Personal update: I’m elated to have joined NVIDIA as a researcher in Seattle where I will be working on human-inspired sim2real perception in robotics. Grateful for the amazing opportunity and excited to see where this journey goes!

To be clear, there is nothing inconsistent with 1) large scale “areas” being extremely functionally relevant and 2) them being just one scale of a locally and globally coherent map of activity!

Very excited to be in Amsterdam for #CCN2025! See below for my two presentations -- a talk today and a poster Friday. Come say hi!

What makes visual processing in the brain so powerful and flexible? Very excited to share our new work where we started from SOTA models that accurately predict dynamic brain activity during hours of video watching, and investigated core computations underlying visual perception

Excited to share a new preprint w/ @annaschapiro.bsky.social! Why are there gradients of plasticity and sparsity along the neocortex–hippocampus hierarchy? We show that brain-like organization of these properties emerges in ANNs that meta-learn layer-wise plasticity and sparsity. bit.ly/4kB1yg5

Exciting new preprint from the lab: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision”. A most wonderful case where brain inspiration massively improved AI solutions. Work with @zejinlu.bsky.social @sushrutthorat.bsky.social and Radek Cichy arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168

Very cool work and very in line with how we've been thinking about category selectivity in topographic neural net models -- one scale of an inherently interactive topographic network. Their results provide important constraints for the next generation of active, multimodal neural net models.

Can seemingly complex multi-area computations in the brain emerge from the need for energy efficient computation? In our new preprint on predictive remapping in active vision, we report on such a case. Let us take you for a spin. 1/6 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Has nominative determinism gone too far h/t @benjaminschneider.ch

BREAKING: A federal judge reversed National Institutes of Health's terminations of hundreds of critical research grants that were canceled because of their alleged connection to disfavored topics, including diversity, equity, inclusion, and gender identity. This is a major win for public health.

What shapes the topography of high-level visual cortex? Excited to share a new pre-print addressing this question with connectivity-constrained interactive topographic networks, titled "Retinotopic scaffolding of high-level vision", w/ Marlene Behrmann & David Plaut. 🧵 ↓ 1/n

Our new story. Now also posted by the official side. :) Activity patterns drift. Representational maps are preserved. Even after single neuron ablations, representational maps are recovered within days.

America cannot long remain free, nor first among nations, if it becomes the kind of place where universities are dismantled because they don't align politically with the current head of the government.

What are the organizing dimensions of language processing? We show that voxel responses during comprehension are organized along 2 main axes: processing difficulty & meaning abstractness—revealing an interpretable, topographic representational basis for language processing shared across individuals

Respectfully, news orgs should not report that "Harvard can no longer" do xyz -- Trump just saying some shit doesn't make it law. Stop carrying water for him rhetorically.

🧪 Basic science boosts the economy: "The proposed dismantling of NSF [and NIH] raises an urgent question: do these cuts actually save money or merely delay spending until the bill gets larger? The answer is clear: these cuts will cost the economy billions."

I’m happy to be at #VSS2025 and share what our lab has been up to this year! I’m also honored to receive this year’s young investigator award and will give a short talk at the awards ceremony Monday

How Your Brain Splits Space to Double Its Perception Power neurosciencenews.com/brain-hemisp... #neuroscience

Just back from an awesome visit to Georgia Tech to speak at their Computational Cognition Postdoc Day. Very impressed by their community. And really happy to finally have met my good friend and student @neurotaha.bsky.social in person after knowing each other remotely for over 3 years!

Time to catch up on the past week’s news about science and medicine in the US. Whew. 1/10

in press @natcomms.nature.com 🌟 "Multimodal gradients unify local and global cortical organization" 7T MRI + cytoarchitectonics reveal a sensory-paralimbic axis of areal specialization & integration led by superstar Yezhou Wang & a terrific team of friends & colleagues ▶️ doi.org/10.1038/s414...

NIH is going to hold a town hall for staff with director Jayanta Bhattacharya, and apparently the form to submit questions is publicly available. In case that’s of interest. forms.office.com/pages/respon...

I got an email yesterday afternoon that my NSF SPRF Postdoctoral Fellowship was terminated. My grant focused on testing interventions to address online misinformation and I was 8 months into a two year appointment.

Dendritic arbors structure memories | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

There is a PR narrative quickly emerging about “entitlement” of elite universities, as if this $ is some sort of subsidy Harvard & others must counter this quickly The $ doesn’t flow into Harvard’s coffers - this is grant money, most of which goes to research the govt has agreed has social value

Top-down feedback is ubiquitous in the brain and computationally distinct, but rarely modeled in deep neural networks. What happens when a DNN has biologically-inspired top-down feedback? 🧠📈 Our new paper explores this: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Extremely proud of Harvard for making this choice. I was feeling a lot of despair at the idea that they would cave like Columbia, and that others would follow suit. Let the battle for intellectual freedom begin. www.harvard.edu/president/ne...

