What is happening, where we are going, what we are pondering
December 2025
From our lab to yours, best wishes for a happy holiday break and a fantastic start of the new year 🎄🎆🥂
December 2025
It’s been one of those terms where you blink and suddenly it’s the end of term, you’re wondering how on earth we fitted everything in, and you realise you haven’t updated the website in forever. Argh.
Despite the chaos, it’s been a really lovely and productive few months. We were delighted to welcome three new people to the lab this term: Tess, Pablo, and Shloka. And then, drum roll please 🥁 two PhD theses have officially been finished. Yes, really.
This term marks an enormous milestone for Ailie and Sana, who have both completed their PhD theses. They look relieved, proud and possibly a little stunned, which feels entirely appropriate. We are officially postponing the emotional processing of the goodbyes for now. There are still theses defences (or viva, as the brits say) to come, revisions to navigate and a bit more shared time ahead before anything feels truly final. That said, Elisa has already started looking completely dejected, so it’s clear some tissues will be needed sooner rather than later.
October 2025
Welcome Tess and Shloka to the Lab!
Tess joins us as a first-year PhD student from New York State, funded by a prestigious Gates scholarship. She comes with an impressive research background in zebrafish sensory physiology and glial plasticity, and a mission to convince us all that glia >>> neurons.
Pablo joins us for his MPhil in Basic and Translational Neuroscience project on dopamine and behaviour, which he will be doing under Junior Research Fellow Guillaume’s supervision. Well done Chloé on attracting such an excellent student as your first.
Shloka joins us as a Part II (aka third year undergrad) student, diving into her final-year neuroscience project with Harin on experience-dependent plasticity.
More fun facts in the coming months as we get to know them, so stay tuned for those, and for the science that they will be sciencing with us ⚗️🔬🧠
September 2025
Timing is everything in science, especially when you are racing a self-imposed deadline while preparing to relocate the whole lab for a week of olfaction y tapas at ECRO2025 in Bilbao. This week Connor and Chloé pulled off a stellar feat: they finished and posted their preprint just in the nick of time.
The preprint introduces their open source, low cost olfactometer, a project started by our own engineer-turned-neuroscientist Jieni over three years ago. Olfaction has historically been an experimental head ache due to technical challenges in odour delivery. To overcome this, they took inspiration from Dan Rokni and Venki Murthy’s work to come up with a design which is affordable, versatile, and easy to assemble, supporting applications from rodent behaviour to human psychophysics. The article includes full design specifications, assembly instructions and validation data to make olfactory research more accessible. We’d love to hear feedback from the community!
Doyle C, Wang J, Galliano E, Guillaume C (2025) A low-cost and open-source olfactometer to precisely deliver single odours and odour mixtures. bioRxiv 2025.09.11.675563;
Special congratulations to Connor, who pulled off a first-author paper before even completing one year of his PhD, and to Chloé, coming into her own as Junior Research Fellow, who truly led this effort by coordinating Connor and Jieni’s work and reminding the increasingly useless PI of all the technical details.
With posters printed, talks ready and the preprint live, the whole lab is officially packed for Bilbao. Now we just need to figure out how to move seven neuroscientists and Elisa’s weekly espresso supply without causing a minor disaster.
September 2025
As half-spoilered earlier in the year, we have HUGE news! 🎉We’re thrilled to finally announce that Chloé Guillaume has just landed one of the most coveted prizes in UK academia: a Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) at Homerton College starting October 2025!
For those not fluent in Cambridge-speak: a JRF is basically an academic golden ticket. It means four years of salary + research funds + total freedom to chase your wildest scientific ideas. Add to that the endless free meals in academic gown (think dining hall banquets straight out of Harry Potter, only with sharper / less magical conversation) and you’ve got one of the most enviable gigs in academia. These fellowships are centuries-old, fiercely competitive, and among the most prestigious postdoctoral awards in the UK, often springboards to tenure-track jobs. In short: a really big deal.
