Jackson Borchardt's paper "SurfDist: Interpretable Three-Dimensional Instance Segmentation Using Curved Surface Patches" was published in WACV 2026. It's an approach for segmentation of smooth blobs which are common entities in microscopic biomedical imaging. The trick is to concatenate a vector of parameters that define a geometric surface primitive to the standard voxel/pixel output of a dense encoder-decoder network (like a 3D U-Net), a la the StarDist, StarDist3D, and Spl

As part of his PhD work, Ray built an all-optical, closed-loop, whole-brain-imaging system to interrogate the brain of the nematode C. elegans, discovering fundamental biology about how nervous systems remember. He used a Mightex digital micromirror device (DMD) to spatially target optogenetic stimulation of individual neurons, under the control of his CLEF closed-loop integration software platform. As a result, Mightex awarded him first place in their annual research compet

Sometimes a fresh pair of eyes in a lab notices a phenomenon that has been under the noses of researchers for a long time but ignored as a distraction. After more careful observations, replications, and basic experimental characterization, a study of prior literature, and discussion with experts in the field, it can be worth sharing with the world. In this case the fresh pair of eyes were those of new lab member May Li . As May was getting her experimental sea legs in the lab

Current Biology published a perspective article, " Short-term memory: How oscillatory networks preserve sensory history" which covers our recent paper about short-term memory in the worm. It's a nice piece by Tomke Stürner which contextualizes our work in the larger body of neuroscience research on how nervous systems implement short term memories, using oscillatory network dynamics, in the service of decision making. This could be an ancient, deeply conserved architecture s

More commentary to come, but for now, enjoy the paper! Congrats to Ray and the team.

Kevin Zhou , former postdoc in the collaborating lab of Laura Waller at Berkeley, and who recently started his own lab at University of...

We developed an "interpretable machine learning" system to find and characterize blobs in volumetric images, such as microscopy images of...

This is a nice news article by Benjamin Plackett in Nature covering our science and community building work to establish tardigrades as a...

This is an idea and a small but curious result that I've been sitting on for a very long time. Finally got around to sharing it. It the...