Post by Harvard Medical School

When Minsu Kim graduated from college with a biology degree and became a research assistant in the lab of Wei-Chung Allen Lee in 2019, she didn’t know anything about electron microscopy or connectomics — the mapping of connections between neurons that is the lab’s main focus — or working with fruit flies, one of the lab’s model systems for studying the brain. Fast-forward three years, and she played an instrumental role in creating the first complete connectome of a fruit fly central nervous system. “Building a connectome currently requires the expertise and time of many people, and it was exciting to witness that collective effort firsthand,” Kim said. “Now that our connectome is a publicly available resource along with previously existing ones, anyone can use it to explore their own questions. Through Wei, I had the unique opportunity to work with researchers approaching the same dataset from different angles, which made the impact of our work feel very real.” Kim is a Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences doctoral student in the Molecules, Cells, and Organisms program at Harvard University. For her PhD, she is studying individuality in fruit flies in the lab of Benjamin de Bivort, guided in part by the connectome she helped develop.