Figure showing number of competitive grants mentioning women from 2015-2025. The number was rising until recently, with a precipitous drop in the last year.

At the end of 2024, the National Academies put out a report concluding the NIH has woefully underfunded women’s health research, and they suggested $15 B should be invested over the next 5 years.

Here’s what’s happened instead. Hard to study women’s health if you can’t say “women.”

wapo.st/4euUt1c

Senior professors - if you want to help your junior colleagues in these times, I am begging you, review our papers. I have done 25 manuscript reviews in the last 6 years. But my own manuscript is stalled out waiting for reviewers. Relatedly, I won't be doing any more reviews until tenure. 🧪

Epistemic Virtues for Scientific Inquiry — Community Survey In Six Memos for the Next Millenium, Italo Calvino proposed six literary virtues he felt should be preserved and cultivated in literature regardless of how the world changed: lightness, quickness, exa...

If you're a faculty, research scientist, postdoc, or senior PhD in any area of science, select your top 6 virtues at this link:
shorturl.at/bV2lF

You can also tell us if you think we missed any.

We want broad participation, so pls RT! 🙏

In collab w/@devezer.bsky.social @statmodeling.bsky.social

In “Six Memos for the Next Millenium”, Italo Calvino distilled six literary virtues he felt should endure regardless of how the world changed.

As we enter an age of automated evaluation & production of science, what are the parallel epstemic virtues we should try to preserve? We want your input! 🧵

“It wasn’t only that America was a big, dynamic country with many world-class research institutions. It was that here, unlike so many other places, differences of opinion were encouraged, and the prevailing ethos was to let the best ideas win.”

Compelling article, must-read. 🧪

In 1928, Rebecca Lancefield discovered the M protein, the key to understanding how Streptococci-related diseases are acquired and spread. Over the next six decades, she classified thousands of strep strains. The Lancefield Grouping is still used today. #125YearsofRockefeller

While Washington wages war on science, NASA just sent humans to the Moon's vicinity for the first time since 1972. Bravo #TeamNASA — proof that public science, when it's funded and trusted, still does extraordinary things.

🧠 Focused ultrasound changes emotional processing 🔊

In a new study published in Neuron today, we stimulated the human amygdala using transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS) and show it plays a causal role in detecting and resolving emotional ambiguity.

My main postdoc work is now published: www.nature.com/articles/s41...! We (myself, Isabel Low, Frances Cho, and @lgiocomo.bsky.social) discovered task-relevant remote representations in entorhinal cortex independent of CA1. #paperthread below! 1/13

Read our paper together with this great paper from Alméras, @valerian-chambon.bsky.social and Wyart, who come to a similar conclusion using a different paradigm of exploration!

they do really cool work cleanly separating exploration from exploitation

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Uncovering the representational geometry of durations www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...

A Neural Population Code for Value in Human Orbitofrontal Cortex. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...

Data is good but this is so insultingly obvious to every woman in academia who has had a child.

Distinct neurogenic pathways shape the diversification and mosaic organization of cortical output channels The cerebral cortex broadcasts its output to subcortical regions through the projections of diverse extratelencephalic (ET) neurons derived from eithe…

Happy to share my first postdoc paper, now out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social 🧠
We show how two distinct neurogenic pathways direct and indirect neurogenesis, differentially shape the cortical efferent projectome, linking evo-devo to adult connectivity and function.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Our latest publication grapples with how the brain could implement gradient descent by sending learning targets top-down, gating plasticity with dendritic inhibition, and updating synaptic weights with biologically observed learning rules like BTSP.

www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Aversive learning hijacks a brain sugar sensor to consolidate memory - Nature A study in Drosophilareveals a mechanism of non-homeostatic hunger and its critical relevance for memory consolidation.

Nature research paper: Aversive learning hijacks a brain sugar sensor to consolidate memory

go.nature.com/3NK4gFG

Prominent Climate Scientist Resigns From NASA, Citing Trump’s Attack on Science

Not so marvelous news.

~95,000 scientists have left the federal government since the Trump regime took over.

What are the systems in neuroscience that we really have something that we can call “explanation” at all relevant levels, other than reflexive feed-forward like circuits.

Here are a few that I would argue are getting there. Obviously not complete explanations but genuinely satisfying.

Coordinated Reform in Research Assessment and Publishing | DORA On March 10, we heard from Katie Corker (Executive Director, ASAPbio) and Felix Dijkstal (Science Officer, International Science Council) who shared outcomes and next steps stemming from a joint works...

How do we bring publishing & research assessment reforms closer together? Our latest blog dives into the next steps of the Nov 2025 Pisa workshop and the global initiatives pushing coordinated action across the system 👉 sfdora.org/2026/03/20/c...

1/8 New preprint alert!

How are signals from the heart encoded in the brain?
What could be the functional implications of cardioception?

We found that neurons in the posterior insular cortex are precisely tuned to heartbeats, and that this cardio-insular coupling supports emotion coding in mice.

I’m excited to share my newest work with @benhayden.bsky.social, and the work I’m most proud of to date, on characterizing semantic coding in single-neuron hippocampal activity in patients with autism during natural language comprehension!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

How does an animal choose between exploring for a better food source and taking advantage of a known one? Our recent work in Current Biology demonstrates how recent feeding and metabolic state dynamically influence fly local search. bit.ly/3PfrIv3 #Science #Neurosky #Foraging #Drosophila

This is heartbreaking and it’s coming for more of us. My daily panic is focused on figuring out how I am going to fund students and keep my lab open without another grant, and I’m not alone. So many of us want to be here, do science, and mentor but without federal support, our labs will close. 💔

Our @statnews.com survey of NIH-funded researchers drew nearly 1,000 responses from 45 states (plus DC and Puerto Rico). Here's a short thread on 5 scientists' whose labs and lives have been deeply impacted by federal policies 🧵

State-dependent spatial maps for navigation Internal behavioral states influence many brain circuits, with well-known effects in sensory areas. Less is known about how these states shape downstr…

Really enjoyed writing up this article with Lavonna Mark for @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social on how internal states - like attention, arousal, or goals - can reshape our brain's map of space, helping the brain adapt navigation to what matters most.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Cosyne 2026 - Cosyne Tutorial: Comparative Analysis of Neural Population Codes YouTube video by Cosyne Talks

Cosyne invited me to give a long tutorial (4 hours!) on methods to quantify differences high-d neural recordings across animals, brain regions, deep neural nets, etc.

The recording is up on youtube. I hope it inspires more research on this fundamental topic!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=n44x...

I am reviewing a simply amazing paper from a relatively young US-based lab, which is in danger of shutting its doors later this year. My emotions are all over the place.

The fact that this does not uniquely identify the lab I’m referring to just deepens the tragedy of this moment in US science.

An Animated Look at Noguchi's Experimental Playgrounds That Were Never Built "I think of playgrounds as a primer of shapes and functions; simple, mysterious and evocative; thus educational," Isamu Noguchi said.

An Animated Look at Noguchi’s Experimental Playgrounds That Were Never Built www.thisiscolossal.com/2026/03/isam...

Want to know more about birding in the city, and get to try it out?

Come join me to discuss @ryangoldberg.bsky.social's great new book Bird City on March 21 in Washington Heights!

Check out our latest research drop! We show BLA dopamine signaling encodes the emotional weight of sensory transitions, but not the associative strength or value of stimuli. These signals dynamically rescale when the learning context changes: "this matters most!" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...