Your next read is here thanks to co-authors Amos Winter (director of the K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Center) & Vijay Govindarajan! Their upcoming book releases on August 11, 2026 🎉 ➡️📚 Pre-order now on Amazon: a.co/d/00DBxwnn

In his recent Foresight Institute Vision Weekend talk, @eboyden3.bsky.social argues that breakthrough tools — and the therapies they enable — depend on long-term support for unconventional ideas. 💻 ⬇️ Watch: Ed Boyden | Incentives in Science @ Vision Weekend UK 2026 #YangTanCollective

Ed Boyden | Incentives in Science @ Vision Weekend UK 2026

YouTube video by Foresight Institute

youtube.com

Read Lampoon Magazine's interview with Hugh Herr: Despite tragedy, his ambitions for himself allowed him to bring light into the “dark ages of prosthetics” by working on allowing people to not only move again, but to sense and feel once more. lampoonmagazine.com/hugh-herr-in...

Hugh Herr builds the cyborg: prostheses the brain feels and controls as its own

After losing both legs at seventeen, Hugh Herr turned limitation into design, engineering prostheses that seamlessly connect flesh, skin, nerves and circuits through bidirectional neural interfaces

lampoonmagazine.com

So proud of Soha for this well-deserved recognition! The Yang Tan Collective community at Harvard is stronger because of her leadership, thoughtfulness, and unwavering commitment. She makes great science possible every day!

Making an impact through academic administration

As executive director of research at Harvard Medical School, Soha Ashrafi supports more than 300 scientists, students and staff members.

thetransmitter.org

Congrats, Dr. Francesca Riccio-Ackerman!🎓 We're so proud of Francesca for completing her doctoral work in the K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics at MIT where she focused on strengthening Sierra Leone’s prosthetics and orthotics sector and expanding access to high-quality care...⬇️

Does logical reasoning require language? According to new research from @evfedorenko.bsky.social, @hopekean.bsky.social, and collaborating neuroscientists, study participants were able to solve various complex logic games and puzzles without language, showing that: no, language is not necessary. ⬇️

The Yang Tan Collective is excited to welcome and collaborate with the newly announced K. Lisa Yang Centre for Autism Research at Cambridge, which was established to support autism research aimed at improving the health and well-being of autistic people and their families!

University of Cambridge@cam.ac.uk · last mo.

We're please to announce a $34.5 million donation from philanthropist Lisa Yang for research to improve the health and wellbeing of autistic people and their families. We'll join 8 other centres at @harvard.edu and @mit.edu as part of the Yang Tan Collective. Find out more: https://bit.ly/4aDYoGx

Evelina Fedorenko and her team, including Aaron Wright, a Yang Post-Bacc scholar, have analyzed fMRI data from 700+ people and discovered that language processing may occur in 17 additional regions of the brain, not just in the left hemisphere of the brain 🧠💬 ⬇️

The brain’s language network is more extensive than previously thought

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from more than 700 people, MIT researchers identified 17 brain regions outside of the canonical language-processing centers that are also involv...

news.mit.edu

Congratulations to Hock E. Tan, co-founder of the Yang Tan Collective, for being honored as part of the Andrew Carnegie Foundation @carnegie.org's 2026 Class of Great Immigrants, Great Americans! 🇺🇸 🎉 Congrats to him and all the honorees 👏 #YangTanCollective #GreatImmigrants

🗓️ Don't miss "Body Alchemy" at @pioneerwork.bsky.social in Brooklyn on 7/19, feat Hugh Herr & Ana Rajčević from the Yang Center for Bionics. This event will explore how breakthroughs in bionics, neural interfaces, and embodied design are redefining the future of the human body. RSVP ⬇️

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! 👏👏 🔗 www.media.mit.edu/posts/two-biomechatronics-researchers-are-among-the-winners-of-de-florez-awards-at-mexpo-2026/

In a new Frontiers for Young Minds article, Y. Eva Tan Professor Ed Boyden 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. ⬇️

Congratulations to Yang ICoN fellow Andrea de Varda @andreadevarda.bsky.social, who has been named a winner of the prestigious Glushko Dissertation Prize! 👏👏 🔗 cognitivesciencesociety.org/glushko-dissertation-prize/ @cogscisociety.bsky.social

(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.

