How living matter measures the physical world, and acts on it
An animal is not separate from the universe. It is the universe, doing something. A pattern that keeps itself going, the way a wave is water in motion. To persist, that pattern has to exchange matter and energy. It samples what carries information bearing on its own survival. It integrates that with what it is already doing. It selects an action, and then carries it out. We call that process behavior. We study the whole loop, and what happens when it is disrupted.
That is one question, not four. The lab looks like several projects from outside. It looks that way because the loop has stages, and each stage needs its own instrument. A worm orienting in a magnetic field, a worm deciding whether it sits in water or in soil, and a dystrophic muscle failing under load are the same problem. They sit at different points on the same circuit. The matter being sensed is sometimes called the outside world and sometimes the animal itself. That split is bookkeeping done by the observer. The animal is measuring one continuous physical system that it happens to be part of.
We are recruiting two graduate students to start in Fall 2027
Our first priority is Duchenne muscular dystrophy: human muscle cell culture, organoids and mouse ex vivo physiology, asking how calcium handling goes wrong in dystrophic muscle and what mechanical load does to it.
We are also open to a student on magnetic orientation, for someone who wants the molecular and physiological mechanism rather than behavior alone. Nobody is currently on that question in this lab, so it is open ground.
One seat is a PhD and the other is an MS. Both are supported, through a combination of research and teaching assistantships. Strong candidates whose interests sit near either direction should write anyway.
The loop, and where our work sits on it
The five stages below are each treated in full on the research page.
Sampling: what information is even available
The Earth's magnetic field is almost too weak to detect, and we showed that the worm orients to it anyway.
Processing: turning signals into a decision
Signals are weighed by glia and by neuromodulators, not by neurons alone.
Executing: producing force, and knowing that you did
Muscle produces the force and also reports on its own state, which makes it a sensor as well as an actuator.
Responding to disruption
We break the loop on purpose, with a genetic lesion, with Mars analog gravity and magnetic fields, and with a pathogen the mother met.
Building what does not exist
About a fifth of what we publish is an instrument, an assay or a method rather than a result.
Training is the point
- 226people trained since 2015, 217 of them alumni
- 89.1%of alumni with a known destination continued in STEM
- 31publications, most with student co-authors
- 91%of alumni we can still account for
Recently
Science is part of the same loop
Information is only useful if it can be used to alter a process. That applies to the lab as much as to the animal. Generating knowledge is half the work, and integrating it into the society the lab sits inside is the other half. We take the work into schools and community groups, host visitors in the laboratory, run a C. elegans channel watched more than 41,000 times, and publish a book for children. Young visitors often send us drawings of what they saw, and we keep them. What we do, and how to arrange a visit.
Graduate students, undergraduates and high school researchers in this lab are trained in the whole arc of a project, from reading the literature to presenting results, and most author posters or papers. Our publication list marks every student author, so you can see for yourself how often that happens.