HHMI

CHEVY CHASE, MD—The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) announced five upcoming competitions for scientists across career stages, from undergraduates to senior faculty. This year’s Gilliam Fellows Program competition opens today. The program provides up to three years of generous support for second- and third-year PhD students and their advisors at eligible institutions. This year’s competition will welcome up to 80 Fellows, the largest cohort in the program’s history.

Janelia Group Leader Ann Hermundstad will lead a new HHMI Janelia Initiative called Theory@HHMI, which joins Biology, Tools@HHMI (formerly Molecular Tools & Imaging), and AI@HHMI in advancing Janelia’s grand challenge to understand how the brain generates behavior, and in strengthening scientific capability across HHMI.

april pruitt Autism spectrum disorder is diagnosed four times more often in boys than in girls, but scientists don’t fully understand why. Gilliam Fellow April Pruitt, a PhD student at Yale University, studies estradiol, a form of estrogen, and how it interacts with genetic mutations linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders.

Every great scientific career begins with a question no one has been able to answer — and a scientist stubborn enough to keep asking it. This series looks back at the careers of some of HHMI’s most distinguished scientists — people whose contributions have changed what we know about life itself, and whose stories reflect the best of what science, and scientists, can be.

KEY TAKEAWAYS Janelia researchers and collaborators at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, the University of Cambridge and Google Research have completed a map of the more than 166,000 neurons in the brain and ventral nerve cord of the fruit fly. The wiring diagram will help researchers better understand how the brain enables complex action, from sensory perception to behavior.

KEY TAKEAWAYS Janelia is betting on a decade-long scientific effort to understand how the brain generates behavior, pursuing a mechanistic account that links molecules, neurons, circuits, physiology, computation, and action in a living vertebrate.

A Janelia postdoc’s months-long microscope-integration problem evolved into a new standard designed to bring AI more directly into the physical world. Developed from a collaboration between Anthropic and the HHMI Janelia Research Campus, the Model Hardware Standard connects scientific instruments faster and enables AI systems to monitor and adjust experiments in real time.

Hadassah mendez-vazquez Gilliam Fellow Hadassah Mendez-Vazquez is interested in how neurodegeneration happens. She studies manganism, a neurological disorder caused by exposure to high levels of the essential nutrient manganese.

Chevy Chase, MD — The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is pleased to announce the selection of 176 undergraduates from 109 institutions across 36 states and territories as the inaugural cohort of Cech Fellows, launching a new summer research program honoring Nobel laureate and former HHMI President Thomas R. Cech.

KEY TAKEAWAYS Freeman Hrabowski Scholar Walter Gonzalez and his team are developing new technology to decipher what’s happening in the brains of songbirds when they sleep. The team found zebra finches dream of different songs when they are asleep than the ones they sing when they are awake. They are now using their platform to decipher these dream songs and, potentially, shape them.