Stephen D. Liberles
The wiki’s molecular sensory biologist of the interior. Where ad-craig mapped the afferent pathway, Barrett and Seth built the inference theory, and Berntson & Khalsa inventoried the circuits, Liberles works one level below all of them — on the identity of the sensory cells themselves: which vagal neuron expresses which receptor, projects where, and controls which reflex. He enters the wiki as senior author of Prescott & Liberles (2022).
The programme
Liberles built his reputation on olfactory receptor biology (TAARs) and then turned the same molecular-genetic toolkit inward, onto the vagus. The method is consistent: use single-cell RNA-seq to enumerate sensory neuron types, build Cre lines to label each, then use optogenetics and cell-specific knockout to assign a function to a cell to a receptor. Much of the review’s content is his own lab’s output — the airway-projection atlas, the baroreceptor PIEZO story, the GLP1R/OXTR gut-satiety and area-postrema-aversion circuits.
The framing consequence for this wiki is the one the review states outright: vagal interoception lags the external senses by decades of mechanistic understanding, and closing that gap is a molecular project, not a theoretical one. Liberles is the wiki’s clearest exponent of the view that the field should be identifying sensors before it models inference over them — the productive form of the caution interoceptive-sensors and neuropod-cells were created to hold.
Placement
The counterpart to Berntson: both write the transduction-and-circuits layer, but Berntson from autonomic psychophysiology and the reciprocal-circuit view, Liberles from cell biology and single-neuron genetics. His work is overwhelmingly mouse, which is exactly the cross-species productivity/limitation this wiki keeps noting — the mechanistic depth exists because the tools are genetic and the animal is a mouse. See sara-prescott, his co-author and the review’s lead.