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

This is excruciating but critical for us to hear. “If you take Columbia university as really the first trial of this strategy, we’ve seen an enormous payoff, and so I’d like to see … that prototype industrialized and applied to all of the universities as a sector" www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/p...

This is beautiful work and super important for theorising about consciousness! "...we demonstrate the persistence of learning, semantic processing, and online prediction in individuals under general anesthesia-induced loss of consciousness."

See how this works? www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

🧪 Time for a full status update at NSF! Let's look via four lenses: (1) New awards: 🚨 About 50% lower since Jan 20 (2) Future funding: 🚨🚨 Major uncertainty -- action alert! (3) Active awards: 🟡🟢 Ok relative to other agencies...? (4) Staff reductions: 🟡🚨 Some with 28% RIFs coming

Interesting that most dramatic differences between humans in chimpanzees are in temporal cortex and parietal cortex. Very little in prefrontal cortex 😮 (consistent with lots of other studies). www.jneurosci.org/content/45/1...

How does the brain work? Scientists are closer to the answer with the largest wiring diagram and functional map of a mammalian brain to date. 🧵 🧠📈

The crush of new grant cancellations hasn't let up. If your grant was terminated (or your app was pulled) please use this Google Form👇 to submit details for tracking purposes. Multiple advocacy efforts are moving forward, but we must must must know more about what grants were cancelled and why.

A brave (and patient) group of neuroscientists have figured out how to do task-based fMRI in babies and toddlers. They aim to uncover how the infant mind takes shape—and the method has already provided new insight into infantile amnesia. My latest www.thetransmitter.org/cognitive-ne... #neuroskyence

I sincerely think that universities should suspend their productivity standards for scientists and ask them instead to hold town halls in schools, public libraries, museums, shopping malls, and anywhere else and communicate what is being lost with the collapse of the research ecosystem.

Here are six examples of how foreign visitors to the US with no criminal record are being treated: 1. Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holding student with no criminal record married to an American is abducted by ICE and is still in detention over a week later. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/n... ......

📢 We have a new #NeuroAI postdoctoral position in the lab! If you have a strong background in #NeuroAI or computational neuroscience, I’d love to hear from you. (Repost please) 🧠📈🤖

Read this www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

📣 Excited to announce our workshop "Agent-Based Models in Neuroscience: Complex Planning, Embodiment, and Beyond" at the upcoming @cosynemeeting.bsky.social #CoSyNe2025! 🧠🤖 🪱🪰🐟🐝🐭💪 Schedule: neuro-agent-models.github.io 🗓️ Join us in Mont-Tremblant, Canada, on March 31!

So disappointing that Harvard is terminating ongoing faculty searches. You'd think that with their resources they could complete these searches and then pause future searches. Apart from the huge waste of everyone's time, it's devastating for the candidates. My heart goes out to them.

Last year, I was overjoyed to receive an NIH NRSA fellowship to study toddler brains and caregiving effects on memory at Columbia. Last night, my grant was terminated.

In the physical world, almost all information is transmitted through traveling waves -- why should it be any different in your neural network? Super excited to share recent work with the brilliant @mozesjacobs.bsky.social: "Traveling Waves Integrate Spatial Information Through Time" 1/14

I just wrote a book about how the type of work @markhisted.org is doing is key to breaking through the bottlenecks holding back new treatments for brain and mental disorders (from Alzheimers to depression). Seeing his work in danger makes me ill, and angry. We must @standupforscience.bsky.social.

Enjoyed sharing our work on electric fish with @dryohanjohn.bsky.social⚡🐟 Their electric "conversations" help us build models to discover neural mechanisms of social cognition. Work led by Sonja Johnson-Yu & @satpreetsingh.bsky.social with Nate Sawtell kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu/news/what-el...

1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%. I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Don’t work on: Concentration inequalities (math) Interneuron diversity (neuro) Barrier functions (optimization) Thermodynamic equalities (physics) Community detection (stats) Biased estimators (stats) Marginalization in graphical models (math) Set inclusion (math) Traumatic brain injury (neuro)

Academic workers across the country are organizing to call on our congressional representatives on Thursday, 1/30, at 3pm ET / 12pm PT to demand these restrictions be lifted immediately. There will be a training over zoom at the beginning of the event. Join us! form.jotform.com/250226137228...