News & Announcements

Press release provided by Washington Research Foundation Washington Research Foundation (WRF) has awarded $250,000 to enable Physiology and Biophysics Professor Andrés Barría, Ph.D., to screen for new compounds that could be further developed for the treatment of neurological disorders and synaptopathies including Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia. Barría used a previous grant of $50,000 from WRF in 2021 to develop high-throughput screening assays that will be used in this work. NMDA-type glutamate receptors containing GluN2B subunits regulate many processes important to…

PBio is pleased to share two upcoming faculty papers! Dr. Edgar Walker is an author on a recent paper that explores neural sampling code to quantitatively test generative models of the brain: Taking the neural sampling code very seriously: A data-driven approach for evaluating generative models of the visual system is available on OpenReview. Drs. Lisbeth De La Cruz (former PBio Postdoctoral Scholar), Derek Bui, Claudia Moreno, and Oscar Vivas have published a reviewed preprint in eLife entitled: Sympathetic Motor…

July 7, 1940 – September 28, 2023 Peter Schwindt was an exceptional scientist who served the department from his graduate student days until he retired in 2000. Peter, with his long-term collaborator Wayne Crill and many trainees, performed pioneering studies using two-electrode voltage-clamp on spinal motoneurons in situ. Those studies provided fundamental insight into mechanisms that control the relation between a neuron’s synaptic input and its action potential output. Some notable highlights were the discovery of a low threshold, persistent…

P.Bio professor Andrés Barría has been named the first Assistant Dean for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (DEI) in Research and Graduate Education for the School of Medicine. Andrés has worked to push social justice initiatives since he came to the UW in 2005. He was a member of the UW Faculty Council on Race, Equity, and Justice and was a co-chair and founder of the School of Medicine’s Biomedical Research EDIT committees. He also founded P.Bio’s DEI committee. His work…

Two P.Bio trainees, Patrick Zhang (Fairhall/Walker lab) and Ryan Ressmeyer (Horwitz lab), were awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships. UW’s Computational Neuroscience Center provides a summary of their work.

Chet Moritz, PhD, joint professor in P.Bio, Rehab Medicine, and Electrical & Computer Engineering, has been featured in a UW Medicine article regarding his research on spinal stimulation.

Leenoy Meshulam, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in the department and the UW Computational Neuroscience Center, is a lead author on a new Nature paper. The paper details research she conducted with Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology where she was a guest of the Theoretical Sciences Visiting Program.  Her work was recently featured in a UW Medicine Newsroom article.

Two great articles were published this week featuring the work from the Tuthill Lab on snow flies and their adaptations in sub-zero temperatures. Choose from The Atlantic (written by Ed Yong, a favorite science writer of John’s) or The Guardian (as linked from UW Today). Kudos to John and all the folks in his lab who contributed: Dominic Golding, Katie Rupp, Anne Sustar, and Brandon Pratt. Photo Credit: @snowflyproject

Professor emeritus Tom Hornbein, MD, passed away on May 6, 2023. Dr. Hornbein was faculty in both Physiology & Biophysics and Anesthesiology. He was also known for his West Ridge climb of Mount Everest in 1963, which he wrote about in his book Everest: The West Ridge. HistoryLink published an essay about his life in 2014. Our sincerest condolences are with his family and friends.

HHMI announced today the selection of Claudia Moreno, PhD, as part of their inaugural Freeman Hrabowski Scholars. We are thrilled for her! For more about Claudia, please visit her lab website. The UW Newsroom article can be found here and the HHMI provides additional information aobut the program on their website.