Go Julia Pai, Fatih Sogukpinar et al. Heavily revised work on astrocytes role in learning. Incredibly grateful for the team's hard work on this. Extended biology and theory now added! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New beautiful normative/theory paper from Ethan Bromberg-Martin with Josh Merel Why are we curious? What is the origin of our non instrumental seeming information preference? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

back at revising this beast on astrocytes and learning....

happy 2 see Dr Okihide Hikosaka elected to NAS Okihide has done an amazing amount of true discovery Think big contributions to understanding of mechanisms of saccadic control, chunking and skill formation, reinforcement learning, and more! Also a great mentor and friend.

Congratulations to my great students Arman Hatami and Romina Aalishah on their new study of machine unlearning and forgetting accepted. arxiv.org/abs/2604.15166 This has had clear implications for ML and neuroscience (albeit from different angles), and we continue this work in both disciplines….

I am deeply grateful to the Bloomberg Endowment for supporting both our research and broader vision! We hope that our work will contribute to next generation of psychiatry treatments, bci, and ai development.

Great Bita

! New paper from the lab ! How does novelty impact value-based decision making ? What are the circuits and what mechanisms do they implement? Congratulations to Dr. Takaya Ogasawara and team www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Nature research paper: Integrator dynamics in the cortico-basal ganglia loop for flexible motor timing go.nature.com/4oX2rmq

How do non-neuronal CNS cells called astrocytes contribute to cognition & computation? See our preprint Headed by my students Julia Pai and Fatih Sogukpinar, also working with Hiratani, Pignatelli, Papouin, Frank, and Ching labs. This was a huge effort www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Some professional news : My team is moving to Johns Hopkins University this Summer. I am deeply grateful to Washington University for supporting us since 2014. It has been an amazing journey full of brilliant colleagues and friends.

New work! How does perceptual novelty impact the value of (physical) rewards: what are the underlying algorithms and neural mechanisms? The answers may help to construct smarter AIs and to understand how and why novelty seeking breaks in psychiatric disorders. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

congrats @alexkwan.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

First blue sky post is to celebrate! Incredibly proud of Dr Julia Pai. Fantastic defense and pioneering project on non-neuronal cells in Reinforcement Learning! Now almost off to her next chapter. Paper in prep!