Embedded within MIT & Harvard Medical School, the Collective accelerates science & engineering collaborations that improve human well-being globally.
Joined September 2025
- Tweets 152
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76 Photos and videos
Congratulations to Carolina Warneryd and Duncan Lee of the K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics on their success at the 2026 MIT Mechanical Engineering De Florez Awards! 👏👏
🔗 media.mit.edu/posts/two-biom…
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In a new @FrontYoungMinds article, Y. Eva Tan Professor @eboyden3 explains optogenetics 🔆🧠 This article was edited with young reviewers, Elizabeth (age 13) and Klara (age 13), who provided feedback to ensure their peers and young audiences could understand the article.
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Frontiers for Young Minds is an open-access scientific journal for kids. Read it here:
🔗 kids.frontiersin.org/article…
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Congratulations to Yang ICoN fellow Andrea de Varda @devarda_a, who has been named a winner of the prestigious Glushko Dissertation Prize! 👏👏
🔗 cognitivesciencesociety.org/…
@cogsci_soc
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(1/2) More than 150 scientists attended the 2026 Yang ICoN Center Symposium hosted by Ila Fiete on May 21. Eight leading faculty shared insights on how neural structure and function emerge during development, spanning both experimental and theoretical perspectives.
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(2/2) The symposium also showcased the next generation of researchers, with a dozen trainees presenting their innovative work during a lively poster session.
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Ila Fiete, MIT; Fenna Krienen, Princeton University; attendees during break
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(1/2) A fascinating @ScienceMagazine feature highlights the breadth of newly identified bacterial defense systems, including groundbreaking work from the Yang Tan Collective led by Feng Zhang.
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(2/2) These findings are reshaping our understanding of human immunity’s ancient origins and revealing a vast reservoir of biological strategies refined through billions of years of evolution.
science.org/content/article/…
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At MIT, Yang Tan Collective scientists and researchers are driven by deep curiosity and a belief that pursuing answers to humanity’s toughest questions can improve human well-being on a global scale.
#CuriosityOnAMission #science #YangTanCollective
Science is Curiosity on a Mission: It includes all of us who ask "why" and make it our mission to find out. These are the discoveries that move the country forward. The pursuit of ideas that seemed impossible until they weren’t. #CuriosityOnAMission
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The Mexican Press Agency @mexi_press spotlights Yang Center for Bionics postdoc @Guillermonics, who is developing incredible “living” implants that could one day restore movement and function to paralyzed organs. Read the feature linked below!
@medialab @mcgovernmit
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🔗 Links
📚Mexican Press Agency feature:
“Guillermo Herrera-Arcos, the Mexican advancing 'living' implants to restore paralyzed organs”, mexicanpressagency.org/newsr…
📚MIT News about research:
“Turning muscles into motors gives static organs new life” news.mit.edu/2026/turning-mu…
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‼️ POSTER SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED UNTIL MAY 8! (Check out post for more information)
Register for the 2026 ICoN Center Symposium: Self-Organization and Emergence in Development and submit your poster here: eventbrite.com/e/2026-icon-c…
Submit your poster abstracts for a chance to present during the 2026 Yang ICoN Center Symposium poster session!
Interested? Indicate your interest when registering for the event and follow the instructions. Deadline to submit interest is May 1 (Friday).
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(1/2) The zona incerta has a lot of unknowns, but Guoping Feng and his team, including Ryan Kast (a former J. Douglas Tan Postdoctoral Fellow), have been researching how “different types of neurons within the zona incerta contribute to the region’s many functions.”
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(2/2) “Providing this kind of resource will lead to new ideas and new hypotheses to test. It will also let us look for changes in disease models to help us understand the pathology of brain disorders,” says Feng.
🔗 yangtan.mit.edu/mapping-the-…
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The Yang Tan Collective celebrates two faculty members for being elected to the National Academy of Sciences @theNASciences. Congratulations Michale Fee and Fan Wang! 👏🎉
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Breakthrough work from Harvard Medical School scientists funded by the Yang Tan Collective: the first-ever “smell map” reveals how the nose organizes 1,000 odor receptors in precise patterns and rewrites how we understand scent perception.
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🔗 Article: “Scientists Create First-Ever ‘Smell Map’”, hms.harvard.edu/news/scienti…
📚 Study: “A spatial code governs olfactory receptor choice and aligns sensory maps in the nose and brain”, cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092…
Image: Datta Lab
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Yang Tan Collective retweeted
Apr 8
"I don’t know how I was so fortunate to be born in a time and place where a non-academically oriented child can grow up to become a scientist, exploring the neurobiological basis for how we perceive the world around us", Professor David Ginty (USA)
#BrainPrize2026 #Neuroscience
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Happy #DNADay26! Today, we celebrate the discovery of DNA’s double helix & over 70 years later, we now know that more than 20,000 diseases have roots in our genes...but what will we do about it?
The discovery of the double helix gave us the blueprint. Now we're writing the cure.
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🔬🧬 Learn more about the Yang-Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics here: yangtan.mit.edu/k-lisa-yang-…
Pictured: Shannon Knight, PhD student in Feng lab
Photo credit: Steph Stevens
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