Chloé has been with the lab for a few years already, dazzling us with her science, tenacity, immaculate style, and the occasional withering French side-eye. So we’re not the least bit surprised that Homerton recognised her brilliance, but we are extremely proud and delighted to be able to enjoy her company and scientific collaboration for another long while. And we’re especially happy that she chose to remain with us, notwithstanding the questionable bread standards in Cambridge.
Massive congratulations, Junior Fellow Guillaume! 🥂
July 2025
Some say that married couples who’ve been together for decades slowly start to look alike. Lab bromance duo and office desk-neighbours Harin and Connor have managed it in under a year.
In this spot the difference photo they can be seen dressed in eerily similar shirts, identical pints in hand, celebrating a very important milestone: passing their PhD qualifying exams in the same week. They’re now officially registered PhD students… which means we’re officially stuck with them for the next 3+ years.
Given their current trajectory, we predict matching lab coats sponsored by Guinness by year two, and custom jewellery with half of an olfactory bulb pendant each by year three, to be reunited only when they publish their first joint paper.
For now, cheers to the newest fully signed-up members of Team PhD and huge thanks to the examiners for their extremely constructive feedback.
25 July 2025
The Latin has been spoken, hands held, gown hooded with new colours 🔴, and parents made proud – if slightly baffled by the medieval pomp: the PhD is now officially over.
Congratulations to 𝗗𝗿 𝗛𝘂𝗮𝗻𝗴 on escaping postgraduate “prison” 🎓🎉
July 2025
Yellow on Yellow presentation alert 🟡
Dressed to match his slides, Harin delivered a standout talk at the 30th UK Semiochemistry Workshop, an international meeting of researchers exploring chemical signalling across species.
His presentation combined science with just the right amount of surrealistic art, earning praise in a strong session which included Victoria Switacz (Aachen), Shreya Choudhuri (Leeds), and Emily Winson-Bushby (London), each tackling a different facet of olfactory processing with insight and enthusiasm 👏
Bright science all round ✨
June 2025
A new opinion piece by Elisa and Tara Keck exploring the interplay between homeostatic plasticity, statistical learning, and inhibition has just been published in Current Opinion in Neurobiology.
The piece is part of a special issue spun out of the 2023 KITP workshop on Statistical Learning in the Brain, a six-week extravaganza organized by Máté Lengyel, József Fiser, and Livia de Hoz, where scientists heroically sacrificed themselves by relocating to sunny Santa Barbara, California to talk about learning, plasticity, and network dynamics by day… and communally to grill things and drink wine by night. Somebody had to take one for the team.
Galliano E, Keck T (2025) Interactions between homeostatic plasticity and statistical learning: A role for inhibition. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 93:103065
Have a read, and maybe play some background ocean sounds and pour yourself a glass of something and pretend you’re in Santa Barbara while you’re at it 🍷🌴
June 2025
Sana kept her Nordic theme 🇮🇸🇳🇴 going by attending the FENS Regional Meeting in Oslo, Norway, where she presented a beautiful poster packed with data from the final two chapters of her nearly completed PhD thesis. Which means that Gadiwalla et al. paper #2 is dropping soon!
Gadiwalla S, Petersen PH, Galliano E (2025). Modulation of bulbar activity in an impaired model of intrinsic excitability in mitral and tufted cells. FENS Regional Meeting, Oslo, Norway
May-June 2025
Chloé is once again making headlines with a double act that’s hard to beat.
First, she took over Elisa’s undergraduate lecture block on Sensoring the environment for first-year Natural Sciences students (class size: ~200), while Elisa is on sabbatical. Taking on a comparative physiology full lecture series is no small feat , but Chloé did so brilliantly. We knew exactly when Lecture 4 ended because the clapping from the lecture theatre made it all the way back to the lab. A proper standing ovation (minus the standing we assume).
Then, barely pausing for breath, Chloé co-organized the CRASSH event “Scents and imagination”, bringing together voices from across disciplines to explore how perception is shaped not just by biology, but also by the social and cultural world we inhabit. The event sparked lively conversations and highlighted exactly the kind of interdisciplinary thinking we love to see.
Now, at this point, Elisa jokingly referred to Chloé as “the lab Kardashian” because she’s literally everywhere in the lab news. Chloé naturally took great offence… but only after making sure her name was spelled correctly in the headline.
