Some good news, which seems rare lately: I was promoted to Associate Professor!

Thrilled to share that our work is now published in Science! ✨ We found a preference for visual objects in the mouse spatial navigation system where they dynamically refine head-direction coding. In short, objects boost our inner compass! 🧭 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵1/

::slowly stands while clapping::

I’ve always found this type of snobbery weird. “I’m better than you because I’m a superior consumer of other people’s greatness”

This is easily the most hilarious yet devastatingly accurate scientific takedown I have ever read

My postdoc Hung’s main PhD paper is out in Neuron! Keep an eye on this guy; there will be many great things to come

This is why I object to the addiction field’s push to replace “relapse” with the allegedly-less-stigmatizing euphemism “resuming use.” It conflates controlled and uncontrolled use, implicitly promoting lifelong abstinence as the only road to recovery www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/o...

A summary of NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya's comments during his visit to UAB today for a town hall style presentation: -Important for scientific work addressing our nation's health problems to be done in the same communities where those problems are concentrated

This is going to be Windows 8 all over again

Related to our previous post- if you had a grant terminated, Pro Publica wants to hear from you. Your work was funded because it was good, important science meant to help Americans. Reach out, and make your voice heard. www.propublica.org/getinvolved/...

Excited to announce that my first postdoc paper is now online! Links: www.nature.com/articles/s41... rdcu.be/eAcN7 In it, we examine the perennial question: what changes in the brain when learning a new motor skill? Read more below to find out 👇

I still get chills Meet Mike *30+ years severe depression *first hospitalized @ 13y *20 meds *3 rounds of ECT *2 near-fatal suicide attempts Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE see videos, read paper, follow thread doi.org/10.31234/osf...

It’s sad saying goodbye to my first PhD student, but nothing kills sadness like a katana with a manifold engraved on the blade

Hung-tu Chen, Nicolas Tritsch, Matt van der Meer, and I have submitted a new preprint (doi.org/10.1101/2025...) in which we use simultaneous hippocampal ephys and ventral striatal (VS) fiber photometry to establish a link between sharp-wave ripples (SWRs) and VS dopamine (DA) in mice. (1/9)

Coming March 17, 2026! Just got my advance copy of Emergence — a memoir about growing up in group homes and somehow ending up in neuroscience and AI. It’s personal, it’s scientific, and it’s been a wild thing to write. Grateful and excited to share it soon.

My first PhD student Elie de Oliveira just defended successfully! Check out his doctoral katana!

few outcomes, except for 99% of FDA-approved drugs, 174 recipients of 104 Nobel Prizes, training ~30K MDs and ~10K PhDs per year to enter the workforce, and a 34% reduction in age-adjusted cancer deaths since 1990 -- the largest decrease in history

Earlier my 7yo hit her head and opened up a ~1.5 cm scalp laceration. I debated Krazy Gluing it closed, but I wasn’t sure how to deal with the hair, so I brought her to the ER. I wish I had known about the HAT trick! Next time I guess I’ll google first www.aliem.com/trick-of-tra...

1/ Mapping synaptic connectivity between individual neurons is extremely laborious. We developed BRISC, a new method that makes it possible to map inputs onto 100s of neurons in the same animal in a matter of weeks! Led by Alex Becalick and @antblot.bsky.social. 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Please repost! We're hiring a postdoc to work with me and @salagapan.bsky.social on an exciting interdisciplinary project in human neuroscience and brain-body interactions underlying effortful behavior in health and mood disorders. siplab.gatech.edu/postdoc_ad_2...

New work! Learning is assumed to involve synaptic plasticity, but which specific synapses change to enable higher order cognitive functions? We actually find that cognitive flexibility involves potentiation of long-range GABAergic synapses from prefrontal PV neurons: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our study is out in Nature! Using wireless Neuropixels we recorded hippocampal activity in freely flying bats and uncovered replay and theta(less) sweeps, revealing striking differences from classic rodent models. 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What I love about molecular biology is that people like Stahl and Watson lived to see single cell RNAseq and spatial transcriptomics. Has any other field ever achieved that much in the span of a single career?

