On the nature of a NSF (or NIH) graduate training fellowship drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2025/09/29/o...

Sometimes you hear a bump in the night. Sometimes that bump is your ceiling crashing down due to an AC drain leak. This wasn’t on my bingo card for today

🔵 I'm interrupting my social media hiatus to flag this important preprint from the Bruchas lab (is he not on Bluesky!?) together with @davidweinshenker.bsky.social. Very difficult experiments to show that dopamine release from LC terminals is independent of VTA 🔥 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We showed previously that chemogenetic activation of the LC rescues spatial reversal learning in the TgF344-AD rat. New paper follows up and reports that optogenetic stimulation of LC terminals in CA1 also rescues cognitive deficits in 3xTg mouse model of AD. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

We're hiring 2 faculty in Behavioral and Cellular Neuroscience at the Assistant Professor level -- come join our amazing department at Texas A&M! apply.interfolio.com/172286 Apply by Oct 1 for highest priority.

It's been a busy time for NIH grants staff — the agency seems on track to spend its budget this fiscal year But, because of multi-year funding, fewer projects are being funded than in previous years. The number of R grants has fallen from 5,633 to 3,758 analysis by @jaspar.bsky.social

Adding up the NIH R01s lost to Multi-Year Funding drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2025/09/09/a...

Excited to share this update to our paper investigating the role of superior colliculus inputs to the ventral midbrain in learning and movement. Studies led by the amazing Dr. @carlipoisson.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Here ye, here ye!!! #WCBR2026 #WinterConfrenceonBrainResearch will be extending the panel deadline one week for submission (new deadline 9/18/2025)! Official announcement coming soon so check your emails! please reskeet!

Florida: Come for the beaches and stay for the preventable diseases. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

Congratulations to Kristen Harris and Amy Hauck Newman the Pioneer Award Winners for #WCBR2026 ! Registration is now open and panel submissions are due Sept 11, 2025; posters are due October 9, 2025

#eNeuro: @mattjwanat.bsky.social‬ et al. show that the cue-evoked dopamine response in rats signals the duration of the trace period between cue and reward, and relates to the response latency. https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0016-25.2025

A single stress exposure alters reward learning in ♀️ 🐀 depending on estrous cycle: ⬆️ responding in non-estrus, but ⬇️ in estrus. Repeated prior stress, however, ⬆️ cue-driven responding regardless of cycle stage

TL;DR: 5 justices say Trump doesn't have to immediately restore the funding, but 5 *also* signal that the underlying directives are unlawful. That sends a fairly strong (if mixed) message that Trump will lose these cases *eventually,* but only once they're brought in the Court of Federal Claims.

As always, Ted Chiang is great in this interview. cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

My greatest accomplishment this week was coming up with this dad joke What does a gen alpha Thor call his brother? Low key Loki

Review now out in @npp-journal.bsky.social! Epigenetic regulation of brain development, plasticity, and response to early life stress rdcu.be/ezzYq

Dopamine dynamics in the nucleus accumbens core reflected decision confidence during evaluation of decisions in an economic foraging task in mice, as well as both past and future value during re-evaluation and change-of-mind @perothwell.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Yeah dopamine encodes reward but what about when contingencies shift and behavior needs to be flexible? Turns out VTA GABA neuron activity plays a role, check it out in my first postdoctoral research article here!👇

New lab paper by @merridee.bsky.social identifying a novel role for VTA GABA neurons in behavioral flexibility GABA, but not dopamine, neuron activation correlates with behavior when cues unexpectedly shift from predicting punishment to predicting reward www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🧪 Senate appropriators say: NIH's budget gets a... boost! Rather than 40% cut, NIH gets a $400M *increase* in the Senate committee bill for FY26 (about +1%). "Congress has your back," said @murray.senate.gov. ADVOCACY MATTERS! There's still a long road (esp in the House), so keep up pressure.

I NEED to tell you the story of Tae Heung “William” Kim. He's a graduate student at Texas A&M where he's working on a vaccine for Lyme disease. He's a *legal permanent resident* of the United States. And he's been in ICE detention for 12 days & counting, transferred Tuesday to South Texas.

The NIH can’t award ANY grants to outside researchers under new WH restriction, reports @wsj.com. The pause came in the form of a footnote from OMB Director Vought, in a document that doles out federal funds to the NIH. Prelude to rescissions, especially after his comments over the weekend?

