Leading Edge Fellows Program

We are thrilled to announce the 2026 Zara Weinberg Leading Edge Fellows! 40 remarkable postdocs pursuing transformative research in biological/biomedical sciences. This is the 7th Leading Edge cohort and we are so excited to welcome them! www.leadingedgesymposium.org/fellows/

New from @meikeesther.bsky.social !

The Agrawal lab has published its first paper! "Sticking the landing: leg mechanosensory feedback coordinates the transition from flight to landing" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... This project was led by a technician in the lab, Tse-Wei (Wayne) Kuo. Brief 🧵on what we found

Very excited to share the first preprint from the Ohainle Lab at UC Berkeley! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Super excited to share that I will start my lab at University of Oregon in Fall 2027! We will study astrocyte-neuron interactions in neurodevelopment and related disorders. Grateful to all my mentors and colleagues! I couldn’t be happier to return to the PNW! ion.uoregon.edu/research/fac...

Congrats to the 2026 Zara Weinberg Leading Edge Fellows - we're especially delighted to see JCC Fellows Dr. Airi Yoshimoto and Dr. Meenakshi Asokan in this cohort! @airiyoshimoto.bsky.social @meenakshiasokan.bsky.social

really enjoyed chatting with @callimcflurry.bsky.social from @thetransmitter.bsky.social about some of the non-Drosophila work happening in the lab! www.thetransmitter.org/neuros-ark/w...

Congratulations to LaShae Nicholson, postdoctoral fellow in the Strittmatter lab @yaleneuro.bsky.social and previous @kavliatyale.bsky.social postdoc awardee, for being named a 2026 Zara Weinberg Leading Edge Fellow!

Gorgeous new work from Meike van der Heijden’s lab!!

I'm so excited to be a part of the 2026 cohort and to be a part of the Leading Edge community.

So grateful to be a part of the Leading Edge community!! Having this network of such kind and inspiring people who are so generous with their time and support is truly an honor!

I’m honored to be a part of the 2026 Leading Edge community, especially in memory of the incredible person and scientist Dr. Zara Weinberg. I was lucky enough to know Zara during my time at UCSF, and I will strive to continue her legacy empowering scientists for generations to come!

Super excited to be a part of this fantastic group! ✨🔬🧫

I am incredibly excited to join this vibrant community

Excited and extremely honored to join this amazing group of professionals!

So excited to be a part of this amazing community!

So excited to be a part of this incredible group! 🐭🥰

Honored to be part of the 2026 Leading Edge Fellows Zara Weinberg Cohort! Thanks to all my mentors and collaborators for their support. Looking forward to being part of this amazing community of scientists!

So excited to be welcomed into such a supportive community of amazing scientists!! Cheers to good people and good science 🧬 👏 🎉

So incredibly honored and excited to be a part of leading edge! Joining the ranks of all these incredible scientists has me truly humbled. To be part of Zara’s cohort when she was so instrumental to me in my first few years at UCSF makes me feel all the things.

I want to thank @aussiebiologist.bsky.social and @leadingedgeprogram.bsky.social for the incredible support I received on the job market last year.

I suppose it's better late than never to mention that this September I started an Assistant Professor position at Rowan University @rowancsm.bsky.social. We will be doing cool work with chameleons 🦎 to understand early development, especially left-right patterning view.rowan.edu/the-human-pu...

Absolutely thrilled to share the latest work from my lab focused on the variation and evolution of human centromeres among global populations! We assembled 2,110 human centromeres, identifying 226 new major haplotypes and 1,870 α-satellite HOR variants. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I’m so excited to share that I’ve accepted an assistant professor position at the University of Colorado Anschutz, BMG department and Barbara Davis Diabetes center! I’m so grateful to many who have helped me get here, especially mentors at Joslin, @hmsbpa.bsky.social @leadingedgeprogram.bsky.social

Kathryn Gunn followed up with a remarkable talk combining cryoEM and and cryoET to reveal the surprising helical filament organization of lipoprotein lipase in storage vesicles. She convinced me that a single lab can use these tools to bridge the gap #cellbio2025

Defining psychiatric disorders is often 'fuzzy' - e.g., compulsivity is a symptom in substance addictions, OCD, hoarding disorder, et al., - which impedes diagnostics and treatment. Our newly published work examines these shared ('transdiagnostic') symptoms... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Work I co-led with @jnoms.bsky.social is now online at @cp-cellhostmicrobe.bsky.social ! We revealed a previously unrealized diversity of viral immune-evasion proteins that selectively destroy different cyclic nucleotide signals used in bacterial immunity. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

It’s that time of year for me to dust this thing off and encourage you to apply to be a Leading Edge fellow, this year named in honor of Zara Weinberg

The Sosa Lab is going to #SfN25 and actively recruiting ✨postdocs✨ with systems neuroscience experience! We study both fundamental memory processes and how memory changes during pregnancy and postpartum. If you are interested in meeting at SfN, please email me! www.sosaneurolab.com/join/postdoc...

Such a fitting honor for Zara! Her passion for science and Justice inspired us. Apply to join the 7th Cohort of LE, an amazing community of scientists that has given me tremendous support

The Leading Edge Fellows gathered this week to celebrate Zara Weinberg, a beloved member of our community. Our 7th cohort of Leading Edge Fellows (2026) will be named in her honor. The Zara Weinberg Leading Edge Cohort application is now open! Due Feb 2. www.leadingedgesymposium.org/apply/

Zara was an incredibly inspiring scientist, activist, and leader within our community of Leading Edge Fellows. She will be deeply missed by all those who had the pleasure of interacting with her.

Zara Weinberg was a brilliant light both in and out of science. She changed the lives of everyone she interacted and loved for the better. Her legacy will live on through all of us and we will fight for a better world on behalf of her memory.

Zara was an inspiration. We never met in person but became friends through Leading Edge. She zealously advocated for her ideals, but was also passionate about helping others realize why they should too. Her loss is gutting & the world is the worse for it. RIP, I'll do my best to continue the fight.

Zara Weinberg passed away earlier this week. She joined my lab earlier this year when her postdoc lab formally closed. She was a brilliant scientist, supportive mentor, dear friend, avid music fan, rabid believer in public transit, open science champion, and above all just an amazing human.

I need to give the biggest shoutout to @leadingedgeprogram.bsky.social Fellows for teaching me how everything I know! It’s the most beautiful open community and yall should apply when applications are open!

Today in @nature.com, we present our work leveraging functional genomics and human blastoids to uncover a human-specific mechanism in preimplantation development driven by the endogenous retrovirus HERVK. Special thanks to the reviewers whose comments improved our manuscript a lot! rdcu.be/eI3tD

The Agrawal lab is moving! This January we will be setting up shop at #UBC in Vancouver, in the department of #Zoology! We are actively recruiting at all levels, especially masters and PhD students. These position are #funded! Please send anyone interested my way!

Here's a movie from the 3D neuroimaging paper - this is the telencephalon of a 19 month old tg(kdrl:mCherry, mpeg1:eGFP) fish. We use imaris to strip the top layer (the skin and skull) off the projection so we can see just the tissue beneath the skull. This was taken with a Bruker 2P+ multiphoton.

Want to image the adult zebrafish brain? Here's a nifty design that I made with the help of a talented master's student, Corey Steinhauser. Supporting files here! morgridge.org/research/lab...

My pre-print from the Shikanov Lab is live! We detail oocyte and somatic transcriptome, and whole follicle proteome signatures driving folliculogenesis in vitro towards improved ART. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...