I'm honored to receive the Penn AI Fellowship with support from @upenndddi.bsky.social! The fellowship supports my research on computational models of perception and cognitive bias. Specifically, we want to understand when and why both brains and AI systems are susceptible to cognitive biases.

Alex Pretti was a scientist.

Thousands of Minnesotans marched in downtown Minneapolis to protest ICE. The wind chill was 30 below during the march. Hundreds of businesses closed their doors Friday in support of the protest as activists urged Minnesotans to abstain from economic activity.

New paper drop! 🧠💊 Our new paper out in Molecular Psychiatry shows that the serotonin 1B receptor is important for the neural and antidepressant/anxiolytic behavioral responses to psilocybin in mice. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨New Kutlu Lab preprint! Excited to share our latest work led by Oyku Dinckol and Noah Wenger. 🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We find that ACh shapes DLS neural ensembles for outcome learning but is biased toward signaling threats over rewards 👇

very excited to share some of the final bits of work from my PhD! 🎉 we find that phasic DA in the accumbens simultaneously tracks persistent motivation towards reward cues in addition to new learning (but maybe not RPE?!) in sign-tracking rats. check out the preprint below!

Huge congrats to Gio Lab postdoc Dr @ericastownsend.bsky.social on her poster award at Temple’s Department of Neural Sciences Research Day!

#JNeurosci: A functional MRI study from @maechlermarvin.bsky.social‬ et al. identify brain regions that might be the source of hemifield-specific capacity limits in attentional tracking of multiple moving objects. vist.ly/3n7a9wt

well its officially official - I graduated yesterday! 🎓 super honored to have also received my department’s promise award in brain science research. pumped to start my postdoc next month!!

I am excited to announce (belatedly) that my dissertation’s final chapter has been published in the Journal of Neuroscience! doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...

defended my dissertation and officially became Dr. Townsend yesterday! 🍾 feeling so much gratitude for my friends and family, my wonderful advisor, the bluesky-less Kyle Smith, and the many mentors & colleagues who supported me along the way 🩷

despite the horrors, I will continue to share and engage with science without fear!! thus, I'm very happy to share my recent article out in Learning & Memory. I'm so proud of this work. it's been my little passion project for some time now. a student of mine, Angela Shang, even made the cover art!

We are organizing a Stand Up for Science rally at Dartmouth College! When: This Friday, March 7th, at 12pm (noon) Where: Center of the Dartmouth Green

Step 1) find your rep www.congress.gov/members/find... Step 2) send an email or call their office Step 3) tell them that federal spending on scientific advancement is the best hope we have to “win against china” or whatever these guys are obsessed with these days

I just reached out to my senators about the NIH situation. If you need to find out how much impact NIH has in your state in terms of dollars in and their economic impact here's a link: www.unitedformedicalresearch.org/nih-in-your-...

TT28 with is the place to be in DC! Come learn about how serotonin modulates reward-related DMS calcium activity.

if you are interested in behavioral microstructures of motivation, come check out my SfN poster today at board JJ8! we explore sign-tracking responses in depth, favoring detailed analysis of video behavior over automatic readouts (eg, presses per min). come check it out and talk behavior! ☺️

using my first bluesky post to say that i officially started my dissertation process and i am ABD 🥂🥳