Since 2010, I have immersed myself into in entomology and other research areas.

I have found a love and dedication to this realm, and you can find all of my publications here.

RESEARCH + PUBLICATIONS

​Postdoctoral Research
In 2020 I began postdoctoral research, co-mentored by Professor Brian Johnson at UC Davis and Professor Tim Linksvayer at Texas Tech. I am an NSF postdoctoral research fellow in Biology from October 2020-2023. Our collaborative research is focused on making scalable, reproducible, and transparent bioinformatic pipelines, so that we can use modern genomic techniques to address fundamental questions in evolution. We take a behavioral ecological perspective on the eusocial insects, while also highlighting the importance of complex gene families, taxonomically-restricted loci, tissue-specific gene expression patterns, distributed physiology, and colony-level cognitive processes. 
Participation.......Inclusion......Education.......Rigor........Mentoring......Accessibility​.....
....are all important to me and essential to the endeavor of Science (the body of knowledge, way of thinking, and career!). 
COGSEC (Cognitive Security)
See all the volumes listed below at our website
2020: “The Great Preset: Remote Teams and Operational Art”
2021: “Narrative Information Ecosystems: Conflict and Trust on the Endless Frontier”
2022: “Structuring the Information Commons: Open Standards and Cognitive Security”

Some specific papers: 
Active Inference Institute
Since 2021 I have been a co-founder and co-organizer at the Active Inference Institute, a non-profit open-science institute that is curating and developing applications related to the Active Inference framework.

Learn more: ActiveInference.org
Twitter: twitter.com/InferenceActive
See our Livestreams: https://coda.io/@active-inference-institute/livestreams 

Also we published a paper on 9/9/2020 about online teams:
“Active Inference & Behavior Engineering for Teams”,(DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4021163)
A Vyatkin, I Metelkin, A Mikhailova, RJ Cordes, DA Friedman
Graduate Research
My PhD thesis research was in the lab of Professor Deborah Gordon at Stanford University. We studied collective behavior in the red harvester ant Pogonomyrmex barbatus. ​My project explored the biology that underlies the regulation of ant colony traits such as collective foraging. I used multiple types of technologies to understand foraging behavior from the perspective of collective decision-making, neurophysiology, ecology, and evolution.

My thesis work and related ant research were published as:
2020, Communications Biology, “Gene expression variation in the brains of harvester ant foragers is associated with collective behavior”. DA Friedman, RA York, AT Hilliard, DM Gordon. 
2020, Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry, “Measurement of natural variation of neurotransmitter tissue content in red harvester ant brains among different colonies.". Shin M, Friedman DA, Gordon DM, Venton BJ, 
2019, Science Reports, “The physiology of forager hydration and variation among harvester ant (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) colonies in collective foraging“ DA Friedman, M Greene, DM Gordon.
2018, iScience, “The role of dopamine in the regulation of foraging in the red harvester ant”. DA Friedman, A Pilko, D Skowronska-Krawczyk, KM Krasinska, J Parker, J Hirsh, DM Gordon. . 
2018, PLoS One, “Foraging behavior and locomotion of the invasive Argentine ant from winter aggregations” BP Burford, Lee G, Friedman DA, Brachmann E, Khan R, MacArthur-Waltz D, McCarty A, Gordon DM.
2016, Proc. Royal Soc. B., “Context-dependent expression of the foraging gene in field colonies of ants: the interacting roles of age, environment and task”.  KK Ingram, DM Gordon, DA Friedman, M Greene, J Kahler, S Peteru. 

Also we wrote some ant Reviews and Perspective papers
2017, Cell, "The MutAnts are here” (Perspective). DA Friedman, DM Gordon, L Luo, Cell.
2017, Molecular Ecology, “Two lineages that need each other" (Perspective). DM Gordon, DA Friedman. 
2016, Annual Reviews Neuroscience, “Ant Genetics: Reproductive Physiology, Worker Morphology, and Behavior”. DA Friedman, DM Gordon. 

Apart from my dissertation research with Professor Gordon, during grad school I worked on articles in other areas:
2019, ALIUS Bulletin 3, “Dennett Explained”, D Dennett, B Fleig-Goldstein, DA Friedman.
2019, Synthese, “The ant colony as a test for scientific theories of consciousness” DA Friedman & E Søvik.
2018, Arts,"Partner Pen Play in Parallel (PPPiP): A New PPPiParadigm for Relationship Improvement", AV Mikhailova, DA Friedman.
2018, ALIUS Bulletin, “Of woodlice and men: A Bayesian account of cognition, life and consciousness”, K Friston, M Fortier, DA Friedman.
2015, Frontiers in Genetics “Commentary: Portuguese crypto-Jews: the genetic heritage of a complex history” AW Marcus, ER Ebel, DA Friedman.
Undergraduate Research
At University of California, Davis, I primarily worked in the lab of Professor Artyom Kopp, working on the evolution of sexually dimorphic traits in Drosophila. We were exploring how cis-regulatory elements in the genome (enhancers) could change over evolutionary time to create new gene-gene interactions, and how that process could generate morphological diversity. Working with many species of Drosophila was amazing - the lab had lines of flies collected from all over the world, each with something to teach us.

I also worked in the lab of Professor Brian Johnson on honey bees. Honey bees undergo a structured transition between tasks as they age, and we were interested in how gene expression in the brain might be involved in these behavioral transitions. Dissecting bee brains is very relaxing, and served as an excellent introduction to behavioral genetics in eusocial insects. The work with bees was published as "Large-scale coding sequence change underlies the evolution of postdevelopmental novelty in honey bees" in 2015, and provides some interesting work towards understanding the relationship between gene coding sequence changes and tissue-specific gene expression changes. 

Publications from Undergraduate research:
2016, Int. J. Radiation Biology, "Influence of Nuclear Structure on the formation of radiation-induced lethal lesions". DA Friedman, L Tait, A Vaughan. 
2015, Medical Hypotheses, “Could Ehrlichial Infection Cause Some of the Changes Associated with Leukemia, Myelodysplastic Diseases and Autoimmune Disorders, and Offer Antibiotic Treatment Options?”. CA Kallicka, DA Friedman, MBA Nyindo.
​2015, Mol. Bio. and Evolution, "Large Scale Coding Sequence Change Underlies the Evolution of Post-developmental Novelty in Honey Bees". WC Jasper, TA Linksvayer, J Atallah, DA Friedman, JC Chiu, and BR Johnson. . 
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