All in all, a fantastic showing once again. Chapeau bas Chloé […and we have a sneaky suspicion that more good news from her will appear soon…]
May 2025
Back by popular demand, Chloé, Nencki, and our lab friend Ana Dorrego Rivas are at it again! After the triumph of last year’s Arduino-for-neuroscience workshop, where participants went from “what’s a resistor?” to “I just built a laser controller!” in two days, they’ve returned with a sequel: Electronics for Neuroscience.
This time, the action unfolded in a picturesque coastal village in Norfolk, which proved the perfect setting to learn about current flow while watching the tide go out. Between soldering sensors and syncing devices, there was tea, sea air, and the occasional philosophical discussion about whether an Arduino counts as a co-author.
April 2025
🌟 Poster Prize Plot Twist! 🌟
Massive congratulations to superstar Ailie for winning Best Poster Prize at this year’s Cambridge Neuroscience Annual Meeting! In a totally unexpected turn of events, Ailie managed to clinch the win even though Elisa was head judge and had explicitly told the whole lab we were out of the running (“No conflicts of interest!” she said. “It wouldn’t be fair!” she said.) … but apparently, the rest of the judging panel had other ideas. Turns out, when your poster is that good, even the head judge gets overruled.
Ailie, we are so proud – but not at all surprised. You absolutely earned it. 👏
April 2025
As per department ritual, all first-year PhD students had to present at the symposium, and Harin and Connor did not disappoint.
Harin, surprise surprise, delivered a talk so full of surrealist painting metaphors the audience briefly wondered if he’d wandered in from an art history conference. Meanwhile, Connor bravely built his narrative around the four Fs of behaviour controlled by olfaction: food, fear, fighting, and… well, mating, of course.
They clearly won the popular vote, judging by the stream of compliments, but the actual Best Talk prize, with its shiny certificate and modest pile of cash, went elsewhere. We assume they processed the “injustice” the only proper way: over a pint at the pub. Proud of them both!
March 2025
It’s the end of March, which can only mean one thing: Ailie has neurons painted on her cheeks again. That’s right, the Cambridge Neuroscience and CamNeuro outreach flagship event has come and gone, and what a weekend it was! A massive well done to Ailie for helping Dervila lead the charge, making sure everything ran smoothly.
Also, a special mention to Connor, our outreach newcomer, who threw himself into the event with enthusiasm. If you saw him deep in conversation about comparative brain sizes, you’d have thought he’d been doing this for years. Harin managed to escape “new PhD student outreach” duties this year under the entirely valid excuse of having theatre tickets for a very cool show in London – Elisa was green with envy. He has of course already “volunteered” to do it all next year. (Yes, Harin, this is in writing now.)
Thanks to everyone who contributed, whether by explaining neuroscience to the public, painting neurons on faces, or just keeping the team caffeinated (aka, our special guest star Li!).
Same time next year?
March 2025
Big News in the Lab, Part II!
It’s now official, so we are finally allowed to share it here too: Tess Stanley, a neuroscience and philosophy double major at Lafayette College (USA), will be joining our lab as a PhD student this October, supported by the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship! 🏆🎉
Tess will be expanding our lab’s research repertoire by focusing on activity-dependent glial plasticity, bringing an exciting new dimension to our understanding of brain adaptation. Her work will explore how glial cells respond to olfactory environmental changes and learning, complementing our ongoing research on neuronal plasticity.
A huge congratulations to Tess on this incredible achievement! You can see her grinning in the photo, which was taken when she visited earlier this month, and read more about her and her research vision here and here.
We can’t wait to have her on board!
24 March 2025
Big News in the Lab!
Our fall recruitment round wrapped up brilliantly, and we’re excited to finally announce a fantastic new addition to our team, new postdoc Dr Sonu Peedikayil-Kurien. He recently completed his PhD in Meital Oren-Suissa’s lab at the Weizmann Institute, where he studied chemosensation and sexually dimorphic behaviors in C. elegans.
