Nastacia has published a review article in Current Opinions in Behavioral Sciences exploring how bumblebees can use social behaviors to respond to thermal stress. Her work highlights the challenges that bees face in a changing climate and outlines key directions for future research. Congratulations, Nastacia! Goodwin and Wang, Facing the heat: behavioral and molecular underpinnings…
What a year! It's been fun settling in and building in exciting new directions. Some highlights and happenings as we say goodbye to 2024: February 2024: We received our first octopuses! After a long journey, it was so rewarding to finally get them into the lab. March 2024: Two new undergraduates, Aimel and Ashlyn, joined…
what a whirlwind of a year! it's been a joy to see our lab grow and change over time. some highlights since spring of this year: May 2023: We completed our first series of CompNeuroEtho meetings with the Ahmed lab. We learned about new tools, centralized resources, and began troubleshooting behavioral/computational projects together. May 2023:…
The final manuscript to come out of my PhD work in the Ragsdale Lab is posted to bioRxiv: Wang and Ragsdale: Signaling ligand heterogeneities in the peduncle complex of the cephalopod mollusc Octopus bimaculoides. This manuscript accompanied me from Chicago to Princeton to the Smithsonian in DC to Woods Hole to Seattle--a long and meandering and…
We are rapidly nearing the end of winter quarter 2023, some days I can even feel spring in the air! Our Racism in Neuroscience class has been a sustaining source of nourishment for me this quarter. I'm grateful to the the all the students in this class; I have learned so much from them all.Here…
hello from the end of 2022, a big year of transitions and transformations. here are some highlights from the year: We published our manuscript on octopus steroid hormones. I am thankful to our fantastic collaborators in the Cologna Lab for their devotion to this work and for making this project so fun! [1] [2] [3]…
Our manuscript on early life social isolation in bumblebees is posted to bioRxiv! Wang & McKenzie-Smith et al: Isolation disrupts social interactions and destabilizes brain development in bumblebees. This project is the culmination of several years of work from many collaborators, including a former undergrad mentee, the amazing Hyo Jin (Jean) Cho. Thanks to everyone…
some lab-related announcements for the end of 2021--belated because the end of the year felt so weird. goodbye 2021, the year we normalized the pandemic. may 2022 bring gentleness. I was selected as an inaugural IMPACT Fellow by the National Postdoc Association for leadership advancement. [1] [2] I was selected to the Allen Institute's Next…
I'm actively developing a course on racism in neuroscience. The ultimate form of the course will likely be a graduate/upper level undergraduate seminar, for neuroscientists, to debut perhaps in winter quarter 2023. I will make the class details (learning goals, syllabus, expectations, etc) public before then. In the meantime, here are books that I am…
The first paper from the Octopus chierchiae consortium is out! Check out our preprint on the biology and mariculture of these amazing creatures: "The lesser Pacific striped octopus, Octopus chierchiae: an emerging laboratory model". This project was spearheaded by Anik Grearson and Ali Dugan, two awesome interns at the Marine Biological Laboratory, and is currently…
ZYWang Lab @ UW Seattle 