"the quickest way to get a collaborator to return edits on your manuscript is to write down their affiliation wrong" (ancient academic proverb)

Can one bring together Reinforcement learning and Drift Diffusion models to understand collective foraging ? Congrads to Jonathan Marienhagen , Lisa Blum Moyse and Dominik Deffner on this new study. Very happy that I was part of this collaboration. Preprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

PLOS Comput. Biol.: Stochastic activity in low-rank recurrent neural networks https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013371

“NeuroAI should not remain limited to learning statistical relationships, but should also help in building mechanistic and causal models of neural activity. These models will incorporate biological properties of neural circuits, including cellular characteristics and network properties.” 💯💯💯

New preprint from @darbly.bsky.social‬ @briandepasquale.bsky.social‬ and my labs! If you love (or hate) mosquitoes, have a look: doi.org/10.1101/2025... We used TEM to describe the circuitry used for CO2 detection by mosquitoes. As usual with mosquitoes, nothing is as expected! 🌬️🦟

Congrats to the 2025 cohort of McKnight Scholars! www.mcknight.org/news-ideas/2...

How do brain circuits evolve? We started looking for some answers by using synapse-resolution cross-species comparative connectomics on an entire olfactory circuit 👇 bit.ly/44aVm9E

Can #AI become a true scientist? @ninamiolane.bsky.social ‬explores how new technologies are reshaping scientific discovery, and why human expertise remains essential as we enter a new era of research powered by intelligent algorithms. 🧪‬ plos.io/4kZi0aB

Tired of your boring old DDM? Check out recent work by grad student @ryguy.io that introduces a *state-dependent* DDM using an underlying HMM. We find mice change their speed-accuracy strategy from trial to trial! Code provided! (in Julia of course!)

90% of doing science is being open to new ideas.

Unsurprising, but nevertheless tragic. Makes it very hard for integrators and multidisciplinarians to exist in academia. #academicsky

Hivemind, what's the best approach/tool to aggregate neural data across sessions (and animals) in dimensionality reduction analyses, particularly when it's not known how overlapping the pool of neurons are over different sessions?

"The core strategy is to slow NIH spending to generate surpluses...then use surpluses as justification for slashing the budget...unspent [$] won’t be because NIH doesn’t have good science to spend on [but] because the administration has blocked spending" donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...

Using pretrained vision-language models to align neural signals from different modalities: arxiv.org/pdf/2407.14020 Cool stuff, though I would still love to see if we could align different neural modalities without the pretrained VLMs... 🧠📈 🧪 #NeuroAI

“Science is a smart, low cost investment. The costs of not investing in it are higher than the risk of doing so… talk to people about science.” - @kevinochsner.bsky.social makes his case to the field #sans2025

First big new @simonsfoundation.org neuroscience collaboration launches - exciting!! The product of a HUGE competition among the best minds and teams. Congrats to this group: www.simonsfoundation.org/neuroscience...

Olfactory neuroscientists have known for a while that their stimuli stink. A new analysis illuminates the extent of the problem. By @callimcflurry.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/olfaction/sm...

Cool project led by Victor Geadah, fitting smoothly time-varying (and condition-varying) linear dynamical systems to neural activity. arxiv.org/abs/2502.18347

I feel compelled to acknowledge the dread and dismay that many international students in the US are feeling at the moment - we see you, even if we feel rather powerless for now. Here's the very first visa stamp on my Indian passport ~40 years ago to come to UW Seattle for an MS in Bioengineering.

📣 Grad students and postdocs in computational and theoretical neuroscience: please consider applying for the 2025 Flatiron Institute Junior Theoretical Neuroscience Workshop! All expenses are covered. Apply by April 14. jtnworkshop2025.flatironinstitute.org

@petersenpeter.bsky.social @jakhmack.bsky.social @sejdevries.bsky.social @bingbrunton.bsky.social @jeremymagland.bsky.social @briandepasquale.bsky.social @maryamshanechi.bsky.social +others not on sky: David Kleinfeld , Tim Gardner, Maryam Shanechi, Carlos Ponce, Eli Schlizerman, Edgar Walker,...

Can we get more of this? “The Japanese American National Museum will ‘scrub nothing,’ Fujioka said, and instead will highlight the importance of DEI. “Our community is based on diversity, equity is guaranteed to us in the Constitution, and inclusion is what we believe in,” Fujioka said.

Lots of excellent advice in this piece. The core message - only through writing do you really think and order your thoughts into logical sense. Makes a case for not using AI for 1st draft because you bypass the thinking step www.nature.com/articles/s41... @naturebiotech.bsky.social #PlantScience

Got for it! But be warned — I’m sensitive to initial conditions!

Already feeling #cosyne2025 withdrawal? Apply to the Flatiron Institute Junior Theoretical Neuroscience Workshop! Applications due April 14th jtnworkshop2025.flatironinstitute.org

#cosyne2025 GNN workshop w/ @neurokim.bsky.social was a huge success! For those looking to stay in touch, see GitHub repo for workshop docs, including our tutorial github.com/depasquale-l...!

