Leslie B Vosshall PhD

Spot the squares with insect repellent

Mosquito 🦟 Tic Tac Toe volunteering for @jacoporazzauti.bsky.social PhD thesis

A central somatotopic map of the fly leg supports spatially targeted grooming https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.27.708590v1

That comment was not written by me, and it does not reflect my views. The Times removed the comment after confirming that the commenter had changed their display name solely for this post. Thanks to all those who flagged it for me. 2/2

I want to address something directly. A comment was recently posted in the @nytimes.com comments section under the name "Leslie V" in response to a story about a former HHMI Investigator. 1/2

$15k stipend to support 9 weeks of full time summer research!

For rising juniors/seniors who are able to travel to and obtain housing at the location of the lab they are placed in!

I did an HHMI summer experience in 2013 and it changed everything for me! Apply…or tell someone to apply!

🧪🧠

What happens when HHMI scientists come together? Inspiring conversations, new perspectives, and a shared excitement for discovery. No matter what program they’re part of, our Investigators, Scholars, Fellows, and more join a vibrant scientific community driven by bold ideas.

Please encourage undergraduates with an interest in biomedical research to apply!
Deadline is December 22. $15,000 stipend for the 9 week @hhmi-science.bsky.social Cech Fellows Program.

"My advice to other undergraduates: Just go for it!" — Lalitha Ravipati, alum, Summer Undergraduate Research Program

Rising junior or senior who's interested in working alongside some of the nation's top scientists this summer? Apply now: bit.ly/CechFellows 🧪

Summer Undergraduate Research Experience | HHMI The Cech Fellows Program is a paid, nine-week summer research experience empowering the next generation of scientific leaders.

@hhmi.org Summer Undergraduate Research Experience - #CechFellows named in honor of Prof Tom Cech
Deadline to apply: 12/22/2025
Spend 9 weeks in a paid, mentored biomedical research experience in an HHMI lab. See you next summer!!!
www.hhmi.org/programs/cec...

FERAL: A Video-Understanding System for Direct Video-to-Behavior Mapping Animal behavior unfolds continuously in time, yet quantitative analyses often require segmenting it into discrete, interpretable states. Although manual annotation can achieve this, it remains slow, s...

Our preprint is out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Peter Skovorodnikov and I are excited to present FERAL: a new video-understanding toolkit that maps raw video directly to behavior, no pose estimation required.
It works across species, from lab to field, and even in collective systems. (🧵1/n)

Summer Undergraduate Research Experience | HHMI The Cech Fellows Program is a paid, nine-week summer research experience empowering the next generation of scientific leaders.

Calling all rising juniors & seniors: Interested in biological or biomedical research? Applications for our ’26 Summer Undergraduate Research Experience Program are now open! Nine weeks, hands-on research, & mentorship from some of the nation’s top scientists — learn more: bit.ly/CechFellows

Congratulations Election to the National Academy of Medicine Sun Hur, Joshua T. Mendell, Duojia Pan, Jay Shendure HHMI Investigators

4 HHMI Investigators have been elected to the @nam.edu!

Election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine. Learn how these investigators are advancing our understanding of biology and human health: hhmi.news/4oxodfS #NAMmtg

We’re thrilled to announce that Dr. Xin Jin has been named the 2026 Peter Gruss Young Investigator. Her pioneering work developing high-throughput in vivo screening strategies is unraveling the genetic mechanisms of neurodevelopmental disorders. buff.ly/RI9emVa

As you can see in this pic we practiced this presentation a lot and we also have some FERAL tshirts! #getferalatSfN

#SfN25 Monday morning we present FERAL: a video-understanding tool for animal behavior detection without the need for tracking or pose estimation! FERAL detects single animal, social and collective behavior in the lab and the wild! Visit our poster at board ZZ5 and check more here: www.getferal.ai

Lights, camera, action potential!

Watch as the stage is set to welcome the global neuroscience community for a week of discovery, collaboration, and innovation at #SfN25!

#neurosky #neuroskyence #academicchatter

The male genitalia of an 𝘈𝘦𝘥𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘭𝘣𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘴 mosquito

What does mating look like when you only have a single shot at getting it right?

