HHMI Investigator Karl Deisseroth honored for his role in developing optogenetics, a technique that uses light to switch individual brain cells on and off — giving scientists the ability to directly manipulate the activity of brain cells to understand how individual neurons contribute to behavior and ultimately develop novel treatments for mental health disorders.HHMI Investigator Vamsi Mootha and his consortium colleagues traced the mitochondrial proteomes of five parasites that threaten human health, revealing ancient machinery and dozens of potential new drug targets.Early in her career, HHMI Investigator Keiko Torii figured out how plant cells talk to each other. Three decades later, she’s still listening — and uncovering exactly what they’re saying.HHMI Gilliam Fellows are PhD students and postdoctoral researchers who are pursuing innovative science that’s helping shape their careers. These highlights from Andrea Sama and Christopher Cousins offer a glimpse into the breadth of their work, showcasing the wide-ranging questions they’re exploring and the discoveries they’re beginning to uncover.A new method developed by Virginie Ruetten, a postdoctoral scientist in the lab of Janelia Senior Group Leader Misha Ahrens, enables scientists to image the activity of nearly every cell in a living larval zebrafish, providing a never-before-seen look at cellular signaling and body-wide circuits across a behaving vertebrate. Janelia scientists and collaborators have completed a wiring diagram of the central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly, the culmination of nearly two decades of groundbreaking research. This year’s Gilliam Fellows competition, opening today, is the first of five upcoming HHMI competitions supporting scientists across career stages – from undergraduates to senior faculty. The competitions aim to expand the institutional and geographical reach of the Institute’s programs.A Janelia postdoc’s months-long microscope-integration problem evolved into a new standard designed to bring AI more directly into the physical world. Developed from a collaboration between Anthropic and the HHMI Janelia Research Campus, the Model Hardware Standard connects scientific instruments faster and enables AI systems to monitor and adjust experiments in real time. HHMI Investigator Janelle Ayres studies how the body can survive infections by cooperating with pathogens rather than killing them — findings that could transform development of new infectious disease treatments.Janelia Group Leader Ann Hermundstad will lead a new HHMI Janelia Initiative called Theory@HHMI, which joins Biology, Tools@HHMI (formerly Molecular Tools & Imaging), and AI@HHMI in advancing Janelia’s grand challenge to understand how the brain generates behavior, and in strengthening scientific capability across HHMI.