Evolution seems to have repeatedly converged on a similar architecture in the early olfactory system of many animals. We offer an efficient-coding framework to understand this. Out in @pnas.org now! Led by @jzv.bsky.social, driven by Juan Carlos, + help from Farhad. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Why Evolution Keeps Returning to the Same Solution for Smell 🧠 🧪🧬 #AcademicSky #higherEd www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... @neurovenki.bsky.social @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social @pnas.org @harvardbrainsci.bsky.social @jzv.bsky.social @rachellegaudet.bsky.social @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social

🧠👃A new study by #KempnerInstitute associate faculty member Venkatesh Murthy & collaborators shows that maximizing information recreates an olfactory design shared by multiple species. Out now in @pnas.org: bit.ly/4uQ6Omw @neurovenki.bsky.social @jzv.bsky.social #neuroscience

Travelling to COSYNE seems to be the perfect opportunity to announce that I started my own lab at RWTH Aachen University earlier this year, funded by NRW's Ministry of Culture and Science through its Return Program. If you are at COSYNE and want to chat please reach out!

If you're at #cosyne2026 in Lisbon, come check out Juan Carlos Fernández del Castillo's poster 1-007 tonight, based on our paper on efficient coding in olfaction (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...)!

NEW: #Kempner researchers develop a mean-field theory of task-trained RNNs that bridges random and learned connectivity—and find macaque motor cortex is best captured by an intermediate, task-specific recurrent structure. Read the blog post 👇 🔗 bit.ly/47f3Ldl

I am totally pumped about this new work . "Task-trained RNNs" are a powerful and influential framework in neuroscience, but have lacked a firm theoretical footing. This work provides one, and makes direct contact with the classical theory of random RNNs: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

How do past sensory experiences prepare us for new ones? Our new paper tackles this long-standing question, revealing a role for activity sequences in the olfactory bulb. Excited to share our work led by @jonvgill.bsky.social with Mursel Karadas & Shy Shoham www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

My paper on the head direction neurons in the larval zebrafish is now published on Nature! Read it here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What is the computational role of dendritic excitations? Byung Hun Lee and team mapped voltage dynamics throughout the dendritic trees of CA1 pyramidal neurons in mice navigating in virtual reality. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too! preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵 Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/9

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

Happy to see this long-in-the-making collaboration with @paulmasset.bsky.social out on bioRxiv!

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

Now in PRX: Theory linking connectivity structure to collective activity in nonlinear RNNs! For neuro fans: conn. structure can be invisible in single neurons but shape pop. activity For low-rank RNN fans: a theory of rank=O(N) For physics fans: fluctuations around DMFT saddle⇒dimension of activity

This week's sensorimotor superlab reading list is out https://superlab.ca/posts/2025-09-05-list302.html @andpru.bsky.social @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social @gribblelab.org #neuroskyence #psychscisky #Sensorimotor

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)

Happy to see this collaboration with @neurovenki.bsky.social out - featuring great work by Juan Carlos!

Excited to share new computational work, led by @jzv.bsky.social, driven by Juan Carlos Fernandez del Castillo + contribution from Farhad Pashakanloo. We recover 3 core motifs in the olfactory system of evolutionarily distant animals using a biophysically-grounded model + efficient coding ideas!

Excited to share our latest!! Thanks to everyone involved especially @neurovenki.bsky.social!

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.

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...

Don't miss our #Cosyne2025 poster (3-128) 'Simultaneous detection and mapping in the olfactory bulb' proposing a new computational role for mitral and tufted cells in the olfactory bulb with Matthew He, @chenjiang01.bsky.social @neurovenki.bsky.social @cpehlevan.bsky.social @jzv.bsky.social

Applications are open for the 2025 Flatiron Institute Junior Theoretical Neuroscience Workshop! A two-day workshop 7/10-7/11 in NYC for PhD students and postdocs. All travel paid. Apply by April 14th.🧠🗽🧑‍🔬http://jtnworkshop2025.flatironinstitute.org/ @flatironinstitute.org @simonsfoundation.org

Science Matters. 🔬 For 80 years, science has been a north star for the U.S. In 1945, Vannevar Bush’s report Science, The Endless Frontier called for bold government investment in research transforming our health, economy, quality of life. Science is not zero-sum—it creates value and better lives.