Sonu will be leading a variety of exciting projects in the lab, with a primary focus on all things molecular and functional imaging data analysis. He’ll also be instrumental in setting up and optimizing our upcoming 2-photon microscope, a tool that will be central to our research in the coming years.
Like Elisa, Sonu is a bit camera-shy, so don’t expect to see too many pictures of him. However, you can definitely expect plenty of updates on his work and lots of fascinating data to come. We look forward to seeing all the amazing contributions Sonu will make to our research, and to our endless comparative food conversations over lunch!
March 2025
This is a bit uncomfortable to share, especially since Elisa deeply dislikes hearing her own recorded voice with weird accent and rambles. However, for anyone interested, here’s a conversation about the journey to landing a PI job and starting a lab. This discussion was featured on the amazing Neuroverse podcast and is now available wherever podcasts are found.🎙️
🎧 “Happily Ever After: You Finally Landed a PI Job, Now What?”
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4EM2it5PhEalnePLijECLH
A huge thanks to the incredible hosts Clara (@lenherrc.bsky.social) and Carolina (@carolina-soares.bsky.social) for inviting Elisa to blabber on, and a shoutout to Scientifica for sponsoring the “Tools for Looking into the Brain” series.
March 2025
One published paper wasn’t enough for Dr. Guillaume, she wanted a second accepted within a fortnight!
Behold this once-in-a-lifetime occurrence on the eNeuro website: two newly published papers in the Neuronal Excitability section, one with Sana and co., and the other led by her from her PhD. If that’s not a flex, then I truly don’t understand what is!
Go Chloé! 🚀👩🔬
March 2025
Our Mitral Vs. Tufted paper is out, all formatted and pretty, and accompanied by a full dataset realease🎉
Gadiwalla S, Guillaume C, Huang L, White SJB, Basha N, Petersen PH, Galliano E (2025) Ex vivo functional characterization of mouse olfactory bulb projection neurons reveals a heterogenous continuum. eNeuro, 12 (3) ENEURO.0407-24.2025
Well done everyone and a special shoutout to first author Sana, who, despite being in Iceland, managed to rally, inspire, and drive the team to the finish line brilliantly💪
January 2025
During a time when we could all use some good news, our “American in Iceland” Sana delivered in style! We’re thrilled to report that she has been awarded a one-year doctoral studentship from the Icelandic Government (one of only two granted to life sciences students, value over £50K!) to fund the fourth year of her PhD at the University of Iceland–School of Health Sciences.
She’ll continue working in the lab of our collaborator, Pétur Henry Petersen, and hopefully, she’ll be able to come down to Cambridge a couple of times to work with us in person and complete the exciting dataset for papers 2 and 3—now that paper 1 has officially been accepted! (Oops, was that still a secret? Shoot!)
Full report here, and of course, a mandatory picture with super Icelandic vibes provided.
Congrats, Sana! You’re on a roll! 🎉
December 2024
From our lab to yours, best wishes for a happy holiday break and a fantastic start of the new year 🎄🎆🥂
30 October 2024
And so it ends: a penguin perched proudly on a doctoral hat, the best internal examiner ever (the one and only Steve Edgley), the right Cambridge Monopoly as a lab gift (Cambridge UK, Harin—not Cambridge, Massachusetts!), and a day filled with constant eating (mouse-shaped carrot cake cupcakes, dim sum, anchovies—don’t ask!). Ah yes, also the main event: an impressive oral exam (or PhD viva, as they call it here) with Steve and our external examiner, Geoff Lau from City University of Hong Kong, leading the charge.
It’ll take a while to recover from all the feasting and emotional rollercoster (Elisa was even made to give a formal speech!). While Li tackles her corrections and we adjust to lab life without our resident chief patcher and master complainer, we’ll try to summon the courage to finally move her to the alumni section of the website. 😭
For now, congratulations, almost Dr. Huang!
October 2024
Prize time at the University of Iceland Life and Health Sciences Conference—and look who’s in the spotlight!