(1/2) A fascinating @science.org feature highlights the breadth of newly identified bacterial defense systems, including groundbreaking work from the Yang Tan Collective led by Feng Zhang. ⬇️ (cont.)

Ancient wars between microbes gave us key immune defenses

A better understanding of battles between bacteria and viruses could inspire new medicines

science.org

The Mexican Press Agency spotlights Yang Center for Bionics postdoc Guillermo Herrera-Arcos, who is developing incredible “living” implants that could one day restore movement and function to paralyzed organs. Read the feature linked below! @mitmedialab.bsky.social #YangTanCollective

‼️ POSTER SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED UNTIL MAY 8! (Check out post for more information) Register for the 2026 ICoN Center Symposium and submit your poster here: www.eventbrite.com/e/2026-icon-center-symposium-self-organization-and-emergence-in-development-tickets-1982815550688

Yang Tan Collective@yangtancollective.bsky.social · 4mo ago

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).

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.”

The Yang Tan Collective celebrates two faculty members for being elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Congratulations Michale Fee and Fan Wang! 👏🎉

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.

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.

How is AI being used at MIT? Scientists and researchers at MIT, including Ila Fiete (director of the Yang ICoN Center), discuss their usage of AI, its impact on their research, and its still-developing potential for further insights and discoveries in this @technologyreview.com article ⬇️

From math → mind. Collective alum Alex Negrón (K. Lisa Yang Postbac Scholar ’23–’25) turned a SURFiN fellowship into a neuroscience path—modeling brain circuits, exploring AI + neural networks at MIT, and now pursuing a PhD at Princeton. Read here⬇️

How SURFiN Fellowships Jump-Started These 3 Neuroscience Students’ STEM Careers

The Simons Foundation revisits several previous members of its Shenoy Undergraduate Research Fellowships in Neuroscience (SURFiN).

simonsfoundation.org

Quilee Simeon, a Yang ICoN Fellow, was recently featured in an article on MIT Spectrum, which details his research into AI, the nervous system, and the brain! Read more about Quilee and his research here ⬇️

Unlocking AI’s Mysteries Using Insights from Brain Research

Quilee Simeon ’21, SM ’25, a K. Lisa Yang Computational Neuroscience Fellow, studies nervous systems to better understand animals and machines

betterworld.mit.edu

Congratulations to Yang Tan Collective alumna Yeji Kim on being named a Schmidt Science Fellow! 👏 Read more here ⬇️ schmidtsciencefellows.org/fellow/yeji-...

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).

Registration for the 2026 Yang ICoN Center Symposium is now live! This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Please register by May 13. Register in the link below ⬇️

This World Autism Awareness Day, we look back at some of the research and studies recently published by the scientists at the Tan-Yang Centers for Autism Research at MIT & Harvard! Read more below ⬇️

A new paper by Hugh Herr, Guillermo Herrera-Arcos, & Hyungeun Song recently published in Nature Communications has introduced a “living” implant by repurposing existing muscle in the body; they are hopeful that their new developing technology can help those affected by organ dysfunctions. Read ⬇️

Turning muscles into motors gives static organs new life

A new biohybrid system reprograms living muscles into fatigue-resistant, computer-controlled motors that can be implanted inside the body to restore movement in organs. Development of the myoneural ac...

news.mit.edu

Two major Yang Tan Collective projects recently received the MIT HEALS (MIT Health and Sciences Collaborative) MIT-Mass General Brigham Seed Program grants! heals.mit.edu/mit-mgb-seed... See the projects and Collective faculty below ⬇️