The Lerner Lab is excited for #Dopamine2026 next week! Make sure to check out these sessions and say hello 👋 @dopaminesociety.bsky.social

Do brain circuits really sit in a 'soup' of neuromodulators? Are neurons like soggy bits of bread soaked in signaling factors? Is the whole brain just squelching around in one big pool of warm modulators?

Where, exactly, does learning happen in the brain? Out today in @nature.com, we identify a synaptic locus of birdsong learning and show that the circuit can be tuned to make birds learn faster - but at a cost. Read on👇 #neuroskyence 🧪 #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics Shareable link: rdcu.be/fiyrS

Long-term editing of brain circuits with engineered electrical synapses! I still remember years ago when Kafui Dzirasa from @dukeuni.bsky.social @hhmi-science.bsky.social called me beaming with excitement about this new technology. Here it is today in Nature. www.nature.com/articles/s41... .

If you've ever sought NIH funding, do this now www.bioniclab.org/news/request...

Breaking: Congress is pushing back on the Trump administration's termination of National Science Board members, with the House calling for their reinstatement and the Senate asking pointed questions about OMB's political interference. My reporting for @science.org:

🚨Exiting new preprint from Lerner Lab postdoc AJ Miller-Hansen examining the thalamus as a physiological driver of local, acetylcholine-dependent dopamine release! 🚨 DA-ACh interactions have been 🔥but what’s really going on in vivo? We think we have some answers. #neuroskyence🧪

Thrilled to share our work out in @nature.com today! Linking flexibility modeling, single-cell imaging, and targeted optogenetics allowed us to characterize how some prefrontal neurons, and mPFC-VTA neurons in particular, drive contingency degradation behavior. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We should fully fund science.

GET IN, DORKS! It's a watershed moment and we need YOUR HELP. 1/x @standupforscience.net was asked by independent members of the National Academies to support their letter to Congress calling for the reinstatement of the National Science Board. #saveNSB 🔗 www.standupforscience.net/nasem-letter...

Hell yeah

Really pleased that this work with @dudman.bsky.social is now out in Neuron: A global dopaminergic learning rate enables adaptive foraging across many options

People have got to wake up to how bad the situation in US science is right now

Ooof, huge cyberattack on Canvas right as university final exams are starting. Solidarity with all the instructors and students out there trying to adapt quickly.

Breaking: Tennessee Republicans pass new 9-0 gerrymander after SCOTUS destruction of Voting Rights Act eliminating state’s only majority-Black district & last Democratic seat. Splits Memphis, which is 63% Black, into 3 districts to disenfranchise Black voters. Quite literally a return to Jim Crow

Very sad news. I was lucky enough to spend some time in Howard's lab when I was at UCSF. He was such a generous and ebullient person and one of the most insightful scientists I've known.

We tracked mice in space! This video shows our estimate of their self-induced centripetal force during circling in 3D 👩‍🚀 Preprint thread below 👇

I’m recruiting a new lab manger! Please pass on to anyone who might be interested, and have them reach out to me once they’ve applied. Photo proof of awesome lab to join research-princeton.icims.com/jobs/21793/r...

1. ICE has not paid for detainee medical care for 7 MONTHS The termination of payments to providers has coincided with a MASSIVE SPIKE in detainee deaths. This is a health crisis and a moral crisis. Follow along for details. 🧵

Free and open-source images, icons, and tools for creating scientific illustrations doi.org/10.59350/5zt... 🧪

So fun to be part of such a rockstar panel with @rcbagot.bsky.social @mayoonthebrain.bsky.social and Friede Holze. If you look carefully you can see @deffinger.bsky.social 👀 whose beautiful work is now in press at Nature Communications 🧠

I am looking for a new reserach technician. This is an entry level position ideal for a graudating senior. Please re-post and send candidates my way! [email protected]

NEW: Sen. @durbin.senate.gov leads nine fellow Senate Democrats in proposing an amendment to the Constitution that would enshrine an explicit, individual right to vote www.durbin.senate.gov/imo/media/do...

