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Joseph D. Zak

@josephdzak.bsky.social
783 followers 573 following 74 posts

Neurobiologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago studying sensory cells and neural circuits. #Neuroscience and #Olfaction. www.zak-lab.org

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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 17h
Dynamics of dopamine transients in human olfactory epithelium during reward learning www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
Del Mármol lab @delmarmollab.bsky.social · 20h
I’m delighted to present our new work on IRs, a massively expanded family of receptors derived from iGluRs. Here we explain how these proteins adapted the iGluR scaffold to sense a variety of stimuli, through an elaborate system of co-receptor subunits. Congrats, team!
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
kevinbolding.bsky.social @kevinbolding.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
NEW BOLDING LAB PREPRINT www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Odor identity is less discriminable in old olfactory bulb than young olfactory bulb. Correlation separation and classifier analysis.
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Kevin A. Scott, PhD @sculpturatus.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
found at ucsf
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
(((Dr Hannah Wirtshafter))) 🔬 @aheadofthenerve.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Hi friends & colleagues! I’m on the hunt for a tenure-track home! I’m a BRAIN Initiative K99/R00 scholar studying learning & memory at the intersection of experimental neuroscience, theory, & machine learning/AI. I’d love to connect & would appreciate help spreading the word! web.mit.edu/hsw/www/
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
We use the pE-300, it's a pretty straightforward setup. We also have a pE-100, its not on a rig at the moment, but I think it could probably work just as well. Good luck!
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
We've been using CoolLED systems on our rigs. Power is tunable, and built-in filters allow for a nice range of opsins.
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
Aurora Scientific @aurorascientific.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
⚡Publication Flash⚡ Our latest publication review, "Perception and Discrimination of Odor Stimuli," explores how animals use olfactory information to navigate environmental dangers. Read it now: aurorascientific.com/perception-and-discrimination-of-odor-stimuli/ #Olfaction #Neuroscience
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
Jamie Roitman @jamiedroitman.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
Photometry phriends preprint: excited to share @racheldonka.bsky.social's side quest to validate how multiple sensors of mesolimbic signaling respond to acute morphine treatment - with @mitchroitman.bsky.social and @basedownloh.bsky.social
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
Jacob Zavatone-Veth @jzv.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Tremendously excited to announce that I will be joining @rockefeller.edu as an Assistant Professor and Head of Lab starting in January 2027! My group will be broadly focused on theoretical neuroscience, and mathematical problems in neural computation in the large.
Rockefeller campus image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rockefeller_University_Campus_aerial_2.jpg, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
Really neat work by my colleagues at UIC comparing ML to traditional ephys event detection tools. Happy that @zachfyke.bsky.social and I could make a contribution!
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
Just a perfect @mblscience.bsky.social evening.
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
The future in Zach’s hands is strong. So much better than I could ever do, and he is just getting started!
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
I think Zach Fyke, a graduate student in our group may have broken some sort of patch-clamp record while teaching at @mblscience.bsky.social. Over the past three days, he has coached 21 people to patch at least one cell on our rig away from home. Photos are our “wall of success.”
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
Oh man, thanks for posting this....definitely an informative watch.
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
Harvard_MCB @harvardmcb.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
Sniffing Out Distance: How the Brain Tracks Odor Dynamics 🧠 🧪🧬 #AcademicSky #higherEd. #Olfaction #Neuroscience www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... @luxorboero.bsky.social @josephdzak.bsky.social @paulmasset.bsky.social @siddjakes.bsky.social @neurovenki.bsky.social @harvardbrainsci.bsky.social
mcb.harvard.edu
Sniffing Out Distance: How the Brain Tracks Odor Dynamics - Harvard University - Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology
A dog unearths a bone buried months ago. A moth flies across a forest toward an orchard. A person opens container after container in the fridge, trying to […]
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
Our work on the perception of intermittent odor stimuli out in @natcomms.nature.com! Led by @luxorboero.bsky.social & former grad student Hao Wu; key contributions from @btolooshams.bsky.social, @siddjakes.bsky.social, @paulmasset.bsky.social, @josephdzak.bsky.social, Farhad Pashakhanloo, Demba Ba.
nature.com
Perception and neural representation of intermittent odor stimuli in mice - Nature Communications
Animals navigate odor plumes by exploiting dynamic and intermittent cues. Here, the authors show that mice can discriminate among different fluctuating odor signals, and characterize their neural enco...
