2026

Tiriac lab shines at the BioSci retreat!

Alex F gave an outstanding talk and Elysia won Best Poster Award!

Kaylee awarded the NSF GRFP!

Congrats Kaylee!!

Feature in the Biological Sciences newsletter:

Elise joins the lab, Parthav wins summer research award

Elise (1st year graduate student) joins the lab!

Parthav (1st year undergraduate student) is selected as a V-START fellow to do summer research with our lab!

The lab is looking forward to SPONT in Japan!

So excited for this! We have such cool work to present!

Lab presents at Brain Blast

Lab members hosted a booth at Brain Blast, a community event organized by the Vanderbilt Brain Institute. The lab taught kids about their blind spots using flash cards and used anatomical models of the eye to explain why we have a blind spot. Fostering inspiration for future neuroscientists!

Kaylee and Elysia win college awards!

Elysia awarded the Rawlings Rosti Scholarship

Kaylee awarded the Richard Bennett/Dorothy Danforth Compton Prize

Woohoo!!!!! 🥳

2025

Usma presents at Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Symposium

Usma presented her research aimed at understanding the development and organization of proprioception.

Celebrating Kaylee’s white coat ceremony

Kaylee dons her lab coat after listening to a couple of inspiring speeches

… always take a lab photo

Kaylee wins best talk at Biosci retreat!

… and we took another lab photo, courtesy of biosci GSA for providing a photographer.

New members and paper accepted

  • Alexander Fisch joins the lab as a Biological Sciences PhD.

  • Elysia Gauthier joins the lab as a Pharmacology PhD.

  • Kaylee Yeager joins the lab as Biosci PhD.

  • Jove manuscript accepted

Lab party to celebrate victories and say bye to two awesome lab members. Natalie Clark is off to grad school to pursue an anthropology PhD and Nathan Stanko is off to medical school. Congrats to you both!

Awards aplenty

  • Kaylee gets NSF GRFP honorable mention!

  • Alex selected as Sloan Research Fellow in neuroscience! Thank you to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the honor.

  • Elysia is accepted into Vanderbilt CBMS training grant

  • Usma is awarded a Vanderbilt Undergraduate Summer Research fellowship.

Congrats everyone!

Lab lunch to celebrate!

2024

Lab presents at SPONT 2024 in Altea, Spain

Natalie (middle) and Nate (right) presented recent lab work

The postdoc generations from Marla’s lab. From left to right: Juliana Rosa, Alex Tiriac, Marla Feller, and Rachana Somaiya

Lab’s first paper is out!

Lab’s first paper published in Nature Communications. Congrats everyone on a huge team effort to get this done! (Development and organization of the retinal orientation selectivity map.)

Alex selected as the Hooley Family Dean’s Faculty Fellow

Thank you to the Hooley family for supporting our lab’s research mission.