ANNOUNCEMENTS

2024 Beauty of the Brain Image Contest
We are excited to announce the winners of the 2024 Beauty of the Brain image contest! This year we received 31 submissions, of which five were selected as winners. Thank you to all who took the time to send us your images and to the 147 people who voted for their favorites. A gallery of this year’s submissions can be found here. Full image descriptions are visible if you click on the “I” information symbol on the corner of the image.

The winning images were:
Tangled Tubules
Mara Casebeer,
Lab of Dan Needleman, Harvard University

A Sparkling Spot
Keunjung Heo,
Lab of Clifford Woolf, Boston Children’s Hospital

Connect to Hear: Afferent and Efferent Neurons in the Ear
Yi-Chia Huang,
Lab of Lisa Goodrich, Harvard Medical School

Stairway to Heaven: The Bundle of a Human Stem-Cell Derived Hair Cell
Carl Nist-Lund
Lab of Karl Koehler, Boston Children’s Hospital

Follow Your Heart, But Take Your Brain With You
Encarnacion Torres Jimenez
Lab of Victor Navarro, Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Community Stories

Double Agents: How Glial Tumors Take On Interneuronal Identities
How do pediatric brain tumors mimic normal brain development, and how can this be leveraged for therapies? Ilon Liu, Mariella Filbin and colleagues find that a specific brain tumor type resembles GABAergic interneuron development, and with this knowledge they identify novel targets against this lethal tumor.
Breeding for Skull Shape Changes the Dog Brain
Sophie Barton shares new research investigating how humans may have unwittingly altered the brain morphology of domestic dogs through selective breeding for head shape. Dogs with extreme head shapes show widespread reductions in gray matter volume across the brain.
Unveiling the Possible Origins of Visual Category Information in the Brain
Brain regions that preferentially process faces, places, and words may emerge naturally from exposure to diverse images, without requiring built-in structures dedicated to specific categories. By training AI models to distinguish images based on visual differences alone, researchers found that brain-aligned category-selective neurons emerged spontaneously in the model.

Upcoming Events

Neural Development Club
January 21, 2025
5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
Location: Warren Alpert 236
Talk by Rachel Hostetler (Allen Institute).
Spatial Transcriptomics 101
January 23, 2025
11:00 am to 12:00 pm
Location: Warren Alpert 563
Featuring Jeff Moffitt (Boston Children's Hospital/HMS)