��Ƭ��Ƭ����

Note: In addition to the , including Joshua Rosenthal, the Kavli Foundation has funded at MBL who are working at the intersection of neurobiology and climate change, through a  with the Grass Foundation. 

On her first day as a science program fellow at the Kavli Foundation, Angie Michaiel had a tall task ahead of her: Identify a new focus for neuroscience that was understudied, undersupported and had the potential to benefit humanity.

So she dove into the literature. By the end of her first year, in 2021, she had come across a study that documented a link between rising ocean temperatures and an increase in the temperature required to “crash,” or stop the rhythmic firing of, a crab’s stomatogastric ganglion.

“I thought that was kind of groundbreaking, to connect those two areas together,” says Michaiel, now associate program officer of neuroscience at the foundation. The more she read about the “vast” ways in which climate change affects nervous systems, the clearer it became “that we really don’t know that much at all,” she says.

This exploration eventually evolved into the Neurobiology and Changing Ecosystems Initiative, which has funded seven research projects and held its first scientific meeting in April. 

Michaiel spoke with The Transmitter about her hopes for this new subfield, what she learned about fostering scientific collaborations, and how she views the relationship between a program officer and the field they support. .