PEEC graduate student Malavika Venu awarded the Graduate College Dissertation Travel Grant

In Spring 2026, PEEC graduate student Malavika Venu was awarded the Graduate College Dissertation Travel Grant, which provides funding to support travel and fieldwork essential for doctoral dissertation research. This grant allowed Venu to further her research at the University of Toronto, where she is expanding this work from dokb to a broader set of genes and neural pathways that shape social connectivity.

 

Venu's work focuses on how social structure is not unique to humans. Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) form social networks with measurable patterns of connectivity. One important network property is betweenness centrality, and variation in this trait has been linked to a gene called degrees of kevin bacon (dokb). Her lab's collaborators at the University of Toronto showed that removing dokb alters social network structure in flies. Building on this discovery, Venu's research investigates how dokb and related neural pathways influence social organization. Because many of these genes and pathways are evolutionarily conserved, this work may provide broader insights into the biological basis of social behavior across species.