Anna Ryba

Anna spent a year in elementary school fascinated by the classroom beehive display, but she never really imagined she’d grow up to study insect neuroscience. She’s excited to see whether the next couple decades will be just as unpredictable.

Outside of lab, Anna loves running, gardening, and baking really mediocre cakes.

Anna is currently a graduate student in the Ruta lab at Rockefeller. She’s working to uncover the neural basis of variation in instinctive behavior across different populations of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster.  During her PhD, she has realized that she loves teaching people how things like fly brains really are beautiful through writing, teaching, and research. 

For the past three years, Anna has been a director of the Summer Neuroscience Program, an outreach program at Rockefeller run by graduate students. The role has taught her a lot about how to manage a program, as well as how to foster scientific curiosity through teaching and mentorship. In summer 2021, Anna joined RockEDU’s Summer Science Research Program as a track leader. She designed a curriculum that used living fruit fly cultures as a jumping off point to talk about genes, brains, and behavior. Students were fascinated by their fly cultures, and their enthusiasm highlighted how simple behavioral observation can give rise to diverse questions that encompass many styles of scientific research. 

In the Drosophila section of the SSRP collection, you can find some material inspired by Anna’s SSRP summer 2021 track. It is designed to be a resource for teachers and students, so please do get in touch if you have any comments, questions, or requests for useful content!