This is an utterly amazing paper.

"I contend what you are doing is against the rights I have as a citizen of this country." #tdih 1944 Frank S. Emi interrogated when he refused WWII draft while imprisoned (Exec. Order 9066) as a Japanese American by US gov't. Convicted of conspiracy. Read ⬇️ www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/fr...

@cosynemeeting.bsky.social Also! Don’t miss a 💡 insightful tutorial on GNNs for connectomics analysis tomorrow at the workshop! Details here: sites.google.com/bu.edu/gnnwo...

@cosynemeeting.bsky.social #wheresmikelong

Rounding out our speakers @cosynemeeting.bsky.social GNN workshop is @dom-beaini.bsky.social of @mila-quebec.bsky.social and @valenceai.bsky.social. Come hear him tell us how to learn a…MOLECULE! Don’t forget brains 🧠 are made of chemicals ⚗️ and chemicals + graphs = 🫶

More 🔥🔥 speakers at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social GNN workshop: @ninamiolane.bsky.social who runs the @geometric-intel.bsky.social lab at UCSB. She will take us beyond 🚀🚀 GNNs, presenting a survey of message passing topological neural networks for neuroscience

@cosynemeeting.bsky.social workshops are almost here! Join GNN workshop w @neurokim.bsky.social and Sam Lewallen to hear @herrsaalfeld.bsky.social head of computation @hhmijanelia.bsky.social present on GNNs for learning structure and function underlying neural assemblies #cosyne2025

T-3 days to #cosyne2025 GNN workshop! Join us to hear Gal Mishne of UCSD talk about graph based methods for learning dynamic functional connectivity. Gal has done a TON of great foundational work on graph based approaches to data analysis in neuroscience — not to be missed!

At @cosynemeeting.bsky.social ? Don't miss the workshop "It's All Connected" or how graph neural networks help us understand the structure-function relationship in the brain🧠 Thanks to the organizers @neurokim.bsky.social @briandepasquale.bsky.social Sam Lewallen 🌟 sites.google.com/bu.edu/gnnwo...

Excited to participate in the Graph Neural Networks workshop at Cosyne on Monday March 31 (day 1): IT’S ALL CONNECTED! Graph approaches to geometric complexity in neuroscience sites.google.com/bu.edu/gnnwo... Hope to see you there!

You're invited to the livestream of our Neurobiology in Changing Environments symposium! Listen to experts in the emerging field of nervous system function and resilience in a changing world, incl. @adc-neuroenv.bsky.social scientists. Register to get the link: alleninstitute.org/events/2025-...

Feeling excited about #cosyne2025? Save some energy for @cosynemeeting.bsky.social GNN workshop! Quan Do from BU will present work illustrating how GNNs can be used to solve challenging puzzles (try them! www.nytimes.com/interactive/...) giving insight into human reasoning!

@cosynemeeting.bsky.social GNN workshop speaker profile 3 is Ashok Litwin-Kumar, of @columbiauniversity.bsky.social! Ashok has been a driving force in connectomics-based modeling.

After hearing about the ongoing hotel workers strike at the #COSYNE2025 hotel, I cancelled my reservation and booked a room at a hotel a short 10 minute walk from the meeting. It was easy and I encourage others to do the same! #solidarity montreal.citynews.ca/2025/01/14/q...

"I'm the Secretary of State...brought to you by Carl's Jr." www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BYF...

Just over a week to #cosyne2025 workshops! Speaker profile number 2 for GNN workshop w/ @neurokim.bsky.social and Sam Lewallen is @kristinmbranson.bsky.social of @hhmijanelia.bsky.social! Kristin’s lab develops cutting edge machine vision approaches for quantitatively studying animal behavior.

Want to procedurally generate large-scale relational reasoning experiments in natural language, to study human psychology 🧠 or eval LLMs 🤖? We have a tool for you! Our latest #ICLR work on long-context/relational reasoning evaluation for LLMs ReCogLab! github.com/google-deepm... Thread ⬇️

From my PhD advisor @kenmiller.bsky.social at Columbia. These are the grants that funded my PhD.

Countdown to #COSYNE2025! Leading up to @cosynemeeting.bsky.social GNN workshop w @neurokim.bsky.social and Sam, allow us to introduce our fabulous speakers, starting with @wesleyqian.bsky.social! Wesley is part of osmo.ai foundling team, using GNNs to digitize smell!

The bill, which was approved today by the U.S. House of Representatives and heads next to a Senate vote, includes 20 percent less BRAIN Initiative funding than last year. By @avaskham.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/funding/u-s-...

Fine-tune protein language models to predict protein symmetry @erichorvitz.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How can large-scale models + datasets revolutionize neuroscience 🧠🤖🌐? We are excited to announce our workshop: “Building a foundation model for the brain: datasets, theory, and models” at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social #COSYNE2025. Join us in Mont-Tremblant, Canada from March 31 – April 1!

Hello friends! Applications for the CSHL course on Neural Data Science are now open- I will be lecturing and hanging out at the course for a few days this July. meetings.cshl.edu/courses.aspx...