Our MSc student, Ryan Ugovsek, has been awarded a Best Poster Award for his project “Investigating the Neural Representations of Self-Motion in the Zebrafish Cerebellum and Hindbrain”.

This summer, we are excited to welcome our new undergraduate researchers:

1. Cindy Yang and Yair Landsman as ROP240 students;
2. Jingtian Hu, a recipient of the CSB Summer Award.
3. Filza Umar and Zih-Yuan Liao, recipients of the Mitacs Globalink Research Internship (GRI).

We also congratulate:

• Frank Fu (welcome back) and Yapeng Zhuang on receiving UTEA awards.

Filza Umar (National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad) and ZIH-YUAN LIAO (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) will be joining us this summer. They will work on dissecting brain-wide functional circuits underlying social decision-making by developing a naturalistic virtual reality platform for juvenile zebrafish. We are excited to have them in the lab and look forward to a fun and productive summer together.

Our MSc student, Ryan Ugovsek, has been awarded the NSERC CGSM for his project “Investigating the Neural Representations of Self-Motion in the Zebrafish Cerebellum and Hindbrain”.

We are pleased to share that Tiantian won Best Poster at the CSB Undergraduate Research Poster Session for 2026!

Tiantian’s project investigated the survival rate and light-dark preference of various transgenic zebrafish lines expressing GCaMP6, a genetically encoded fluorescent calcium indicator, compared with wild-type zebrafish. This award highlights Tiantian’s ability to communicate her research goals and findings in both the poster and oral formats.

Congratulations on the outstanding achievement!

Please see the Position page for more details. Positions

Prof. Qian Lin has been awarded a CIHR project grant to study “Dissecting cerebellar mechanism for information coordination during goal-directed behaviors”.

Cheers!

Cameron Parro has been awarded the Janssen Graduate Award for Equity & Inclusion, an annual award recognizing a graduate student in health sciences or neuroscience within the Department of Cell & Systems Biology based on academic merit.

Pauline Shen has been awarded an SGS Conference Grant from the University of Toronto School of Graduate Studies in support of her research presentation at the 2025 Zebrafish Neurobiology Conference.

Oscar has been recognized at the Undergraduate Engineering Research Day (UnERD) for his outstanding research presentation. This award highlights his excellent communication skills and innovative contributions to undergraduate research. Congratulations!

Altered locomotion and anxiety after exposure to SiO2 nanoparticles in larval zebrafish.

https://rdcu.be/enz92

This work opens up our long-term collaboration with Kai Huang, where we assess the impact of nanoparticles on the nervous system for future nano medicine development.

This summer, Yapeng will be using our 3D virtual reality system to dissect neural mechanisms of spatial navigation using zebrafish, supported by a UTEA. Congratulations!

*This cool VR system was developed by Toby Yang, who was a CSB498 student.

Ahmed has just been selected as a recipient of the 2024-25 CSB TA Teaching Excellence Award for his outstanding work in BIO130H1. He was nominated by students in this course. Congratulations!

See the news here:

https://braincanada.ca/announcements/brain-canada-grants-2-1-million-to-early-career-researchers-nationwide/

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7241866011694571520/

We are thrilled to announce that Asia Anwary has been awarded the Best Poster at the CSB Undergraduate Research Poster Session 2024. Asia embarked on her research journey in our lab as a CSB498Y student.

Asia’s project explored spatial navigation in juvenile zebrafish, investigating how they learn and utilize spatial information in changing environments. Her work aimed to reveal whether zebrafish base safety on spatial location or visual cues, setting the stage for advancements in virtual reality design for zebrafish.

Congratulations to Asia Anwary on her outstanding achievement!

News in CSB at UofT.

Congratulations to Ashenafee Mandefro for receiving admission to U of T Master of Science in Applied Computing (MScAC) Program, Data Science for Biology Concentration, starting in the fall of 2024!

Ash is a 4th year undergraduate at UofT, a Bioinformatics & Computational Biology Specialist. Since September 2023, he has been working on his BCB430 project, and developing a web app to monitor and analyze social behavior in zebrafish. 

Congratulations and well done!

A fantastic piece designed by our talented summer student Michelle Sun (with ESROP and CSB USRA)! It summarizes well our lab life. Thank you!

This Wednesday we shared our work at U of T Undergraduate Engineering Research Day (UnERD).

Michelle gave an outstanding presentation on the virtual reality setup.

Ambrose and Will discussed their idea of applying RNN in VR and won the best poster!

Congratulations to everyone on your fantastic work! This marks our fruitful summer.

In the news:

https://connaught.research.utoronto.ca/researchers

https://csb.utoronto.ca/connaught-award-for-aquatic-vr-to-understand-neural-dynamics/

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/university-of-toronto-cell-and-systems-biology_connaught-award-for-aquatic-vr-to-understand-activity-7135341806447194112-6jKB/

More details are here:

https://csb.utoronto.ca/csb-researchers-earn-multiple-nserc-awards/