Excited to announce that I'll be moving to the Univ of California Irvine @ucirvine.bsky.social next Spring!🌴 Happily, this is not goodbye to Japan as I'll continue my lab @RIKEN_CBS for some time. Help spread the word: the new UCI lab will be hiring, DM or email ([email protected]) if interested!

Fantastic opportunity, APPLY! ⬇️

At #ICON? – Join us tomorrow to hear about novel measurement & manipulation approaches for neuromodulatory systems! 🗓️Sept 19, 🕚11:45 am 🏫Room Sé #ICON2025 #CogNeuro #AcademicSky #LocusCoeruleus #neuroskyence

My group at Science has been running a big campaign to engineer new channelrhodopsins. Excited to share the first results from it today: a suite of highly sensitive new opsins. We call them "WAChRs". Everyday indoor office lighting is enough to activate them pretty strongly.

William James saw the brain as a filter of bodily signals shaping thought, memory and emotion. That psychological processes require bodily input, brain processing and then action. A century later, science has come full circle to this same mind–body insight! #mindbodyconnection

🔵 I'm interrupting my social media hiatus to flag this important preprint from the Bruchas lab (is he not on Bluesky!?) together with @davidweinshenker.bsky.social. Very difficult experiments to show that dopamine release from LC terminals is independent of VTA 🔥 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨 New paper alert! 🚨(1/6) Excited to share our work, out now in Science Advances We show that a rapid norepinephrine surge along a brainstem pathway (LC→PRN) is a key driver of sound-evoked awakenings www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Happy to share our recent work attempting to better understand the impact of early life maternal separation on locus coeruleus function. Super proud of first author (the now Dr.) Chayla Vazquez. She brought this idea when she joined in… March 2020… and she carried it through these rough few years!

Bird’s eye view, literally. 🐦👁️ Glowing quail embryo eye for #FluorescenceFriday, #DevBio 🧪🔬

Liberty depends on an accurate understanding of reality.

Two flagship papers from the International Brain Laboratory, now out in ‪@Nature.com‬: 🧠 Brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09235-0 🧠 Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09226-1 +

#newPI thoughts: I feel a heavy responsibility towards #WomenInSTEM, same as my♀️mentor had towards me. In a recent heated discussion, relevant to growing the team, I found myself committed to only hire ♀️ candidates. On one side I feel it's the least I can do to balance out long-standing but 1/

🧠 1/ In our latest study, we show that stress responses aren't one-size-fits-all. CB1 receptors in norepinephrine & epinephrine neurons modulate stress reactivity contextually. A nuanced look at the endocannabinoid system's role in emotional regulation www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Beautiful work!

Somehow summer is officially over (?) and I'm both terrified of and extremely excited about the new academic year starting! We have new courses, new students, new experiments & more data coming in, and the anticipation is at an all time high. Let's goooo! 🧠 🧪 👩‍🔬

Honored to be the next co-chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Catecholamines with amazing @bensaunders.bsky.social! This meeting is a vibrant space for cutting-edge science & community, deepening understanding of how catecholamines shape brain circuits and behavior. Excited for what’s ahead!

Honored to be elected to serve as the next vice co-chair, along with the amazing @sciolinolab.bsky.social, for the Catecholamines Gordon Research Conference. I first came to this meeting in 2011 as a grad student and it was transformative for my career. Excited to help cultivate that for others.

Please submit! We will be extending the deadline to November 30 as well

Now there's a neat distribution: somatostatin-expressing neurons in the retrosplenial cortex for #FluorescenceFriday !

we have a new manuscript out! 🧵Lead by @sarayconley.bsky.social with significant contributions by @sarahsizer.bsky.social @madiganbedard.bsky.social and Sara Faccidomo and Clyde Hodge. We describe a tonic excitatory conductance in the BNST! link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007...

How the heck did I not know that Bluesky 🦋 now has an activity notification button? Immediately adding the entirety of our Locus Coeruleus 🔵 starter-pack profiles in my not-too-miss 🧠 list @support.bsky.team any other feature that I should most def know about ? go.bsky.app/DyBTCRF

Reading ECRs grant proposals and feeling optimistic for the future! So much talent, ambition & good ideas 💡 🧠 science is in good hands, as far as we keep FUNDING them

The cost of remembering: engram competition as a flexible mechanism of forgetting. Our new perspective piece in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social, lead by Ryan Lab alumni, Livia Autore. Also with Michael Drew from @utaustin.bsky.social Trends in Neurosciences www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

Excellent paper from @emreyaksi.bsky.social @manumameli.bsky.social labs. So much gold in the supplementary figures! www.nature.com/articles/s42...

#FluorescenceFriday 🔬🧫 Neural progenitor cells cultured in 2D (Blue: Sox2, Yellow: GFAP). While I love working with complex 3D tissue, there’s something captivating about 2D cultures. Time at the microscope is the best therapy, it always reminds me why I fell in love with biology in the first place.

