We recently posted a new review preprint: “Ventral hippocampus and the contextual control of Pavlovian and instrumental behavior”, written with fantastic collaborators Samantha Moriarty (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) and Travis Todd (University of Vermont). lnkd.in/dJ5ydAaZ

So excited to see our latest paper out today in @natcomms.nature.com! Studies led by the amazing @margestelzner.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41.... VTA GABA neurons have a unique role in economic decision making - they integrate reward seeking motivation and the current cost of seeking

#SfN25 attendees - make sure to head to the posters when you get to the meeting on Saturday afternoon (V7-V11: Gretchen, Megan, Margaret, Louisa, Bella) and Sunday morning (KK17: Micaela) to hear about our work. We're printing the posters now and they look rad.

Folks at SfN come see the first Fraser Lab poster ever at FF6 on Tuesday Nov 18, 8am. Serena Miller has oodles of data to share on a new direction for us. Also, that day happens to be my birthday so you have to come say hi or else

Check out our latest, online now at @sfnjournals.bsky.social www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Really excited to have this paper accepted for publication now in @natcomms.nature.com - stay tuned for the final version and huge congrats to @margestelzner.bsky.social!!!!

🧠 Curious about grad school in Psych & Brain Sciences? Join UC Santa Barbara’s PBS Department for a virtual open house on Oct 14 — meet faculty, connect with grad students, and learn more about the program!

🎇 Excited to finally share JL Romero Sosa’s publication! Results are from single-cell imaging in different subregions of rat frontal cortex during ✨de novo learning. Spoiler: everything is not everywhere all at once www.nature.com/articles/s41...

First lab paper out today! Student authors: Mikayla Cutler and Abhi Thati 🎉🤩 Hippocampus | Neuroscience Journal | Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

I'm recruiting a PhD student to study how enkephalins affect cognitive processing in the rodent frontal cortex. The project uses pharmacology, multi-electrode recordings, and fiber photometry, and is funded by NIDA. Please share with trainees applying this cycle. Thanks!

We have an open NIH-funded postdoc position in the lab to study circuit and neurochemical mechanisms of cognitive and motivational deficits in opioid withdrawal. Apply here: recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09885 or message/email for more information.

Honored to be elected to serve as the next vice co-chair, along with the amazing @sciolinolab.bsky.social, for the Catecholamines Gordon Research Conference. I first came to this meeting in 2011 as a grad student and it was transformative for my career. Excited to help cultivate that for others.

If you are a highly motivated grad student (@uabneuro.bsky.social) or a prospective postdoc with experience in behavior, neural recordings, or programming, and would like to contribute to this project, just contact me. Details on kmcostalab.com

My hero!!!!

We are thrilled to announce that OneNeuro Co-Director Patricia Janak, Ph.D., has been elected as the 2026-2027 President of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN). @janaklab.bsky.social View the official announcement: www.sfn.org/publications...

New Dispatch in @currentbiology.bsky.social w/ @RobinPiquet & @dryacinetensaouti.bsky.social highlighting elegant work from the @iordanova.bsky.social lab that formally disentangles whether dopamine signals reward prediction errors or value. authors.elsevier.com/a/1ldGk3QW8S...

Very excited to share this major update to our paper delineating VTA GABA neuron encoding of valence and decision conflict. Studies led by the amazing @margestelzner.bsky.social. We leaned in here, taking the opportunity to add a lot of cool new data. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Catching up on announcements — huge congrats to @sophiepeterson.bsky.social on a successful defense! Proud PI moment!

🚨New paper alert! 🚨 Inactivation of the nucleus reuniens causes relapse of extinguished fear. Here we show this “circuit-induced relapse” depends on hippocampal fear memories and is mediated by hippocampal engrams. Congrats to the team!

Check out our latest! Studies led by the amazing Megan Brickner - she finds really interesting patterns of dopamine signaling in the basolateral amygdala that report the emotional salience of sensory state transitions. These are largely non-associative, value-free signals, in contrast to classic DA.

Thrilled to announce that our paper is now finally out! 🎉We combine scRNAseq, 2p imaging, ephys, and behavior to understand the role of lateral septal Nts neurons in opioid withdrawal. Curious about the septum and addiction? Give it a read👇 www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Very surprised (but very excited) to announce that I’ll be officially starting as an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and as part of the new Data Science and AI Institute in July 2026!