Our own Sana has received the prestigious Professor Jóhann Axelsson Motivation Award, presented by the Association of Icelandic Physiologists to honor a young and promising scientist in the field of physiology or related studies. Her winning project and lecture, “Investigating Mitf’s (microphthalmia-associated transcription factor) role in the regulation of neural activity in the murine olfactory bulb,” stood out for its originality and impact. Alongside well-deserved recognition, Sana took home a beautiful bouquet and a cash prize—not too shabby!
In a delightful twist, we celebrated not with Sana (this time!) but with her main supervisor and our lab’s collaborator, Prof. Petur Petersen, who was here in Cambridge to share the exciting news and join our lab meeting. What a perfect way to toast her success with coffee and scones 🏆☕
October – November 2024
As co-lead of Nencki’s Cambridge Open Lab – @cam_openlab – and in collaboration with Mateusz Kostecki (Nencki Institute) and Andre Mala Chagas from Sussex Open Research, Chloé has successfully organized and fundraised for a two-day workshop on Arduino Programming for Neuroscience. This event will take place in Brighton at the end of November and is priced affordably to ensure accessibility for all. It promises to be an unmissable opportunity!
Topics:
- Basic electronics – from electrons to laws
- Controlling devices with Arduino – diodes, motors, servos
- Writing code to control lasers in optogenetic experiments
- Synchronizing devices with Arduino
- Sensing environment – light, temperature, and distance sensors
- Wireless communication
- Writing complex code in Arduino
Read more and register before October 30th here: https://nenckiopenlab.org/arduino-cam/
October 2024
Our first lab member has attended SfN, but—plot twist—not as a student presenting a poster. Ailie was in Chicago as a science writer and staff member of the communication team. She took on this role as part of her Professional Internships for PhD Students (PIPS), which are compulsory non-academic placements for PhD students. While the typical student might seek placements in the pharmaceutical industry, a data science company, or perhaps a publishing house, Ailie is anything but typical. She successfully lobbied SfN to create this position for her, allowing her to indulge her passion and natural talent for science communication and writing. Elisa is both incredibly proud of Ailie’s achievements and heartbroken that she couldn’t be there to chaperone her during Ailie’s first visit to the States and SfN – but she gave her a list of things to eat and art to see, so there’s that. Check out her contributions to @Brain_Facts_org while we eagerly await her return to the lab to share all about her adventures!
October 2024
Three new starters in the lab! A warm welcome to Edina, our new lab manager and senior research technician, and Connor, who is starting his PhD. Harin is also starting his PhD, but he’s a bit of a “fake” new starter since he’s already been with us… So let’s say 2.5 new starters 😉
September 4th 2024
A super important first for our lab: PhD thesis submission, complete! 🎉
On September 4th, Los Angeles was founded, Beyoncé was born, and Ohm and Volts were declared official units of measure. But most importantly, Li submitted her PhD thesis!
Fast forward a few days, and after an hours-long farewell BBQ featuring an overwhelming amount of food and Elisa’s cats (Li’s favourite lab members), she “abandoned” us to start her new gig as a Regulatory Affairs PhD fellow at Vertex Pharmaceuticals 😭. Abandoned us, that is, until she showed up for after-work drinks just a few days later, followed by the CamNeuro garden party… you get the gist. Basically, she’s a boomerang, and we’re never truly rid of her—which suits everyone just fine.
Viva, champagne, and speeches are on the horizon. In the meantime, we’ll be hosting the Hunger Games to decide who inherits her prime window-side desk. Let the games begin!
September 2024
The website is growing!
After having published her first paper as corresponding author (!!!), we have managed to convince Chloé to create her own page so that she can showcase all that she is doing, and show off some of the cool photos that she took in Iceland as well. Read here about her research and her involvement with Nencki Open Lab —-> https://gallianolab.org/chloe/
August 2024
We are hiring a postdoc!
We are looking for a highly motivated, proactive and enthusiastic postdoc to work on a Wellcome Trust funded project which will employ advanced optical techniques, including 2-photon microscopy and holographic light shaping, to monitor and manipulate neural activity in vivo. The aim is to elucidate how sensory inputs drive different mechanisms of neuronal plasticity in different cell types, and how interactions among different types of neurons enhance circuit output and information transfer to the cortex.