In our new paper @dulaclab.bsky.social, we investigated a fundamental question in social neuroscience: the origin of "sociality" (the need of being together) at the levels of behavior, neuron type, neural circuit and sensory modulation. (Detailed digest below) (1/7) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Honoured to have been selected as a #SloanFellow Thankful for all the support from family, mentors, collaborators, colleagues and students along the way! @sloanfoundation.bsky.social

Yes, many worrying things happening in science that should take priority in grabbing our attention - but we are worried precisely because scientific knowledge is worth creating. In that spirit, I am proud to highlight our latest @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint! #neuroscience 🧪

New preprint: "The geometry of the neural state space of decisions", work by Mauro Monsalve-Mercado, buff.ly/42wVHD5. Surprising results & predictions! (Thread) We analyze neuropixel population recordings in macaque area LIP during a reaction time, random-dot motion 1/

Theory in neuroscience, you say? How about this preprint by @david-g-clark.bsky.social, with a couple of others you might recognize? :-) #neuroscience

The thing is “cancer research” is *incredibly* popular. Everyone knows people with cancer. This is slam dunk shit.

Excited to welcome @sueyeonchung.bsky.social to Harvard!! She will be at the @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social and the Center for Brain Science. We are very lucky!!

Our perspective on designing electronic noses inspired by natural olfaction! #neuroscience #ChemSky 🧪

Recently posted an updated version of arxiv.org/abs/2306.13326 on `Solving systems of Random Equations' I find this a really useful model to gain intuition into the behavior of optimization algorithms in high-dimensional overparametrized landscapes, as the ones arising in modern machine learning.

Thanks to the yield of U arrays, we were able for the 1st time AFAIK to average across neurons (not trials) and see memory bumps on single trials. Look at this 😍 Not the focus of the work but it taps into an open debate on the neural mech. of WM cf @cconstan.bsky.social @earlkmiller.bsky.social

1/ Super-excited to share our new work “Episodic and associative memory from spatial scaffolds in the hippocampus”, that just appeared in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Key insights and ideas 👇#tweeprint

Very cool paper on Manx shearwater flight strategies! Also cool that the first & corresponding author @stephharris.bsky.social lists their BlueSky handle in the affiliations :-) 🧪

Happy head direction cell day y’all! On this day, 41 years ago, Jim Ranck recorded the first “HD cell” in his Brooklyn lab in 1984. Jim shared the news with the world at SFN that year, showing a video of the cell’s firing on a TV he somehow acquired and brought to his poster… (1/3)

A summary of my thinking on shared prosperity, work and AI in ten bullet points.

Yes it's important people understand a preprint hasn't been peer-reviewed. BUT it's also important to understand that what "peer-reviewed" means varies considerably, in some cases signifying nothing... www.science.org/content/arti...

663 days since the senseless tragedy that took An, we present a manuscript that reports some of the discoveries that she left us. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Here is the link for the "back-story" for a paper we published in 2024. It was in collaboration with Feng Chen (Stanford), Shaul Druckmann (Stanford) and Michael Long (NYU). This is my first attempt at doing this. Feedback welcome. www.arkabanerjeelab.com/_files/ugd/c...

Key-value memory is an important concept in modern machine learning (e.g., transformers). Ila Fiete, Kazuki Irie, and I have written a paper showing how key-value memory provides a way of thinking about memory organization in the brain: arxiv.org/abs/2501.02950

Interested in theoretical neuroscience or machine learning but come from a non-quantitative background? This summer school is for you! Learn the foundational theory needed to excel in a quantitative PhD in 7 weeks. Apply by feb 7!

ML methods are an asset in analysing numerically glassy dynamics - a notoriously difficult physics problem. If you want to know more on recent results and future directions, check out our "Roadmap on machine learning glassy dynamics", just appeared on Nature Reviews www.nature.com/articles/s42...

I wish the government would understand that open access mandates are (on their own) invitations for profit-seeking publishers to gouge authors, universities, and funders by charging exorbitant fees. The government should directly support open access publishing, so that they can control costs.

🚨Our paper on how the cerebellum learns to drive cortical dynamics for rapid task learning and switching, which we propose can then be consolidated in the cortex @naturecomms.bsky.social nature.com/articles/s41... 🧠 #compneuro

Can the motor system use sensory expectations to prepare for unexpected events? Excited to share my latest work with @andpru.bsky.social – where we establish that sensory expectations shape neural population dynamics in motor circuits! 🧵 and paper below 1/

Honored that a piece I wrote made it to NYTimes. It’s about how my mom’s stroke changed my connection to time, science, and nature. What a privilege to honor my mom in Modern Love. Below is a gift link. Let me know your thoughts 🙏🏼 www.nytimes.com/2024/12/20/s...