I’m excited to share a new paper from the lab. The study led by Xiaowei Gu reveals how the mPFC encodes complex emotional memories, using an internal model to infer emotional associations and memories via projections to the amygdala. a🧵(1/8) rdcu.be/el19t

Sharing a new paper from the lab. This paper, led by Sangyoon Ko, represents a merging of two longstanding research themes in the lab-- adult neurogenesis and systems consolidation. rdcu.be/el18q A short thread follows for those interested. 1/n

🚨Very excited to share a new paper from our lab in Neuron (@cp-neuron.bsky.social) on the influence of the estrous cycle on structural and functional plasticity in the hippocampus: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Thread below 🧠🧪🧵:

Join us in beautiful Santa Barbara! We're hiring a full-time junior specialist/research technician to play a central role in data collection & analysis of brain imaging studies of pregnancy & menopause. Learn more & apply at: recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF02974 Or help us spread the word 💫

Our latest! We measure dopamine signals as rats disambiguate cues that predict reward or threat. We find that dopamine flexibly tracks the changing salience and value of cues, but according to region-specific scales, rapid within-trial dopamine fluctuations prioritize different stimulus features.

Thanks @danacobblewis.bsky.social and @asapresearch.bsky.social for supporting and showcasing our work!

Sex Differences Research Saves Lives! #OSSD #BoSD #SBN #SWHR #science please share rdcu.be/ecZXa

#standupforscience2025 at the St Paul Capitol with my lab and many others this afternoon

Proud to #standupforscience with students, postdocs, and colleagues today

I am happy to share my latest (NIH funded) work, out in @currentbiology.bsky.social ! We show that task demands define the correlations between accumbal dopamine and acetylcholine, in a pattern that supports a tripartite coincidence model of striatal plasticity. sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Interested in knowing more about conditioning? It’s not what you think it is. #rescorla Check this webinar out on March 5 at 2pm apa-org.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Reaching out to all Americans through the media to explain how decreasing funding of the NIH will have irreversible harm for developing therapies for all diseases. Please spread the word to your families and friends and contact your congressional representatives. www.nbcnews.com/science/scie...

🚨📃New Wassum Lab Paper📃🚨 Out today, @jackiegio.bsky.social discovered brain pathways that support agency and habit and how chronic stress disrupts them to rob of us our agency and cause us to form rigid habits 🧵👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41... Free full text: rdcu.be/eaxEv

If the block on the Federal Register isn’t removed in the next few months, I fear a majority of labs will close within a year. This small procedural wrench has the power to kill US science indefinitely, losing an entire generation of discovery and innovation.

I have been talking to the media, Time, Fortune, NBC, etc., to explain how the onslaught on science and NIH will impact the health of all Americans. Everyone knows someone who has cancer, heart disease, or depression. Spread the word about how cutting science impacts all. time.com/7216299/nih-...

I had this key for years. Today I learn that *everyone* in the lab thought this was John Snow… Fuck I’m old

💯👏

🎈New paper🎈 Led by the inimitable @asieh.bsky.social Hippocampal dysfunction in medication naive patients with schizophrenia during a memory task resolves with drug treatment. Incredible team effort! urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=htt...

Nature Reviews Neuroscience The curious case of dopaminergic prediction errors and learning associative information beyond value idp.nature.com/authorize?re...

Literally more of y’all need to think about this as you increasingly outsource mundane work to gen AI

Nature Neuroscience Context-dependent decision-making in the primate hippocampal–prefrontal circuit www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I met Stan Weiss early in my career, while attending the Winter Conference on Animal Learning and Behavior. He was kind, smart, and funny. His support for the field continues even after he is gone. www.stanweissfund.org/home

Excited to share this perspective with @yaelniv.bsky.social about how schemas might be learned and instantiated via reinforcement learning, latent cause inference, and dimensionality reduction, and what's the medial prefrontal cortex might be doing for all of these www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New results for a new year! “Linking neural population formatting to function” describes our modern take on an old question: how can we understand the contribution of a brain area to behavior? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧠👩🏻‍🔬🧪🧵 #neuroskyence 1/

🌟 Mark your calendars for the EBBS Meeting in Bordeaux, June 28 – July 1 🧠 Connect, explore cutting-edge neuroscience, and enjoy Bordeaux’s charm 📅 Registration opens on January 15 👉 Check out the preliminary program ebbs2025.azuleon.org/programme 📲 Follow us for the latest updates

One of the best neuroscience meetings in 2025. Can't wait to be there 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

🎄PinkyCaMP- our christmas gift to you! 🎁: We are excited to present PinkyCaMP, the first mScarlet based calcium sensor with: ✨exceptional, brightness ✨phototability ✨and optogenetic compatability. Check out our new preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...