Myles Joyce, a PhD student in the Harris Lab and a predoctoral fellow in the CLM T32 training program, was named a winner in the 2026 UT Austin College of Natural Sciences Visualizing Science Contest!
Every year, the College of Natural Sciences invites faculty, staff and students to send in the most striking and fascinating images from their research for the college-wide Visualizing Science competition. Myles Joyce's entrance of reconstructed dendritic spiines was a winner! Click here to see all the winners!
About the image:
Dendritic spines are specialized protrusions found on the branches of neurons that serve as the main post-synaptic sites for receiving chemical signals in the brain. Highly diverse and dynamic, they change shape throughout life in response to experience and learning. Through countless hours reconstructing rat hippocampal dendrites for his research, neuroscience Ph.D. student Myles Joyce observed how the variety and unique beauty of dendritic spines closely resemble the vibrant biodiversity of coral reefs. In this visual metaphor, each coral polyp is a separate dendritic spine reconstructed from electron micrographs of rat hippocampal neurons. Spines are grouped based on morphology, with different shapes assigned a unique color, highlighting the diversity and complexity of neuronal structure. Just as reefs are built by thousands of distinct yet interdependent organisms, neural connectivity and function arise from the interplay between an orchestra of specialized spines. Nature has a striking tendency to use similar forms and organizational themes across disparate biological systems.