News

New paper just dropped! This was the first project I worked on at Penn as a grad student and my deepest dive into neuroscience thus far. After pivoting towards computer vision and behavior, Jessie Burke (now at Columbia), took over the final, very technical experiments and wrote the paper to get it to publication. It’s a cool project, and I am really happy to have been a part of it (though in total honesty, I was happy to move on to less crunchy neuro projects).

Back in July, I got to present at the Animal Behavior Society (ABS) virtual conference. ABS is always a bit intense, not because the people are mean or intimidating, I feel like ABS is one of the most welcoming conferences I’ve participated in. It’s just so much. Most of the talks are 15-30 minutes, and they have about 4 parallel sessions going at once, So you spend all day, for several days, running around the venue trying to get to the talks that you want to catch, and inevitably you are faced with some impossible dilemmas and you just have to choose. A friend of mine described it as a “science bender”, which I think is pretty accurate.

When I was 13 or so, I started a Livejournal. I don’t remember who got me into Livejournal, but I spent hours writing updates, working on my background, color scheme, and profile pics. (I think if you had the unpaid version you got a total of three profile picture slots. Memory was pretty sparse back then it seems.) When facebook came around, I gradually transitioned over. (I remember feeling strongly about the fact that facebook was stupid and would never catch on.) Like all of us, as Facebook got bigger, I stopped updating by livejournal, or the blogger that replaced it. And then I moved to Twitter. Oh, and then I got married, and I had someone to talk to, so I didn’t have this compulsion to write down all my thoughts on a carefully designed page. So this all feels like a return to form, albeit 18 years later.