At the Bernstein Conference 2024, Jeremie Lefebvre and I organized a workshop on the computational consequences of neural heterogeneity. Now, slightly more than a year later, we funneled the emerging discussions into a perspective piece: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

The RLC call for papers is out! A last minute bit of excitement before the holidays. Come join us at the conference every RL researcher complains about missing

McGill is recruiting top-tier researchers working abroad through the federally funded Canada Impact+ Research Chairs program, addressing global and national challenges. The first round is due in early 2026. Learn more and submit your candidacy: https://mcgill.ca/x/5Zh

If you're (1) into nhp neurophysiology and/or biological motor control, (2) a foreign big shot and (3) interested in moving here, please reach out -- this new program looks extremely attractive (min. $8M over 8y)! www.uwo.ca/research/can...

Montreal AI & Neuroscience 2025 started this morning! 🧠X🤖 www.main2025.org #MAIN2025 #NeuroAI #Neuroscience #AI

📣We have 2 open faculty positions for senior researchers in Neuroscience at Queen's University! healthsci.queensu.ca/administrati... 1. a new Director for our Centre for Neuroscience Studies 2. a non-human primate NeuroAI researcher Please share widely and reach out for questions!

Another new paper from the lab: Predictive theories like the SR imply that navigators who navigate differently should have cognitive maps which differ in predictable ways. Here we show that this holds in mouse hippocampal CA1. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

1/ Why does RL struggle with social dilemmas? How can we ensure that AI learns to cooperate rather than compete? Introducing our new framework: MUPI (Embedded Universal Predictive Intelligence) which provides a theoretical basis for new cooperative solutions in RL. Preprint🧵👇 (Paper link below.)

Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins is inviting applications for 3 open-rank tenured/tenure-track positions in (1) Behavioral Neuroscience, (2) Cognitive Neuroscience, and (3) Cognitive Psychology. pbs.jhu.edu/about/jobs/

I am recruiting graduate students for the experimental side of my lab @mcgill.ca for admission in Fall 2026! Get in touch if you're interested in how brain circuits implement distributed computation, including dopamine-based distributed RL and probabilistic representations.

Share your research at the next Canadian Neuroscience Meeting May 18-21, 2026 in Montreal! Calls for Parallel Symposia, Satellite Meetings, Poster Abstract and Travel & Professional Awards are now open - Don't miss these opportunities! can-acn.org/meeting-2026/

Delighted to see this finally out: rdcu.be/eO9oW We tested whether brief striatal dopamine release events influence the vigor of skilled movements. Despite popular belief, we did not find any evidence linking rapid dopamine dynamics to motor vigor on a moment-by-moment basis.

All talks of the 2025 UCL #Neuropixels course are now available: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... For more information on the course see the website: www.ucl.ac.uk/neuropixels/... And for those at #SfN, come say hi at the #Neuropixels booth (Number 3731) or at my Poster 👋. Happy Neuropixeling!

How do VTA DA neurons sculpt downstream representations to reinforce actions? VERY excited about our new preprint (by Alex Pan Vazquez & @czimmerman.bsky.social )

First paper from the lab! We propose a model that separates estimation of odor concentration and presence and map it on olfactory bulb circuits Led by @chenjiang01.bsky.social and @mattyizhenghe.bsky.social joint work with @jzv.bsky.social and with @neurovenki.bsky.social @cpehlevan.bsky.social

Simultaneous detection and estimation in olfactory sensing https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.01.686013v1

Stoked to see our study out in final form! Big kudos to @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social for driving this along for the past 5 years.

🔷 Launch of the IVADO 2026 Postdoctoral Research Funding Program for outstanding national and international postdoctoral researchers. More info: ivado.ca/en/scholarsh... #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #R3AI #Funding #Postdoc

Applying to do a postdoc or PhD in theoretical ML or neuroscience this year? Consider joining my group (starting next Fall) at UT Austin! POD Postdoc: oden.utexas.edu/programs-and... CSEM PhD: oden.utexas.edu/academics/pr...

Apply to the new CSHL grad program in BioAI/neuroAI! (Masters degree or equivalent required in a quantitative area such as computer science, physics, mathematics, or engineering) www.cshl.edu/phd-program/...

Mila's annual supervision request process is now open to receive MSc and PhD applications for Fall 2026 admission! For more information, visit mila.quebec/en/prospecti...

Delighted to share that we are currently hiring for a tenure-track position (open rank) in Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychology at McGill University. Come join a great department! Link to apply: mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/mcgill....

This is one of the most outstanding examples of circuit understanding I've seen in a long time. The unification of theory and experiment is beautiful. When Malcolm presented this in my lab, the audience was cheering at the end, and one person shouted (non-ironically) "You did it!"

Finally preprinted! TL;DR: thalamic head-direction neurons can shape their activity regardless of input. Big thanks to @apeyrache.bsky.social and master experimentalist @sskromne.bsky.social .

Stoked to see this paper finally out! It answers two big questions: where visual objects are encoded in the brain, and how head-direction cells get oriented using visual landmarks. Super fun collaboration with @mace-lab.bsky.social and Stuart Trenholm. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

For anyone on the neuroscience job market, our ads are up. We are looking for anyone working in systems neuroscience of animals to join us in southern Alberta 🇨🇦 #academicsky #neuroskyence #neuroethology #academicjobs #Canada neurojobs.sfn.org/job/39049/as...

