Addgene gave our lab at #NIH the Blue Flame Award for making a plasmid requested at least 100 times by other scientists. It's a bicistronic stable opsin-GCaMP8s pair for pattern stim. Congrats to @lafosse.bsky.social, Z Zhou, and B Akitake who led this work. 🥳🥳 Addgene

Our lab had a poster at the #SFN2025 meeting in San Diego, but the #NIH people were not able to attend. I wanted to call in Haleigh Mulholland, postdoctoral fellow (2nd pic). Haleigh was a major driver behind this project, and I encourage anyone with questions to reach out to her. /1

Sigh. NIH normally sends several hundred scientists to the SFN annual meeting to learn, exchange info, come up with new ideas, and advance science. (The exchange of ideas is the very core of the scientific enterprise.) This year, no one from NIH will attend due to the gov't implosion.

The brain is incredibly densely connected. Human cerebral cortex may have as many as *one trillion* connections. Most of those cortical connections are recurrent, inside each area. What do they do? New paper from me in Annual Reviews: 🧪 🧠📈 1/ www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Thank you very much @hhmijanelia.bsky.social and @hhmi.org for inviting me to give a seminar! That talk was supposed to be today, Tues Mar 11th. I would have talked about @lafosse.bsky.social's work on neural activation functions (con't below)... But I had to cancel due to the NIH travel ban. 🧪 1/