Accomplishments

Student Spotlight

Evolutionary Biology student Ariel Pani recently published a study in Nature that sheds new light on the origin of the vertebrate brain. Working in the lab of his advisor Christopher Lowe (now a faculty member at Stanford University), Pani studies Saccoglossus kowalevskii, a primitive species of acorn worm with the neurological machinery identical to that which shapes the brains of vertebrates, illuminating the way our brains may have evolved. Read more from the UC Medical Center blog here and from the NIH here.