Great news from the Senate appropriations committee

Very excited to share my postdoc work- out now at PNAS! Learn more about how neurons facing chronic autophagic stress compensate by upregulating two secretion pathways Autophagic stress activates distinct compensatory secretory pathways in neurons | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Reminder: Nobel-prize winning PCR (1983), used in basically all genetic tech today, was only possible because of extremophile bacterium discovered in 1964 in Yellowstone funded by a small ~$80k NSF grant with no obvious application at the time. #science 🧪 www.richmondscientific.com/how-a-discov...

Excited to present our study in ‪@natneuro.nature.com‬: a deep brain pathway that triggers safety-driven movement—overriding needs like finding food or social contacts. A look into how the brain weighs deep instincts. Congrats to all and first author @nkrauth.bsky.social. shorturl.at/toYFN

Thrilled to share our latest preprint and first major project from the lab, where we show a mechanism for direct interoceptive input to the insular cortex. Work by the incredible @zhezhao2017 with help from many others including @stefanoberto83.bsky.social

Check out our latest! Studies led by the amazing Megan Brickner - she finds really interesting patterns of dopamine signaling in the basolateral amygdala that report the emotional salience of sensory state transitions. These are largely non-associative, value-free signals, in contrast to classic DA.

Excited to share our latest story: "The gut-brain vagal axis governs mesolimbic dopamine dynamics and reward events" 🎉. Big congrats to 1st author Oriane Onimus 💪 🥳 & many thanks to all those involved 🙏🙏. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My survey class on the history of science is essentially about the social conditions required for science. The final lecture is always about how the US became the dominant nation for research in the 2nd half of the 20th century, and how it in retrospect it may be seen as an anomalous "Golden Age."

After 21 years at my dream job, I’m very sad to announce my early retirement from the National Institutes of Health. My life’s work has been to scientifically study how our food environment affects what we eat, and how what we eat affects our physiology.

Research briefing: A textbook assumption about the brain’s most abundant receptors needs to be rewritten https://go.nature.com/3FDq3KZ

Cutting funds for science and research will save you a penny on the dollar but may one day cost you a life that you love.

Exclusive: NIH appears to archive policy requiring female animals in studies www.thetransmitter.org/policy/exclu...

1/ 🧠 Excited to share our new preprint: Convergent state-control of endogenous opioid analgesia We uncover how cognitive + contextual factors—like injury, fear, and placebo—modulate pain through dynamic opioid signaling in the periaqueductal gray (PAG) biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, led by Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) - a gastroenterologist with an MD from LSU, just released a report entitled NIH IN THE 21st CENTURY: ENSURING TRANSPARENCY AND AMERICAN BIOMEDICAL LEADERSHIP. Since he is the ranking Republican, 1/n

The John Le Carré Advent Calendar - My cartoon for this week’s @theguardian.com Books. (with apologies to @realjohnlecarre.bsky.social and @harkaway.bsky.social)

Signals are in the red. www.nytimes.com/2024/12/01/h...

Dear gut/brain neuroscientists -- is there a paper you'd consider groundbreaking in this field in the past ~10 years or so? Like, something that really changed how we thought about the gut/brain connection?

Just in time for Thanksgiving, we're grateful for the publication of our paper in #eLife doi.org/10.7554/eLif... We measured dopamine and behavioral responses to intraorally delivered sucrose across acquisition and extinction of a conditioned taste aversion. 1/n

How the #brain talks to the #gut and vice versa! 🧪🧠💩 Check out the great primer on gut-brain communication and #interoception by @amberalhadeff.bsky.social and Nilay Yapici 👇👇👇 www.cell.com/current-biol...

My paper is out!! 🎉 "Opponent control of reinforcement by striatal dopamine and serotonin", @Nature Here, we show that dopamine and serotonin signals form a gas-brake system for reward in the mammalian brain THREAD ⬇️ 1/n

As a kid, I put a sample of pond water on a slide using a little microscope I got for my birthday. To my surprise I found a stentor attached to a speck of green. Seeing that little microscopic life form churning away helped spark my interest in biology. Cool to see how it works!

🌟 Cai Lab Nature (@natureportfolio.bsky.social) paper alert! In work led by Joe Zaki, we find that rest periods after learning not only stabilize new memories BUT ALSO integrate new memories with older ones from days past! (1/10) Read it here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

OPEN RANK #FACULTY #POSITION in #Pharmacology & #Neuroscience with expertise in #behavioral pharmacology/neuroscience of relevance to substance use disorders. Review of applications will start immediately. Target start date is Fall 2025. Come join us! Apply here: careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

I've been attending the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB.org) conference since 1996 as a grad student, pdoc, prof and I now have the honor of serving as its President. Its an exceptionally warm group of scientists. Join us in Oxford UK on July 28 for the 2025 meetng!

Too often we spend only two weeks choosing a problem and then many years trying solving it, but this limits our potential impact. A must read for PhD students: Problem choice and decision trees in science and engineering. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38608651/

NIH funding drives a massive amount of economic activity in the US, with 47 states experiencing over $100 million annually and 23 states experiencing over $1 billion annually.

Happy to be here and excited to share my postdoc work, "Autophagic stress activates distinct compensatory secretory pathways in neurons" Now on BioRxiv www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Many thanks to @erikaholzbaur.bsky.social and @asapresearch.bsky.social

Just going in to lab hoping no one in Congress notices me feeding mice little sweet treats to see if they really want it or just merely like it