Appointments will be made on a fixed-term, full-time basis for 4 years in the first instance and we are open to discuss flexible working patterns to accomodate personal circumstances and/or caring responsabilities. Support will be provided to advance your career both within and outside academia through a tailored personal and professional development programme. If desired, candidates will receive assistance with writing fellowships, joining a Cambridge college, developing a teaching portfolio, and attending specialized summer schools. Additionally, you will have the option to participate in workshops on technical skills, leadership, management, and communication offered within the university.
Further details and information on how to apply before September 10th here: https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/47775/
July 2024
Our “Icelandic” preprint is out! Led by our country-hopping, cold-adapted patcher extraordinaire Sana Gadiwalla and done between Cambridge & the Petersen lab at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, here’s our offering on the mitral vs tufted cell debate in the adult mouse olfactory bulb (and this time Elisa is on the paper):
Gadiwalla S, Guillaume C, Huang L, White SJB, Basha N, Petersen PH, Galliano E (2024) Ex vivo functional characterization of mouse olfactory bulb projection neurons reveals a heterogenous continuum. bioRxiv 2024.07.17.603915. Preprint.
July 2024
Exciting news from the Galliano Lab: a new paper is out, and even more excitingly, Galliano herself is not on it!
Chloé took the lead in writing a Journal Club article for the Journal of Neuroscience. These short pieces provide scholarly reviews of recently published JNeurosci articles, are written by students and postdocs under the guidance of a mentor, and are designed to be accessible to a broad range of young neuroscientists.
Chloé recruited former Cambridge student Connor Doyle, currently a research assistant in the Sohoglu Laboratory at Sussex University, to write a commentary on an exciting new paper from the Ramirez Lab on context and reactivating an engram. Mentored by Arielle Tambini from NYU, they wrote an insightful piece on memory reactivation.
- JC paper: Doyle C, Guillaume C (2024) Reactivating an Engram: Context Matters. J Neurosci. 17;44(29):e0650242024.
- Original paper: Dorst KE et al (2024) Hippocampal Engrams Generate Variable Behavioral Responses and Brain-Wide Network States. J Neurosci. 10;44(2):e0340232023.
Champagne to follow, courtesy of our brand-new corresponding author, Dr. Chloé Guillaume! The unbearably proud PI will just watch from the sidelines and continue to spam text all her PI friends with screenshots of the paper.
PS Perhaps this is a great time to announce that Connor will start a PhD with us in October, funded by a Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholarship 😉
June 2024
For a whole week in June, the lab relocated to Reykjavik, Iceland, to attend 19th International Symposium on Olfaction and Taste – ISOT24 – and of course to hang out with Sana.
It’s been an absolute blast, with poster presentations from Li, Chloe, and Harin, a talk by Elisa, our future lab member Connor coming along for a pre-taste of olfaction, lots of catching up with friends and past colleagues, midnight sun (or at least light greyness), and even the mandatory fermented shark tasting and puffin spotting. Many thanks to ISOT, ECRO, and Jesus and Fitzwilliam Colleges for the travel fellowships, and to Sana for the local know-how.
We have started counting down the days to ISOT2028, which we understand may take place in Okinawa, Japan 😮
April 2024
Huang*, Hardyman* and Edwards belated paper celebration 🥳🍾
We can’t share the champers with you, but their paper is here for everyone to enjoy. And if you want to be around for the celebration when we pop the champagne for the next paper, reach out informally to Elisa. We will soon put out formal job ads for postdocs employed on the lab’s recently awarded Wellcome Trust grant, but we are already keen to hear via email from interested people.
March 2024
Good news all around!
- Li has found a super job in the private sector, which she will start in September – so now it’s thesis writing crunch time
- Shreya has finished her data collection and analysis and her results are cool
- Chloé got a medal together with her PhD diploma (we are all jealous, we want a medal too!)
- Sana’s paper has reached full manuscript draft, a preprint posting is imminent
- Everyone’s abstract has been accepted for ISOT 2024: Iceland, here we come!
