UW Biology Professor Horacio de la Iglesia was awarded a 2026 Research Grant by the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) for his work examining tidal and circadian rhythms in intertidal crabs.

The HFSP Research Grants-Program provides 3 years of support for international teams involving at least two countries. Preference is given to intercontinental collaborations. All team members are expected to broaden the character of their research compared to their ongoing research programs and interact with teams bringing expertise that is very different from their own so as to create novel approaches to problems in fundamental biology.

The Human Frontiers award that Horacio and colleagues from Argentina, the Netherlands, and the US got will study sleep in an environment where it has never been studied before: the intertidal environment. Virtually all animals sleep, and in the vast majority of them, sleep timing and quality are regulated by two processes: a biological clock that is synchronized to the solar light-dark cycle, and a process that keeps track of how long an animal has been awake before falling asleep. In intertidal animals, like the crustaceans that this project will study, a third process needs to synchronize sleep with the ebb and flow of tides, leading to a three- (not two-) process model of sleep regulation. The project will use molecular genetics, neurophysiology, behavioral analysis, and mathematical modeling to unmask the mechanisms and neural circuitry underlying this complex regulation of sleep.

Congratulations, Horacio!