STAT Story www.statnews.com/2025/07/29/t... 1/n

Largest genetic study of cocaine self-administration The results replicate previous loci associated with human cocaine use disorder and provide novel biological insights, including the potential of pharmacological treatment strategies targeting carboxylesterases www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Talk about your grant lotteries. Earn a 4%ile for a chance at a four year award....or bupkis. whee.

NIH will only accept six applications per PI per calendar year. drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2025/07/17/n...

Exciting new work from @mattjwanat.bsky.social & team is out NOW ⤵️🤩

5 years of my life are finally available to read thanks to @npp-journal.bsky.social! Check out my first first-author paper here: rdcu.be/ewtDQ. Shout out to @mattjwanat.bsky.social for all of his incredible mentorship and making sure this was something I could be proud of, which I absolutely am!

Ever wonder how stress and the estrous cycle affects reward learning? Well we have answers for you in our paper led by @askaneuroscientist.bsky.social published in @npp-journal.bsky.social And huge thanks to the NIH and NSF who supported this research.

(1/3) Excited to introduce our new GRAB sensors for a series of steroid hormones! These tools enable real-time detection of steroid hormone dynamics in vivo🐭🧠. Happy to share these sensors and welcome any feedback! Please contact [email protected] for information.

Journalist freaks out researchers because of incomplete understanding of how NIH works drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2025/07/09/j...

Pleased to share my recently minted PhD student Dr. Kaisha Meyer-Acosta’s first author publication. She’s on the postdoc market, DM her if you’d like to connect @karinameyera.bsky.social pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40541173/

Details of the announcement by Nicole Kleinstreuer start ~min 2:40 www.youtube.com/live/vz1uF42...

Indiana Jones will be played by a rotating cast of three adjuncts who answer to two different associate deans

Submissions for #WCBR2026 open today! Please go to www.winterbrain.org Big Sky is my absolute favorite venue for this meeting. The science is top notch, the people are great, the meaning is inclusive, and I learned to ski as a 35 year old! Please repost!

So I know it takes time for traditional media to catch up. But the lack of stories about this is noticeable. This is freaking huge and great

BREAKING: A federal judge in Massachusetts (the Reagan-appointed William Young) has declared the Trump administration's cuts to NIH grants — ostensibly over Trump's EOs on gender ideology and DEI — are "illegal" and "void." He's ordering many grants restored.

Excited to share the preprint for one of my postdoctoral projects in the Nestler lab 🥳

Funny story - I forgot about this work I did as a PD in the PEMP lab (circa 2011-2013) but was recently reminded during a lab journal club. Better ~12 years late than never. Thx to Paul, Tati, and people from the lab doing revision expts (Brandon, Ceci, and Leo)! www.eneuro.org/content/12/5...

Funny story - I forgot about this work I did as a PD in the PEMP lab (circa 2011-2013) but was recently reminded during a lab journal club. Better ~12 years late than never. Thx to Paul, Tati, and people from the lab doing revision expts (Brandon, Ceci, and Leo)! www.eneuro.org/content/12/5...

NSF GRFPs terminated for those in graduate school and already attending Harvard, too.

Excited to share this new publication in Behavioural Pharmacology! Check it out via the link below. Congratulations to first author Dr. Nina Beltran, and the whole team including our collaborator Dr. Vanessa Minervini! journals.lww.com/behaviouralp... @ninabeltran.bsky.social

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

To the grant reviewers who gave me good scores - thank you. To reviewer 1 - well, I have other words. Let this be a way to feel better about the scores you receive because it is hard to top this.

My trainee's F31 diversity from NIDDK "terminated" today. We received a NGA for $0.00. He worked his butt off for it and would have been competitive in the normal F31 pool. This is just blatant discrimination. If there are large lawsuits being put together, please share that info. #contractlaw

The lab's latest published project lead by our recently graduated Dr. Rhiannon Robke! --> Optogenetic stimulation of novel TPH2-Cre rats advances insight into serotonin’s role in locomotion, reinforcement, and compulsivity (www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...).

My first author paper is officially out!! Thank you to all of my co-authors for their help & support. So proud of the final product 😄😄

Pleased to share the final published version of @glopez.bsky.social's work in @currentbiology.bsky.social! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... "Region-specific nucleus accumbens dopamine signals encode distinct aspects of avoidance learning" Congrats, Gaby!!!

So proud of our new work comparing opioid self-administration between old (24 mo!) and young mice. We found that the old mice learned self-administration faster and took more remifentanil than the young mice. Great job team! @mikebeckstead.bsky.social @laciiiiiiiiiiii.bsky.social bit.ly/3G7lJE7