Excited to highlight a new paper from my graduate student Sergio Bernal Garcia who, together withLuke Hammond, developed RESPAN, a new deep-learning pipeline automating the segmentation of neuronal morphology and dendritic spines from fluorescent microscopy images: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning? Read on to find out more! 🧵

SCN2A loss is strongly linked to neurodevelopmental delays and, at times, seizure. In an amazing collaboration with @nadavahituv.bsky.social, led by Serena Tamura, Andrew Nelson, and Perry Spratt, we leveraged CRISPR activator approaches to rescue this loss. rdcu.be/eGU0W

Excited to share our new paper! ✨Natural habitat and wild behaviors of the dwarf cuttlefish, Ascarosepion bandense✨ tinyurl.com/bdew5x3s Our first cuttlefish expedition - diving in the dark to observe our cuttlefish in the wild... Check out the paper & new expedition tool on Cuttlebase.org 🧠

Good morning everyone! So, I wrote a book (!!) and it’s coming out November 4th in physical and audiobook form. It’s called *How to Change a Memory* www.amazon.com/How-Change-M...

Our latest profile is here! Dr. Suelyn Koerich studies the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying Alzheimers Disease. Learn more at the link below! www.storiesofwin.org/profiles/202... #StoriesOfWiN #WomenInNeuroscience

New results! Similar destabilization of neural dynamics under different general anesthetics Different anesthetics induce unconsciousness through distinct mechanisms, but cortical destabilization may be their common effect. doi.org/10.1101/2025... #neuroscience

Honored to receive this recognition from the @grassfoundation.bsky.social . Shoutout to all the giant stars that have pulled / pull me up, including @ruimcosta.bsky.social + Darcy Peterka. And here's to working hard to pull up the neuroscientists of tomorrow!

A very special 150th episode - I got to interview the one-and-only Eve Marder! Check it out to learn more about her life and science, and highly recommend listening to the interview to hear her many fabulous stories and her words of wisdom, my personal favorite being about how she found her ‘voice’

Exciting news!! I’m joining the tenure-track faculty at University of Colorado Boulder this fall as an Assistant Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience! The Sosa Lab will study how memory is shaped by cognitive and physiological demands, including during pregnancy and the postpartum period. 🧵

Our new paper is out in Science. What is the synaptic plasticity rule in the brain, we asked. It turns out there are multiple, even within individual neurons. Congrats Jake! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Save the date! Join us in Seville, Spain May 17 - 21 2026 for the next Dopamine meeting. More details to come. dopaminesociety.org

The preliminary program for the 2026 Basal Ganglia Gordon Research Conference is up! www.grc.org/basal-gangli... Super excited about this program and to move the meeting to Europe for the first time - come join us in Tuscany!

Finally an article focused on these grant losses that scientists from underrepresented backgrounds EARNED, including my own grant (MOSAIC K99/R00). Generations of scientists from these groups will disappear. Will those with less to lose and from more privileged backgrounds advocate for us?

New preprint out! We developed a behavioural platform for the kinematic analysis of skilled whole body behaviour. Very fun collaboration with Christopher Black, @liamebrowne.bsky.social and Rob Brownstone.

Our first look at midbrain PAG’s role in singing mouse vocal control. When near each other, these mice produce two divergent vocal modes. Same circuits for USVs and Songs—or different ones? Bets were made..some of us bought beers for others! Led by @xmikezheng20.bsky.social & Clifford Harpole. 👇🏽

Our latest profile is here! Dr. Aqilah McCane (@drbediya.bsky.social) studies models of alcohol use disorder and the consequences of adolescent alcohol exposure on development and aging. Follow the link below to learn more! 🧠 www.storiesofwin.org/profiles/202... #StoriesOfWiN #WomenInNeuroscience

Of mice and macaques... Differences in local regulation of dopamine release in the striatum of macaques and mice. Macaque dopamine is regulated more by GABA than by acetylcholine, compared to that of mice. And what about humans? www.jneurosci.org/content/45/1...

Congratulations to our own Vikram Gadagkar, one of five @columbiauniversity.bsky.social faculty named @sloanfoundation.bsky.social Research Fellows! 👏 news.columbia.edu/news/five-co... #brain #learning #socialbehavior

When the environment tells me when to stop responding to earn reward Feedback cues that signal termination of an action sequence promote habitual responding via a dopamine-mediated credit assignment mechanism www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

So so so honored to be featured in @sfn.org Newsletter as part of the Future of Neuroscience! If you want to know a little more about my background, PhD work, and future goals, this one’s for you! :) www.sfn.org/publications...

Please share! Thanks to @thetransmitter.bsky.social for highlighting these stories.

New blog post. Thoughts on this first year of being a new PI gonzales.science/resource-blo...