The good news: I’m in Tam Cóc, Vietnam The bad news: I have f*cking Swedish skin

I saw Sinners for the second time last night. It’s really, really good. Nice to see that Hollywood is still capable of doing something original

Physics is the science of things that are easy to model.

Announcing two new lectures in our youtube neuroscience methods course: Lecture 12: experimental design (by Anita Autry) Lecture 13: neuronal population coding (in which I advocate a viewpoint that is... controversial) Please repost to help us spread the word! www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

I’m old enough to remember when HHMI ran a competition for the best ideas they’d fund for the next 15 years. Some of us put huge efforts into that and went multiple rounds of review only to have the competition cancelled. Then our ideas started showing up in HHMI funded labs…

This weekend I showed my kids some of the best 90s-2000s movies their mom wouldn't approve of. They liked about half, and I wouldn't have guessed their top choices: First choice by far: Memento (the 10yo and 13yo loved it) Tied for second: Run Lola Run and District 9

🚨 This MUST READ essay and call to action spells out, in very clear terms, how the Trump administration could get away with slashing the NIH budget. NIH scientists and Dems in congress need to read and understand it. This is where we win or lose the battle to save the NIH and US science. 🧪 🧠 🧬 🔊

Well well well, if it isn't the perfect solution to my current problem. Seems to work too!

Sign of the time xkcd.com/3081/

Check out this cool work from my superstar student Elie developing a new dimensionality reduction algorithm that compares two conditions! It works on many types of data

NIH leadership is systematically purging women and minorities from its boards of scientific counselors. The odds of this being random are 1 in 300 wapo.st/4jtCPdw

FACULTY JOB ALERT! The Albert Einstein Dept of Neuroscience is hiring a new assistant professor in any area of neuroscience! We have funds specifically earmarked for this search. #Neuroscience #AcademicJobs #NeuroSky Job just posted: faculty-einstein.icims.com/jobs/17175/f... Please share widely!!

Was watching Vaiana 2 (or Moana 2 outside of Europe) and the statement by Loto, the engineer character in the movie, is such good advice for early career researchers! 'Perfection's a myth. There is only failing, then learning, then death'.

In the midst of the relentless assault on US science, I was very happy this afternoon to teach the 1st yr neuroscience PhD students how to solder together a voltage divider and test it with an oscilloscope 🤓🧐

The fact that nonsensical preprints like this one are so unusual on bioRxiv is a testament to how little value peer review provides

I haven’t posted in weeks bc I didn’t have anything positive to say, but now I have a small thing: I joined a boxing gym this weekend! Vomited mid-workout yesterday, and in today’s workout a 3 cm blister tore off my foot I love it! Just like the good old days

This move on petition is in support of pushing back against the NIH indirect cap: sign.moveon.org/petitions/sa...

Great analysis of the indirect cost rate announcement by @stuartbuck.bsky.social

I have no background whatsoever in law so I could easily be mistaken, but I do suspect that this cut is illegal overreach and that it would take an act of congress to cap overhead rates, based on this April 2024 legislative mandate: grants.nih.gov/grants/guide... h/t @archstreet.bsky.social

Soundtrack for the week-end open.spotify.com/album/4Io5vW...

Neuropixels and Optogenetics are delighted to announce the birth of Neuropixels Opto Combining high-resolution electrophysiology and optogenetics Today in bioRxiv 960 sites, 28 emitters, 2 colors By Lakunina, @karolinazsocha.bsky.social, Ladd, et al www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/2)

Grid cells have a geometry in time. Thanks to @azvollan.bsky.social l & @rjgardner.bsky.social for this heroic discovery. @ercresearch.bsky.social #KiloNeurons @m-bmoser.bsky.social @kavlintnu.bsky.social @nature.com @kavlifoundation.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/19 I’m thrilled that my postdoctoral work, with John Widloski and David Foster is now out in @science.org, along with a wonderful preview by Daniel Bendor!

Welp. This is unusual.

While I realize this is not relevant to many of the present day discussions, the remarkable similarity of organisms at the biochemical, genetic, cellular, and physiological levels is not understood by many people. 1/n

I don’t use TikTok but have we considering banning Teams….?