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
Bozza Lab @neuroboz.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
Happy to share the latest from the lab! A microbiome-generated metabolite affects male-male aggression and social dominance in mice via the main olfactory system. Gut-Nose-Behavior. www.cell.com/current-biol...
cell.com
A microbiome-derived olfactory signal regulates inter-male aggression and social dominance in mice
Cichy et al. show that trimethylamine (TMA), a gut microbiome-derived metabolite, activates the receptor TAAR5 in the main olfactory system to regulate aggression and social dominance in male mice. Th...
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
Our latest work is available at @sfnjournals.bsky.social. This project was conceived of and completed by Kai Clane Belonio, an amazing postbac student who worked with us for the past two years. We learned that stress influences olfactory experience and activates microglia in the piriform cortex.
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
Matt Smear @mattsmear.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
Visualizing and Sonifying NeuroData (ViSoND) github.com/Smear-Lab/Vi... is a strategy for observing multiple data streams in video and sound www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... e.g., watch an animal move while you listen to their physiological signals (or vice versa)
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
Jens Notroff @jensnotroff.com · 01/03/2026
Smelly past, or: history with all senses ... Glad to see @theguardian.com reporting on @barahuber.bsky.social and colleagues' brilliant research in #olfactory #archaeology. 👃🏺 www.theguardian.com/science/2026...
theguardian.com
T rex breath and Queen Elizabeth’s car: scientists creating ‘time machine for the nose’
Researchers are recreating ancient odours for museumgoers as interest in the archaeology of smell grows
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
In case there was any doubt about what was going on behind these doors.
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 14/02/2026
Balloon museum in #Chicago, absolutely fantastic instillations.
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
Not exactly #fluorescencefriday, but #chicago was glowing beautifully yesterday evening.
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
Jon Gill @jonvgill.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
Excited to share our new preprint for this project!
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Matthew Cobb @matthewcobb.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
Cool. Smell in the spider brain. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Presumed Glomerular Neuropils in the Central Nervous Systems of Spiders (Araneae)
Spiders sense chemicals in their environment with particular sensory hairs (sensilla) on their legs and feelers. Chemosensory neurons inside these sensilla send their axons into the central nervous s...
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
Catherine Dulac @dulaclab.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
I am thrilled to share our latest work led by @zurisullivan.bsky.social in collaboration with @moffittlab.bsky.social ! We find that the brain encodes distinct, pathogen-specific sickness states across behavior, physiology, neural activity, and gene expression 1/6 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
Alexandra Keinath @atkeinath.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
Another new paper from the lab: Predictive theories like the SR imply that navigators who navigate differently should have cognitive maps which differ in predictable ways. Here we show that this holds in mouse hippocampal CA1. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Environmental representations in mouse hippocampal CA1 reflect the predictive structure of navigation
Predictive theories of cognitive mapping propose that these representations encode the predictive relationships among contents as experienced by the n…
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
Paul Masset @paulmasset.bsky.social · 04/11/2025
First paper from the lab! We propose a model that separates estimation of odor concentration and presence and map it on olfactory bulb circuits Led by @chenjiang01.bsky.social and @mattyizhenghe.bsky.social joint work with @jzv.bsky.social and with @neurovenki.bsky.social @cpehlevan.bsky.social
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
Chicago is definitely burning. Just not in the way the news wants to portray.
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
Rupinder Kaur, PhD @kaurr.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
#Wolbachia has puzzled scientists with its power to rewire insect reproduction. What if I tell you that we found one of the keys Wolbachia use to rewire its host AND a small molecule inhibitor uses this key to mimic what this microbe has mastered for millions of years. www.cell.com/cell-reports...
cell.com
Beyond Wolbachia—Can a small molecule control insect reproduction?
Kaur et al. demonstrate reduced histone acetylation as a key mechanism underpinning Wolbachia’s paternal-effect embryonic lethality trait in Drosophila melanogaster. Recapitulation of this trait by in...
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
Evan Schaffer @esschaffer.bsky.social · 05/09/2025
Very excited to see this out in the world. It was fun to play a (small) part in it.
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
Nicholas Bellono @nbellono.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
Octopuses sense environmental microbiomes to drive predatory and parental behaviors. Artwork by Lily Soucy. #evolution #sensation #microbiome @cellpress.bsky.social
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Siddharth Jayakumar @siddjakes.bsky.social · 02/09/2025
Excited to share our latest!! Thanks to everyone involved especially @neurovenki.bsky.social!
