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Vikram Chandra

@vchandra.bsky.social
335 followers 572 following 10 posts

Incoming Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute (March 2027). BWF CASI postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. Brains, behaviour, evolution, acoels. scholar.google.com/citations?user=z…

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Vikram Chandra @vchandra.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Mot sure I understand. Excising bits of my Mac would lead to degraded behaviour, but surely it’s still computing? Or maybe you mean something else? Hofstenia is unusual among animals because it’s so robust to major damage, and because its brain seems so different. We’d like to understand this
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Vikram Chandra @vchandra.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I’m looking for a senior research scientist to lead a transgenics engineering project in Hofstenia with scope to build related projects, and to help with lab management. Feel free to get in touch for more detail. Deadline: Oct 13th crick.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/External/job...
crick.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com
Senior Laboratory Research Scientist
Salary for this Role: From £47,080 with benefits, subject to skills and experience. Job Title: Senior Laboratory Research Scientist Reports to: Vikram Chandra [C] Closing Date: 13/Oct/2026 23.59 GMT J...
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Vikram Chandra @vchandra.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I’m hiring! I’m looking for postdocs to lead multiple systems neuroscience projects - to identify organising principles for Hofstenia’s distributed brain, and to understand how it computes and how it generates coherent behaviour. Deadline: Oct 11th crick.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/External/job...
crick.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com
Postdoctoral Fellow
Salary for this Role: From £47,500 with benefits, subject to skills and experience. Job Title: Postdoctoral Fellow Reports to: Vikram Chandra [C] Closing Date: 11/Oct/2026 23.59 GMT Job Description: J...
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Reposted by Vikram Chandra
Matt Lovett-Barron @mlovettbarron.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Our lab's latest paper on the neurobiology of collective behavior is now published www.nature.com/articles/s41... This is the work of a great team in the lab - led by Jo-Hsien Yu, with Geoff Meyerhof, Jimjohn Milan, and Julia Napoli @nature.com @danionella.bsky.social
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Reposted by Vikram Chandra
Leah Houri-Zeevi @leahhouri.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
🩸🩸🩸TODAY WE SHARE TWO MAJOR DISCOVERIES🩸🩸🩸 1. We peered into genomes and brains of the rare mosquitoes that QUIT feeding on blood and found what biting is built from 2. Humans got rid of isoleucine in their blood, malaria suffers from it, and mosquito proteomes budget for it THREADS>
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Vikram Chandra @vchandra.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
A bit. From coarse anatomy, several have a subepidermal brain seemingly like Hofstenia’s, and both lack features of convolutid brains, consistent with a primitive diffuse brain. But we need higher res. And I think we can learn things about brain evolution here regardless of how the tree turns out!
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Vikram Chandra @vchandra.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Structurally and functionally, Hofstenia has something that diffuse nets don’t, so it can help us understand what has to change for rich behaviour to evolve. So we need to figure out how this diffuse brain is organised, and we can then compare both within xenacoels and across the whole tree
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Vikram Chandra @vchandra.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
2. Hofstenia specifically is an early-branching acoel with a special diffuse brain: no internal regionalisation, uniquely robust to damage, but still capable of sophisticated behaviour. I argue this represents a plausible intermediate between nets and typical brains (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...)
biorxiv.org
Distributed neural computation and the evolution of the first brains
The origin of brains in the Precambrian was a landmark in animal evolution, enabling new behavior and life histories. Brains likely evolved from diffuse nerve nets, but we do not know what the first b...
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Vikram Chandra @vchandra.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Good q. I do aim to compare across xenacoels! I think it’s a great ‘model clade’ within which brains have changed extensively. Why acoels first: 1. Xenoturbella is supposed to have only a diffuse nerve net. Assuming this is true, I’d bet this is probably not very different from other diffuse nets
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Vikram Chandra @vchandra.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I will be hiring at all levels soon - I’m looking for systems neuroscientists, molecular biologists, genomics experts, physicists, and more. If you’re interested in distributed computation, brain evolution, or the behaviour of marine invertebrates, get in touch! www.crick.ac.uk/research/lab...
crick.ac.uk
Vikram Chandra
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Vikram Chandra @vchandra.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I’m especially glad to be starting alongside an incredible set of group leaders, in an environment that is collaborative, ambitious, and fun.
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Vikram Chandra @vchandra.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I am excited to announce that I will start the Brain Origins Lab at the Crick in March 2027! Using acoels as a model system, the lab will study how animal brains evolve, and how innovations in brain organisation enable new computational abilities and the evolution of complex behaviour.
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