Very excited to share our work on an almost-invisible female control, rapidly evolving mating recognition systems, and species that break the rules and take over the world. IN MOSQUITOES>

What we got wrong about mosquito mating - News Researchers have discovered the first evidence of what happens when a female mosquito chooses to mate for the one and only time in her life.

Researchers in the Vosshall lab have discovered the first evidence of what happens when a female mosquito chooses to mate for the one and only time in her life.

We spoke to @leslievosshall.bsky.social and @leahhouri.bsky.social about their unexpected findings. See the full Q&A:

Excellent work! I'm in support of any move away from the grotesque publishing model and journal profiteering we currently have, but how are we going to get institutional promotions/recruitment panels, funding bodies, grant peer reviewers etc to recognise it in their decision making?

IT'S HAPPENING! 💥 I'm psyched to launch the collaboration between @qedscience.bsky.social & @openrxiv.bsky.social @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social! Preprint + q.e.d = your science is out there, and anyone can appreciate it. Let's care about making discoveries, and not on “getting published” (1/3) 👇

Do we really still need scientific journals when BiorXiv + the community + q.e.d. evaluate, filter and provide constructive feedback on a #preprint in order to strengthen and improve the message?

#IMHO, this is really a question worth asking.

Enabling options for review: from training and transparency to author-centered AI tools - openRxiv Peer review is widely viewed as a critical aspect of biomedical communication. Ideally, it provides authors with feedback so they can improve manuscripts and gives readers, particularly nonspecialists...

Excited to launch an openRxiv partnership with the scientist-run AI review service qed (@qedscience.bsky.social), the brainchild of @odedrechavi.bsky.social 1/n

openrxiv.org/enabling-rev...

This has always seemed to me to be an obvious no-brainer. Journals controlling the review process is such a hangover from Victorian gentlemen's clubs, and it feels that great papers get published *in spite* of the system, rather than because of it.

The idea is to decouple the journals from the review step. They’ll still exist, but they’ll need to add other value. They’ll highlight, curate, add new perspectives. If they do a good job they can still be prestigious (like Scientific American or Wired) (1.2) 👇

A single-nucleus transcriptomic atlas of the adult Aedes aegypti mosquito A comprehensive single-nucleus RNA-seq atlas of >367,000 nuclei from male and female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes reveals sexual dimorphism in sensory systems and brain cell types and widespread co-expres...

Excited to announce the final version of the Mosquito Cell Atlas is out now in @cellpress.bsky.social!! 🦟🩸

There is SO much left to find & investigate in this dataset (& the rich biology of the Aedes aegypti mosquito)! We hope this helps scientists in many fields!
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

A single-nucleus transcriptomic atlas of the adult Aedes aegypti mosquito A comprehensive single-nucleus RNA-seq atlas of >367,000 nuclei from male and female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes reveals sexual dimorphism in sensory systems and brain cell types and widespread co-expres...

🦟 We've just published the world's first head-to-toe single-cell atlas of the Aedes aegypti mosquito in @cp-cell.bsky.social!
The #MosquitoCellAtlas maps 69 cell types across 19 tissues, revealing surprising biology. Read it here:
shorturl.at/dJWT3

Researchers release the world’s first head-to-toe cellular atlas of the mosquito - News The atlas makes the most dangerous animal in the world a lot easier to study—and perhaps defeat one day.

A global effort, led by @leslievosshall.bsky.social and @nadavshai.bsky.social, just made the most dangerous animal in the world a lot easier to study—and perhaps defeat one day.

Learn more about the first head-to-toe cellular atlas of the mosquito, published in @cellpress.bsky.social, below.

Ancient origin of an urban underground mosquito Understanding how life is adapting to urban environments represents an important challenge in evolutionary biology. In this work, we investigate a widely cited example of urban adaptation, Culex pipie...

How does life evolve to adapt to modern cities?

Out now in Science, my PhD work with @lindymcbr.bsky.social uncovers the ancient origin of the “London Underground mosquito” – one of the most iconic examples of urban adaptation.

🧵(1/n)
@science.org
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady4515

Q.E.D works amazingly well! I was a skeptic at the beginning and then just really really impressed. For change 🥂