1/ Excited to share a new preprint! Our latest study uncovers how serotonin precisely controls the “time window” for fear learning, ensuring that our brains link cues (CS) & threats (US) only when it’s adaptive. #Neuroscience #FearLearning www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Patch clampers: we got an error 52 on our Leica vibracheck and the normal "blow on it like a nintendo in the 80s" fix didn't work. Nor did a cleaning of the LED and diode. LED does shine. Has anyone else had such an issue and managed to resurrect this very simple but stupidly expensive thing?

Done ✅: 1st behavioral experiments since the lab officially opened 🥰 To-do: a million optimization steps 🙈 But...I go home happy & content, knowing that we can test all our funny ideas whilst generating some 😎 data

Morning thoughts. Neuroscientists love to study fear memories because, bottom line, it's really easy to train fear. It is much harder/takes longer to extinguish that memory. It's a great model system. And when the fear behavior is reinforced over and over and over creeps in, feels innate.

Honored to have been invited to contribute to this comprehensive review on neuropeptide signaling and its impacts on the locus coeruleus noradrenergic system 🔵🧠🧪. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Excited to share this huge team effort collaboration supervised by Stephanie Page in Translational Neuroscience @lieberinstitute.bsky.social and @stephaniehicks.bsky.social @jhubiostat.bsky.social to generate a spatio-molecular resource of the hippocampus in human 🧠 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Beyond happy & proud to have our paper on peptidergic neuromodulation of the #LC out! This is a project that started with naive intentions & silly curiosity, withstood 1 pandemic & 2 lab moves & made us fall in ❤️ with the most beautiful brain regions of all!! 🔵 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

excited to see current Kash Lab postdoc Jess Wojick's paper out from her PhD in @flybottleescape.bsky.social lab !!! congrats Jess and Greg!!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Our article “Prelimbic cortical excitatory overdrive and inhibitory underdrive accompany environmental suppression of food seeking” recently came out on @‪npp-journal.bsky.social‬. tinyurl.com/5xpd9ay5 Want to learn more? The thread is below: 1/n‬‬‬

Absolutely thrilled to share the first half of my PhD work! Super proud to see it finally out! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Thread below for a quick (10 point) recap of what we found! 🧵🧪🧠

PNAS waives APCs for corresponding authors from lower-income countries and those unable to afford them—supporting broad and fair access to publishing and encouraging broader global participation in science. Learn more: www.pnas.org/post/update/...

'The myth of meritocracy in science collapses under the financial sacrifices expected at every career stage. From unpaid internships and self-funded conferences to underpaid graduate and postdoctoral positions, the hidden costs of ‘doing science’ are profound.' journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Super interesting discussion & many creative ideas about future publishing

2 acceptances in a month, June turns out to be magical ✨

fitting that my PECASE certificate finally arrived many months late and looking worse for wear (much like me these days😂😭). Still grateful to the Biden admin. for recognizing the importance of junior investigators in science❤️

My laboratory at Université Laval in Québec City, Canada, is looking for a postdoc to study how neuromodulatory systems impact cortical processing during foraging behavior. This fully-funded position offers a collaborative environment in a great city. More info👇 can-acn.org/postdoctoral...

For #FluorescenceFriday, a beautiful image of some results that are blowing my mind - activated cells, Fos 🟢, just hugging the locus coeruleus, TH 🔴. Image credit to Research Assistant Daniel Olivares from the Circuits team in the @lieberinstitute.bsky.social Translational Neuroscience division 🔬🧠🧪

Third, @willuhnlab.bsky.social explores the role of the prefrontal cortex in felixbility and compulsive reward-related behaviours. #EBPS2025

Today, the ERC formally adopted a decision to increase its support for researchers moving to Europe. On top of its normal grants, the ERC offers 'start-up' funding to help PIs establish laboratories / research teams in Europe. This extra funding is now x2 (up to €2 million!) europa.eu/!6Vdgmp

"Women are PIs on 58% of the canceled grants, although they are PIs on only 34% of all active NSF grants. Similarly, Blacks are PIs on 17% of the terminated grants, although they make only 4% of the total pool. Hispanic PIs and those with disabilities were twice as likely to lose a grant."

Far from being a passive neighbor to the locus coeruleus, the pericoeruleus appears to act as a kind of micromanager of arousal, selectively inhibiting different subgroups of locus coeruleus neurons, writes @macshine.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/attention/th...

A wonderful day for science, to see the (peri) #LC in all its glory. A ginormous effort from all involved, and a fantastic resource for the field. Chapeau 🎩 🧠 🔵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Read preprints. Cite preprints. Email people and tell them you loved their preprint. Email people you hated their preprint. Embrace preprints, preprints are good.

Join us this Monday and Tuesday 28 - 29 April 2025 for the 1st Paris Circuit Dynamics Conference on Hippocampal–Cortical Circuits at the @institutducerveau.bsky.social Limited spots available, so please register (it's free)! 14 invited speakers 8 contributed talks 32 posters www.paris-circuits.eu