Ashley Lopez


Ashley Lopez joined KUT in February 2016. She covers politics and health care, and is part of the NPR-Kaiser Health News reporting collaborative. Previously, she worked as a reporter at public radio stations in Louisville, Kentucky, and Miami and Fort Myers, Florida, where she won a National Edward R. Murrow Award for a story about an immigration policy that was failing some undocumented domestic abuse victims. She earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism and political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Clockwise: lab mouse, zebrafish, octopus, rat pushing a cube, nematodes, fruit fly.

The term ‘model organism’ should be reserved for biological systems

By referring to artificial neural networks as model organisms, we run the risk of distorting funding priorities and disregard the explanatory power of a shared evolutionary history across biological organisms.

By Marc Coutanche
13 November 2026 | 6 min read

New phase of BRAIN Initiative spawns basal ganglia ‘parts list’

With a standardized cell naming system and infrastructure for data collection and analysis, the basal ganglia project sets the stage for a whole-brain primate atlas.

By Claudia López Lloreda
12 November 2026 | 1 min watch
Research image showing genes containing microexons in mice.

Machine-learning model spots autism-linked variants that scramble splicing

The model provides a way to investigate genetic variation in regions of the genome whose functions have been difficult to interpret.

By Giorgia Guglielmi
12 November 2026 | 4 min read