregulation.
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Kaarthik's thesis defense 🎓🎊🤩
On Wed Jun 25, 2025 Kaarthik presented his thesis A systematic investigation of thermoregulation in larval zebrafish. To no one’s surprise, he defended it successfully. Many congratulations to Dr. Kaarthik Balakrishnan - we will be on the lookout for your future endeavours!
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Bradley presents at Neural-Immune Meeting
Keystone Symposia on Molecular and Cellular Biology hosted a meeting focused on Neural-Immune Interactions in Whistler, Canada (Jun 8-11, 2025).
Bradley, as a recipient of the Kenneth Rein fellowship, gave a talk titled Determining the immune signaling necessary for behavioral fever in larval zebrafish.
The talk was engaging with the audience posing many thoughtful questions. Go Bradley! 🐠🤒🧑🏼🔬
Click here for more information on the 2025 Neural-Immune meeting.
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Kaarthik and Lindsay win awards at IGP Symposium
Every May The Ohio State University hosts the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program (IGP) Symposium where grad students can share their work and meet colleagues outside of their program. At this year’s symposium on Wed May 21, 2025 Kaarthik won Outstanding Poster and Lindsay won Outstanding Leadership and Engagement - congratulations to them both on these well-deserved awards! 🥳👏
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Danica attends CCN workshop at the Flatiron Institute
In January, 2025 the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute hosted a computational neuroscience workshop to train scientists on how to use python packages for neuroscience data analysis. Danica traveled to New York City where she learned about the pynapple and NeMoS python packages, met extraordinary colleagues, and experienced the bustle of Manhattan, all thanks to the Center for Computational Neuroscience and NeuroRSE group.
For more information, check out the following websites:
NeuroRSE Group at Flatiron Institute
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Lindsay wins GWIS's Science 'N' Suds talk
On Dec 5, 2024 Graduate Women in Science (GWIS) hosted a 5-minutes presentation competition where researchers presented their research to the general public at Parson’s Brewery here in Columbus. There were 5 speakers covering a wide range of STEM topics, but Lindsay’s talk on using zebrafish in neuroscience research received the most votes thus winning her the competition. Congratulations to Lindsay! 🥳
For more information on GWIS Ohio Chapter and Science ‘N’ Suds, check out their website.
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Bradley published in Neurophotonics
Bradley and Martin wrote a comprehensive review on thermoregulation in vertebrates from a molecular viewpoint tying in how that relates to neural circuitry and behaviour. Check it out in the Neurophotonics journal: Vertebrate behavioral thermoregulation: knowledge and future directions
Cutler B, Haesemeyer M. Vertebrate behavioral thermoregulation: knowledge and future directions. Neurophotonics. 2024 Jul;11(3):033409. doi: 10.1117/1.NPh.11.3.033409. Epub 2024 May 20. PMID: 38769950; PMCID: PMC11105118.
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The lab attends the Zebrafish Neurobiology conference
In November 2023 the The Lab attended the Zebrafish Neurobiology conference at Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory in Long Island, NY. All the members presented posters and received many questions from attendees for their respective research projects.
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MINE published in eLife and on GitHub
Work led by Jamie Costabile and Kaarthik A. Balakrishnan published in eLife: “Model discovery to link neural activity to behavioral tasks” introduces an unbiased method to determine how neurons encode task variables such as stimuli, actions or states. Find the paper here: Model discovery to link neural activity to behavioral tasks and the GitHub repository here.
Costabile JD, Balakrishnan KA, Schwinn S, Haesemeyer M. Model discovery to link neural activity to behavioral tasks. Elife. 2023 Jun 6;12:e83289. doi: 10.7554/eLife.83289. PMID: 37278516; PMCID: PMC10310322.