First Post on Blue Sky promoting science from the group! Delighted for the first Neurodegeneration paper from my lab. Led by Hammad Khan and wonderful collaborators, we reveal cortical circuit biomarkers delineating the gradual progression of Lewy pathology across synucleinopathies rdcu.be/d5f3w

Marlin Lab’s 1st Thesis Defense ✨ Hear the science @2:30pm EST bit.ly/MarlinLab Have the cheers @5:00 pm EST JLG✨ Columbia Biology student Beka Stecky will share her discoveries on “What the Nose, Knows” after learning an odor predicts a stressful experience.👃🏽🧬🧪

New paper out in @currentbiology.bsky.social with the inestimable @kurtfraser.bsky.social and @janaklab.bsky.social. We think this work illuminates an important way the brain dynamically orchestrates motivation, and look forward to testing new hypotheses this inspires in disease models.

Finishing up multiple grants for submission to the NIH black hole this week. This is the first time I have not felt hopeful about grants I am submitting. Sad. Regardless, must do my job. #nih

663 days since the senseless tragedy that took An, we present a manuscript that reports some of the discoveries that she left us. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Okay, this is very cool: evidence from Peter Jonas' group that human CA3 follows a different logic of synaptic connectivity than rodent CA3, focussing more on sparser, but highly reliable synapses. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... CC @dlevenstein.bsky.social & @repromancer.bsky.social #neuroscience 🧪

Our paper from Junchol Park and collaborators that has been brewing for a while. Trying to capture our thinking about what action specification in striatum means and what would constitute evidence for such a model. Longer thread soon, but it’s online now. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

If you can, go hear Laura’s seminar (it’ll be great). If you can’t make that, check out her recent preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Will the real dopamine please stand up? 🥰

Thank you @thetransmitter.bsky.social for spotlighting our new labs! 🧠 We're growing our team at all levels so please reach out if you're interested! [email protected]

Here are *some* of my favorite studies on dendrites and spines from 2024 👀 - feeling very excited and inspired about the field! 🔥 Happy new year y'all!

It's official, the Rich lab is now part of the Center for Neural Science at NYU! I'm thrilled to be joining CNS! At the same time, I'll miss my amazing colleagues at Sinai (even though we're not going far). Here's to new adventures in the new year!🥂

Traveling waves are the next frontier. Traveling waves enhance hippocampal-parahippocampal couplings in human episodic and working memory www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroscience

New work from Josh Garcia in our lab! This is a collaboration with David Hackos (formerly Genentech) Roy Ben-Shalom (UC Davis) and Al George (Northwestern) where we use fancy knockin mice to allow for selective block of different sodium channels, revealing their unique roles in excitability.

Delighted to highlight our new paper in @natureportfolio.bsky.social entitled 'Synaptic basis of feature selectivity in hippocampal neurons' (thread below 👇): www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Happy Holidays from The Picower Institute at MIT vimeo.com/1038953105 #neuroscience

Big congrats to everyone who’s applied to grad school! 🥳🎉 It’s a huge milestone, and we’re so proud of all the hard work you’ve put in. Take a moment to celebrate—you deserve it! 🌟 Tag a friend who’s on this journey so we can cheer them on too! 🙌🎓

A background in physics, and his own curiosity, have helped Dmitry Rinberg tackle the complexities of the neuroscience of smell. More on Rinberg sniffing out the mysteries of olfaction. By Lina Zeldovich www.thetransmitter.org/olfaction/sn...

🚨SAVE THE DATE‼️ Happy to announce that #DopamineMeeting2026 will be held in S E V I L L A🧠. May, 17-21, 2026

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Congrats to Juan and Hugo and the rest of the authors. Not sure if anyone is on bsky yet.

If some calcium enters a dendrite, how far does it diffuse? Rebecca Frank Hayward (who is on the job market!) measured this. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... She combined a blue light-activated Ca++ channel with a red-fluorescent Ca++ sensor. The length constant is about 5 microns.

The topology and geometry of neural representations doi.org/10.1073/pnas... #neuroscience

Our preprint of my PhD’s work in @gisellavetere.bsky.social lab is finally out on BiorXiv: doi.org/10.1101/2024..., and I’m so excited to share it! If you’ve ever wondered about reconciling engram manipulation experiments and neuronal activity during encoding, you’re on the right thread! 1/14

Neuroscience students asked us to teach a PRACTICAL course on experimental methods, and it is now on YouTube! Please like and repost to help us get the word out! www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Lecture 1: Signals and data acquisition Focusing on hardware, digital/analog I/O, synchronization 🧵

A reminder to come join us (@okaysteve.bsky.social) in Park City Utah (Jan 2-5) for the 49th annual Learning and Memory meeting! Awesome line up, check it out here: parkcitywinterconf.org 🧪🧠

Multi-timescale neural dynamics for multisensory integration www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience