Picower Special Seminar with Sangyu Xu "Contextualized Phenovectors Reveal a Drosophila Serotonergic Circuit Controlling Satiety"
Building 46, Picower Seminar Room (46-3310, Third Fl of MIT Building 46), 43 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA
Picower Special Seminar with Sangyu Xu, PhD Speaker: Sangyu Xu, PhD, Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore (The Neuroscience and Behavioural Disorders Programme) Date: Wednesday, October 14, 2026 Time: 4:00pm Location: Picower Seminar Room (46-3310, Third Floor of MIT Building 46) Please note that this seminar is in person only Talk Title: Contextualized Phenovectors Reveal a Drosophila Serotonergic Circuit Controlling Satiety Abstract: How do we know when an intervention has truly changed an internal state, rather than simply moved a convenient metric? My work develops measurement and benchmarking methods for this problem, specifically in neural circuits supporting feeding behavior. I’ll discuss contextualized ethomics (DESTRA), a framework for testing whether a circuit perturbation reproduces a coherent natural state transition, such as the shift between hunger and satiety, across the behavioral profile rather than a single readout. This reframes what counts as evidence for a manipulation to have “worked”: not whether one variable moved in the expected direction, but whether the resulting phenovector wholistically resembles the biological state we intended to reproduce. I’ll…