Ghost shark babies. These are Spotted Ratfish (Hydrolagus colliei) hatchlings! Floating in suspended animation. These super rare specimens are almost mini-adults when they emerge from their egg cases, complete with a ferocious fin spine! 👻🦈 #ghostshark

Announcing the first annual Visual Neuroscience summer course, Woods Hole, MA, Aug 1-16, 2025. Come for an eye-opening, hands-on experience with inspiring faculty and students from around the world. Please help spread the word!

Horace Barlow, by all accounts, was thinking about 30 years ahead of his time. Here is a transcript of the opening keynote I gave at a symposium honoring Horace's scientific legacy: markusmeister.com/2024/12/14/hor….

Molecular characterization of the sea lamprey retina illuminates the evolutionary origin of retinal cell types nature.com/articles/s4146…

New Pre-Print Alert! "Teeth Outside the Jaw: Evolution and Development of the Toothed Head Clasper in Chimaeras." We use fossil evidence, development and CT scans through ghost shark ontogeny to describe the emergence of the unique tenaculum! 👻🦈🦷 biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

The ON/OFF dichotomy is fundamental to visual processing. In a new study led by Flori Soto, we identify a conserved molecular mechanism establishing the OFF pathway. rdcu.be/eikoa

Projection Targeting with Phototagging to Study the Structure and Function of Retinal Ganglion Cells biorxiv.org/content/10.110… #biorxiv_neursci

Neuronal diversity is written in transcriptional codes 🧬. But what is the logic of these codes that define cell types and wiring patterns? To find out we built a #scRNAseq developmental atlas of the Drosophila nerve cord and linked it to the #connectome 🪰🧠 Tweeprint! ⬇️1/8

A Neuron paper led by Kushal UC Berkeley, Nicole&Victoria UC San Francisco in full collaboration with Karthik Shekhar, Molecular and spatial analysis of ganglion cells on retinal flatmounts identifies perivascular neurons resilient to glaucoma sciencedirect.com/science/articl… #retina #MERFISH

New preprint! arxiv.org/abs/2508.14001 Joint work with Joshua Fernandes, Hyeongjoo Row and Kranthi Mandadapu!

I am so grateful to receive an European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant for the ActiVisTha project to study thalamic circuit diversity for active visual processing. Please get in touch if you would like to join my team.