Ah yes, we also got a massive grant 😎 Anyone interested in joining us?
23-24 March 2024
Another outstanding weekend of public engagement is done, and Ailie has no voice left!
Together with Dervila Glynn she led the Cambridge Neuroscience / CamBrain efforts at the 2024 Cambridge Festival. The stand they manned for two very busy days featured multiple activities for children of all ages. Showing neurons under one of our teaching microscopes was everyone’s favorite, along with the neuron face paint, of course!
Proud of you Madam President!
February 2024
And paper two is also out!
Congratulations to Li and her two undergraduate mentees Fran and Megan
January 20th 2024
Double birthday celebration for Li and Harin = way too many homebaked goods at lab meeting
January 2024
Harin and Rory join the lab, welcome guys!
Harin is an MPhil in Basic and Translational Neuroscience student and he will be in his lab until summer for his extended project focussed on olfactory enrichment and plasticity.
Rory is a BBSRC Doctoral Training Program student currently rotating with us and exploring models of homeostatic plasticity in the olfactory bulb.
Both are taller than 1.60m, so we are all thrilled that we’ve got somebody else besides Chloé able to reach the tall shelves. Stay tuned for cool science from these two🔬
January 3rd 2024
What better way to start the year than with having the lab’s first paper out?!?
Maggy and Sana’s work which we posted last summer as a preprint is now out in the European Journal of Neuroscience as part of the #dopamine special issue.
Congratulations to all authors, including the amazing collaborator/mentor/friend and electrophysiologist extraordinaire Sue Jones 🤩
December 31st 2023
From our lab to yours, best wishes for a new year filled with plenty of cool neuroscience and excellent coffee
November 2023
Last month Shreya Dwarakacherla joined us for her 3rd year research project. Shreya is medical student intercalating in neuroscience and thanks to Ailie’s tutelage she has already mastered the suble art of olfactory bulb immunohistochemistry. Since she is even less keen on photos of herself being posted than Elisa, we are sharing instead a snap of our former undegrads Emily and Megan. They are both PhDing at Kings College London and last week they happened to stop for a chat in the corridors of New Hunts House front of one of the handsomest posters ever made 😉
September 2023
ECRO 2023, here we come! Chloé and Elisa went to Nijmegen, NL, for the annual European Chemoreception Research Organization meeting. Elisa gave a talk as part of a super interesting session on Mouse Olfaction organized by three amazing Early Career Researchers – Victoria Switacz, Moritz Neßeler, Andres Hernandez Clavijo. She felt rather smug about the fact that for once she had to do something while at a conference instead of just loiteing around and listening to cool science. That was until Chloé told her to hold her beer and proceeded to: (a) present a poster on the mitral/tufted cell physiology project led by Sana; (b) reduce lab friends Tobias Ackels, Ana Dorrego Rivas and Hung Lo to tears during an absolutely hilarious dinner where people competed on replicating the many sounds of olfactometer valves; (c) win an ECRO travel award AND the Cynexo Young Investigator Grant. Talking about overachievers, jeez!
September 2023
And less than a week later, the second preprint from the lab is also out!
What happens in the brain after sudden loss of incoming inputs from eyes, ears and nose – a loss perhaps caused by trauma or viral infections? Does the brain responds and tries to compensate in similar ways across the three sensory modalities? The intrepid Li Huang joined by two stellar undegrads, Fran Hardyman and Megan Edwards systematically trawled through the literature and read 91 papers which looked at deprivation-induced plasticity in rodents. The literature is VERY heterogeneous, every study uses different ways to deprive and to read out the plasticity, but they still managed to find commonalities among the senses when correlating the activity-dependent plasticity mechanisms to the deprivation duration.
August 2023
The first preprint from the lab is out!
