As luck would have it, my PhD advisor Mike Greenberg happened to be in Barcelona at the same time as me. Like a science-y version of a Whit Stillman movie, we chatted about engrams and enhancers while dining over tapas and strolling through the city.

Was fun celebrating the recent Nobel with many of the pioneers in optogenetics at Optogen 2026 in beautiful Barcelona — a great place to reunite with old friends. The conference brought together wide range of approaches, from optical methods to new indicators to clinical trials

Celebration at Stanford Bioengineering for Karl’s Nobel Prize. His commitment to teaching came up, and Karl said something very interesting: that one of the best feelings is finishing a classroom presentation and realizing you had taught students something new. Completely agree!

Photos from this morning's impromptu celebration taken by my postdoc Daesun Song (I missed it unfortunately) The name badge is a nice touch. "I'm Karl Deisseroth and it's okay for me to be here"

Sunset over Stanford

Third reviewer just commented on variability and the degree of sleep promotion by activating these cells Peer review file: media.springernature.com/ori…

Another reviewer

But I don't see a necessity experiment asked at all in the referee evaluations. Instead we get suggestions to measure correlations. Correlation does not equal causation. One reviewer:

Exciting to see how quickly the frontiers of neuroscience are advancing. With investigators Jung Ho Hyun, TK Kim, Dohoung Kim, Changchun Ryu, Jihye Seong, Seong-Eon Roh, Sang Jeong Kim, and Yulong Li

Photos from the journey