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 01/09/2025
Thrilled to share this work, long time in the making! Carried through creatively by @siddjakes.bsky.social after initial design & piloting by @trackingskills.bsky.social, with help from @trackingactions.bsky.social. Modeling in collaboration with Massimo Vergassola & Nicola Rigolli.
biorxiv.org
Mice navigate scent trails using predictive policies
Animals actively sense their environment to extract features of interest to guide behaviors. For mammals, odors are prominent environmental features which are sampled by active modulation of sniffing ...
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 20/08/2025
Proud to share Kai Clane Belonio’s latest work in our lab. Kai showed that induced-depression decreases behavioral tolerance of aversive odorants as well as increases in neuroinflammation in sensory affective areas. Also contributing are @nervenkidd.bsky.social and Eyerusalem Haile.
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
Felix Baier @felixbaier.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
🚨Very happy that my PhD work is now out in @nature.com! We discovered that evolution, by acting in the midbrain, shifted the threshold to escape in Peromyscus mice, to fine-tune defensive strategies in different environments www.nature.com/articles/s41... This was a truly collaborative effort! 🧵⬇️
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 02/07/2025
Some campus brutalism to accompany this brutal heatwave.
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 26/06/2025
Good thought, but I don’t know for sure about lipofuscin. I’m not surprised in the least that you see them at 8w. They can be apparent even in juveniles.
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 26/06/2025
These are super common especially in the glomerular layer. Tons of autofluorescent accumulation in both red and green. They are aggregations of some sort and often increase with the age of the animal. I assume they are extracellular plaques.
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Reposted by Joseph D. Zak
Joe Walker @evojfwalker.bsky.social · 26/06/2025
@shawn-anthony.bsky.social helped ~20 undergrads learn transcriptomics in this budget friendly investigation into the dogbane family. A fun way to investigate the molecular evolution of the group. Also, a chance to collaborate with @phylonatworks.bsky.social and Jarrad! doi.org/10.1101/2025...
doi.org
Going green: Recycling transcriptomes to infer evolutionary relationships, gene duplication, gene tree conflict, and patterns of molecular evolution in the Apocynaceae
Background and Aims: The flowering plant family Apocynaceae exhibits diverse adaptations with biological and pharmaceutical significance, many of which have been studied with RNA-seq. However, despite...
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 24/06/2025
That lab space looks awfully familiar 🤔
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Izumi Fukunaga @ifukunaga.bsky.social · 13/06/2025
Animals’ sniffing drives rhythmic input to the olfactory system. How does this timing contribute to perception, especially beyond first steps of olfactory processing? We tested this using simple closed-loop optogenetics in our new paper: www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
cell.com
Decoding olfactory bulb output: A behavioral assessment of rate, synchrony, and respiratory phase coding
Neurogenetics; Behavioral neuroscience; Sensory neuroscience
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 05/06/2025
Congrats, Paul! This is fantastic!
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
What a special place. So grateful for all the friendships, learning, and science that fullfilled my time @harvard.edu.
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 14/05/2025
Proud of @nervenkidd.bsky.social (Zach Fyke), a graduate student in our group, for being recognized by @uicbios.bsky.social for both his research AND teaching over the past academic year. Here are links to some of his recent work: tinyurl.com/37vw5s5f tinyurl.com/23zu458t tinyurl.com/3mmjvw83
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 13/05/2025
Congrats, Rachel! Well-deserved.
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Datta Lab @dattalab.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
Maps are everywhere in the brain...and finally we've discovered one in the nose! Led by @davidhbrann.bsky.social, we uncovered the logic that specifies the positions of each of the 1,000 sensory neuron subtypes in the nose and aligns their projections to the brain.👇👃see more details below👃👇
biorxiv.org
A spatial code governs olfactory receptor choice and aligns sensory maps in the nose and brain
Although topographical maps organize many peripheral sensory systems, it remains unclear whether olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) choose which of the ~1100 odor receptors (ORs) to express based upon t...
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
One of our new favorite images for #fluoresencefriday. Graduate student, Lindsay Vivona, labeled fibers from each anterior olfactory nucleus hemisphere as they bidirectionally pass through the anterior commissure. #neuroskyence #olfaction
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Joseph D. Zak @josephdzak.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
This NOFO seems to active: grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...
grants.nih.gov
PAR-25-234: NINDS Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) for Training of Postdoctoral Fellows (F32 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
NIH Funding Opportunities and Notices in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts: NINDS Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) for Training of Postdoctoral Fellows (F32 Clinical Tri...
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