New preprint led by recent PhD graduate Dalton Fitzgerald characterizing two distinct populations of VTA dopamine neurons that differ in ion channel expression, intrinsic excitability, and response to drugs of abuse. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Finally online @natmethods.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41... This was a fun collaboration with @finkryan.bsky.social @massecklab.bsky.social @tpatriarchi.bsky.social @martinfuhrmann.bsky.social @campbell-lab.bsky.social @jangrundemann.bsky.social 🧪🧠🔬🧬

Had fun working with @margole.bsky.social on this eLife Insight piece. Also check out the original paper by Zong et al. (Schoenbaum lab): elifesciences.org/articles/109...

The number of NIH competitive awards is down 50% from 2025, and down ~70% from prior years. Even if they catch up by the end of the year, only wealthy institutions can bridge these huge funding gaps.They're killing science-and violating the constitution-by weaponizing the bureaucracy

Another PhD! Huge congratulations to Dr. @margestelzner.bsky.social!!!! She completed a fantastic dissertation defense yesterday. We are all really proud!

“Congress did fund NIH. That is true. The President signed the appropriation. The money exists. But the grants are not necessarily moving.” Great piece from Liz Ginexi detailing why. Add to this all of this new screening is happening with 20% less staff. open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

📋 Great papers in the queue for a special collection on the Neurobiology of Associative Learning! It’s not too late to contribute- the submission deadline is June 15. Get in touch with me or @kurtfraser.bsky.social💡✅ academic.oup.com/oons/pages/c...

John Roberts’ Wife Made Millions From Bribes Roberts accepted $10 Million in bribes disguised as recruiting fees from Law firms with cases pending before the Supreme Court. www.thedailybeast.com/chief-justic...

The task of de-Trumpification of science and public health will take a generation and a "Marshall Plan" to rebuild. Without a bold, expansive vision to guide us, there is no coming back. Small-bore, poll-tested versions of the future will not help us. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

ZOHRAN: “TBH, I don’t think too much about how Republicans portray me. The power of an ideology is judged in the worth of its delivery— to be told a city-run grocery store is implausible but $500 MILLION/day to kill ppl in Iran & Lebanon is necessary speaks to a broken politics.”

Super excited for this paper to be out soon! Keep an eye out for the final version.

thrilled that i got this madonna song title into @science.org. the song is so true and the music video has the best cinematography.

Officially out today! Long-running project, many thanks to give - in particular to my mentors & collaborators, the postbacs who worked so hard on each experiment, and the reviewers. If you love the amygdala, give it a read. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

New preprint from my lab! We study how reinforcement learning & selective attention interact. To do so, we built a set of models describing different ways that value & reward prediction error can modulate top-down attention. We compare model outcomes to monkey data from a color value learning task

Delighted to share our discoveries about one of the brain's neurotransmitter systems: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Together with colleagues at the @alleninstitute.org, we have learned a lot about a tiny cluster of neurons in the brainstem locus coeruleus (LC) that releases norepinephrine (NE). 1

This view as Artemis 2 approached reentry so incredible (and stressful) to get to watch this happen live

Experts found that the White House budget request for the upcoming fiscal year could defund 54 NASA science missions, including a spacecraft currently studying Jupiter and two planned Venus missions: www.scientificamerican.com/article/whit...

Welcome back, moon poets

“Crowds watch the Artemis II Orion capsule splash down off the coast of San Diego at the Air and Space Museum in San Diego, California.” Photo by Sandy Huffaker

New paper alert: @nicglewwe.bsky.social connects the explore exploit tradeoff to cognitive flexibility!! A fun paradox: Female mice in our lab do "better" at this cognitive flexibility task because they commit to exploit behavior sooner In @npp-journal.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If you're on signal & haven't already, maybe go to Settings → Notifications → Content → Name Only or No Name or Content Because apparently phone forensics can scrape msgs from notifications storage. Not just a signal problem, btw. Any encrypted messaging service w/ a "msg preview" type of setting

Artemis II going behind the moon with a crescent earth in the distance

Huge congratulations to Dr. Megan Brickner!!!! She completed a stellar dissertation defense yesterday. We are so proud!

#TWiNPP Dick et al. demonstrate that NMDA receptor knockdown during adolescence drives dynamic, compensatory synaptic remodeling, providing insight into prefrontal cortical circuit adaptations relevant to schizophrenia @nicolagrissom.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is appalling: “Case counts [of measles] in 2026 are more than double what they were the same period of 2025 and more than ten times what they were in 2024.” 4/1/26 … 1/ www.nbcnews.com/data-graphic...