“Characterization of identified dopaminergic neurons in the mouse olfactory bulb and midbrain”
A few years ago we (Grubb and Murthy Labs) published a paper detailing how dopaminergic neurons in the olfactory bulb can be cleanly split into two groups using their birthday and presence/absence of an axon. Afterwards, when I moved to Cambridge and kept babbling about them, I was gently made aware that not many people think about the olfactory bulb when you say “dopaminergic neurons”. A true shocker. After this revelation, I stated pondering deep philosophical questions about what it means to be a dopaminergic neuron, and does a stereotypical dopaminergic neuron even exist. Instead of this aimless philosophizing, my much wiser colleague Sue Jones recruited an amazing MPhil Student, Maggy Lau, and together we started a systematic analysis of the electrophysiological properties of dopaminergic neurons across midbrain and olfactory bulb. With the help of another uber-talented student, Sana Gadiwalla, Maggy showed that also within the midbrain hotspots DA neurons are incredibly diverse, and that DA neurons across midbrain and forebrain are substantially different. These results are in line with lots of previous work in other animal models, in vivo, of gene expression etc, and overall question the existence of a single “dopaminergic” phenotype.
June 2023
Megan just got her final results and she smashed it! Well done for graduating with top marks overall, and for her lab project as well. Her lab supervisor is visibly thrilled, she is discovering that nothing beats the feeling of seeing your mentees doing well 🥹
Megan is now off for a well-deserved summer break before starting as an MRes+PhD student at King’s College London. Which is great, she will be able to come visit all the time!
April 2023
The lab’s first postdoc has arrived!! We are thrilled to welcome Dr Chloé Guillaume, who joins us thanks to generous funding from the BBSRC to work on a cool project about dopamine, neurogenesis, and circuit connectivity. Read more about our polyglot Frenchwoman and electrophysiologist extraordinaire on the “Who” page, and follow her on twitter @ChloeG_Neuro
March 2023
Monday March 6th was a big day for Megan, with lab meeting presentation in the morning, and poster presentation in the afternoon as part of the final year undergrads project departmental poster day.
TL;DR she smashed both!
January 2023
The first lab meeting of 2023 was a proper treat: Mika Hyman visited us from the department of History and Philosophy of Science, to talk about her academic work on how we talk about sensory perception, and her equally cool work for the cacao industry on taste and quality control. We met a few months ago at the “Anosmia in Culture and History: Smell Losses/Smell Lessons” in London, and we are very keen to keep the dialogue open and possibly collaborate in the future. The only drawback of the day is that Ailie is seriously considering quitting her PhD to become a cacao neuroscientist …
Halloween 2022
We finally got around to take the “new academic year lab photo”, with Sana joining lab meeting from Iceland, and Ailie providing the thematic baked goods to supplement our normal breakfast offering. And just to show how committed we are to the theme, Emily presented a paper on phantom limb pain 😱.
Looking forward to another year of science with this scary good bunch!
October 2022
Welcome to Megan, who joins our lab for her final-year undegraduate project!
September 2022
Sana, Ailie, and Li – aka The Teal Team – had a blast presenting their posters first at ECRO in Berlin, and then at Cambridge Neuroscience New Horizons meeting. Thank you to the many people who checked out the teal works of art, chatted to them, and gave them valuable feedback on their science.
A special shout out from a very proud PI to Sana and Ailie, who were brave enough to take the plunge and present the fruits of their first year of grad school, demonstrating that even a work-in-progress story is worth sharing. And another one to “senior” Teal Team member Li, who received a special mention for her poster at the CamNeuro meeting and a travel grant from ECRO! Li is writing a blog post detailing her experience as first-time conference presenter, stay tuned.
Last but not least, many thanks to honorary lab member and official photographer Ana Dorrego Rivas, who joined us for both conferences, putting up with cheap accomodation and adventurous food choices.
August 2022
We are going to to Berlin! First lab conference, everyone is super excited about it. Li, Ailie and Sana will bring posters, and Elisa will bring herself. Looking forward to spending four days nerding out about olfaction. And huge thanks to ECRO & Fitzwilliam College for awarding a travel grant to Li, and to Wolfson College for awarding a travel grant to Ailie!
April 2022
We are super happy to welcome Dr Marcus Leiwe from Kyushu University. Marcus will spend some time working remotely from Cambridge, and he is going to hang out with us to talk mitral cell development, rainbow neurons, and proper Japanese food.
Galliano Lab @Cambridge_Uni 