Come join us at University of Toronto. We're hiring a Professor of computational cognitive neuroscience. #neuroAI #compneuro jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-...

Since I'm back on BlueSky - with @frostedblakess.bsky.social and @cpehlevan.bsky.social we wrote a brief perspective on how ideas about summary statistics from the statistical physics of learning could potentially help inform neural data analysis... (1/2)

Thrilled to share this work, long time in the making! Carried through creatively by @siddjakes.bsky.social after initial design & piloting by @trackingskills.bsky.social, with help from @trackingactions.bsky.social. Modeling in collaboration with Massimo Vergassola & Nicola Rigolli.

Having fun facilitating this amazing group of young Profs at the #Neuro4Pros workshop with @kordinglab.bsky.social and @meganakpeters.bsky.social, @yaelniv.bsky.social, and Hannah Bayer. Watch out world: this is the next generation of leaders! compneurosci.com/Neuro4Pros/i...

For anyone interested in an academic job in 🇨🇦, we will soon be advertising an Assistant Prof position in Systems Neuroscience (rodents and other animal models) at ULethbridge. There are many pros and cons of working here, so feel free to DM me to find out more #neuroskyence #academicsky

My first paper with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social is finally out in @natcomms.nature.com ! rdcu.be/eACGf TL;DR: asymmetric learning rates can be induced by shifts in tonic dopamine giving rise to pessimistic/optimistic biases in agents or animals undergoing reinforcement learning .

🚨 I’m excited to say that my CIHR Project Grant was funded! My NHP lab is now full-speed-ahead, and I’m hiring experimentalists (postdoc, PhD student, and/or a tech/manager). We’ll do multi-region ephys during reaching/grasping in macaques, with behavioral and spinal perturbations.

New paper with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social in Nature Communications: an RL model that builds a successor map compositionally. The new model plans as well as the best models, and it links components of the map used for planning to neural codes in the medial entorhinal cortex. rdcu.be/eAofi

Our paper on foraging is now published in Neuron! Read it here: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... This project was co-led by Michael Bukwich (not on Bluesky) and me, with major contributions from all co-authors. Huge thanks to the whole team!

A landmark volume, The Handbook of Dopamine, is now online: www.sciencedirect.com/handbook/han... Big kudos to the editors, Stephanie Cragg and Mark Walton, for putting this together.

Check out our new review/perspective (w/ @juangallego.bsky.social & Devika Narain) on neural manifolds in the brain! It was a lot of fun to think through these ideas over the past couple of years, and I'm excited it's finally out in the world! 🔗: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 📄: rdcu.be/ex8hW

👨‍💻 Open PI position in our institute 👨‍💻 !! If you are an expert in Computational Neuroscience and want to start your lab in Bordeaux, contact us ! www.fens.org/careers/job-... @neuromagendie.bsky.social @neurobordeaux.bsky.social

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Excited to share the first 2(!) preprints from the Kebschull Lab. The amazing @hyopilkim.bsky.social developed MAPseq2 & POINTseq and used them to map the dopaminergic cells of VTA and SNc. tl;dr MAPseq2=10x cheaper, 4x better; POINTseq=easy cell type specific barcoding; DA neurons=very cool.

Thrilled to announce I'll be starting my own neuro-theory lab, as an Assistant Professor at @yaleneuro.bsky.social @wutsaiyale.bsky.social this Fall! My group will study offline learning in the sleeping brain: how neural activity self-organizes during sleep and the computations it performs. 🧵

It's officially published!! In my main postdoc work with @markplitt.bsky.social and @lgiocomo.bsky.social, we found that the hippocampus simultaneously encodes an animal's spatial position and its experience relative to reward in parallel population codes. 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our work, out at Cell, shows that the brain’s dopamine signals teach each individual a unique learning trajectory. Collaborative experiment-theory effort, led by Sam Liebana in the lab. The first experiment my lab started just shy of 6y ago & v excited to see it out: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

And one more again at McGill in artificial intelligence in Psychiatry can-acn.org/assistant-pr...

Preprint Alert 🚀 Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) often assumes that agents know when other agents cooperate with them. But for humans, this isn’t always the case. For example, plains indigenous groups used to leave resources for others to use at effigies called Manitokan. 1/8

Our work with Pablo Tano, @hyunggoo-kim.bsky.social Athar Malik, Alexandre Pouget and @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social exploring how dopamine neurons could enable multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain is out in @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Two papers out today on RL in the dopaminergic neurons of the midbrain of mice (one from McGill's new PI @paulmasset.bsky.social). Both papers demonstrate heterogeneity in discount factors! www.nature.com/articles/s41... nature.com/articles/s41... 🧠📈 🧪 #NeuroAI

First pre-print from the lab: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

1/6 Why does the brain maintain such precise excitatory-inhibitory balance? Our new preprint explores a provocative idea: Small, targeted deviations from this balance may serve a purpose: to encode local error signals for learning. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... led by @jrbch.bsky.social

Choose Science. Choose Europe. A new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 call is now open. With a budget of €404.3 million, it will support around 1,650 researchers from Europe and beyond. Apply by 10 September → europa.eu/!fBTMgF