Those of us doing research related to women’s health have been hit particularly hard by the govt’s sabotage of the NIH. I spoke to WaPo for this piece, as painful as it was to discuss the reality my lab is facing. www.washingtonpost.com/science/2026...
New paper out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social 🎉
What determines contextual modulation in V1? Why does the visual surround sometimes facilitate and sometimes suppress a neuron's response to its preferred stimulus?
This book has just been published, open access, edited by Ken Cheng and me. It contains multiple chapters originating in a wonderful Strungmann Forum held in Frankfurt around a year ago.
link.springer.com/book/10.1007...
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
Hey everyone!
Do you remember this post from your fav blogger? labrigger.com/blog/2025/11...
Not super easy to use - I know. Well, spring break has sprung here at ucsb and we decided to bring that activation energy down a notch.
I guess welcome to my first bsky thread? letsgo (1/5)
New @annualreviews.bsky.social #neuroscience article 👁️🧠:
bionicvisionlab.org/publications...
w/ @crisniell.bsky.social, @michaelgoard.bsky.social, @spencerlaveresmith.bsky.social
Grateful to be part of this collaboration & learn from such a sharp group while rethinking vision in natural settings!
Amazing work by my mother-in-law Jo Ellen Jacobs and colleagues to uncover the true origins of On Liberty
A San Francisco institution. Started by Robert Oppenheimer’s brother Frank after he lost his professorship in physics due to his “communist sympathies”…
Fabulous keynote session at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social.
@neurokim.bsky.social and I kicked off the meeting and introduced Chris Olah.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=koGy...
Come check out our poster "[2-018] Predictive pursuit emerges in high dimensions" Friday from 1-4p if you are at #cosyne2016! This work was led (and is presented) by the amazing @wtredman.bsky.social alongside an awesome team incld. @xiaoxiao-lin.bsky.social, @fatihdinc.bsky.social, and May Chan.
The most impt change at #NIH and to US science this year is bigger than grant cancellations— it’s how the agency is governed.
For 75 years NIH has been largely independent of presidential control. That’s changed this year. New piece from me and @nataliebaviles.bsky.social in @nature.com
🧪
I am just arguing that finding particular cases of stable responses does not dispute the existence of drifting representations for other neurons/variables, for which there is now strong evidence from multiple labs.
yes, I completely agree that some neurons represent some information in an incredibly stable manner (e.g., M1 neurons during a well-learned motor task, HVC neurons during singing, PoS neurons for HD, and V1 neurons for orientation).
Also, I know it's fun to proclaim that representational drift is fake news every time someone finds a stable response somewhere in the brain, but for those who have actually done careful longitudinal recordings, many (not all) neurons clearly change their responses over time.
As a result, we suspect the same neurons can exhibit different levels of stability to different stimuli based on network connectivity (as opposed to stimulus complexity/dimensionality). Just a hunch at this point, but seems plausible enough. More in this paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Compare this to neurons responding to natural movies, where neurons active at a particular point in the movie might be responding to completely different aspects of the stimulus (spatial frequency, motion energy, etc), and are thus less likely to reinforce their mutual tuning to that time point.
Late to this conversation, but our interpretation of stimulus-dependence of drift is that neurons in networks of highly connected iso-tuned neurons (e.g., orientation tuned neurons in visual cortex, HD cells in PoS) will tend to reinforce each others tuning and maintain stable responses.
Two-photon calcium imaging at 24,000 lines/s, with the resonant axis spanning 4x what other systems can do. Inertia-free. Diffraction-limited. No tradeoffs. Che-Hang Yu developed a 4x angle multiplier for laser scanning. His paper is out today: opg.optica.org/optica/fullt... 1/n #fluorescenceFriday
🔬🧠 Releasing the 1.0 version of #Suite2p and THE PAPER w/ @marius10p.bsky.social! Now with GPU acceleration. Want to use Suite2p but don’t have 100,000 neuron recordings? We show you how to get those with a standard 2p microscope #neuroscience #imaging #neuroAI www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
New paper alert! 🚨
We found that the brain's compass is remarkably stable at two scales
1️⃣ the system maintains its internal organization for weeks
2️⃣ It "remembers" its orientation for weeks, even after a single visit
This may be key to how the brain aligns its other maps.
Paper: rdcu.be/e3waP
When a brain researcher solved a logistical problem by going rogue, the idea proved remarkably infectious.
By @lyrebard.bsky.social
#neuroskyence
www.thetransmitter.org/brain-imagin...
I’m very happy to share the latest from my lab published in @Nature
Hippocampal neurons that initially encode reward shift their tuning over the course of days to precede or predict reward.
Full text here:
rdcu.be/eY5nh
📣 Our lab is hiring a full-time RA/lab manager! Join us in beautiful Santa Barbara to study the neural bases of affect-cognition interactions using fMRI and brain stimulation. Great stepping stone to a PhD in cognitive/affective neuro 🧠🐬🏖️ Apply by Jan 22: recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF03048
(this size microknife is very useful for making incisions prior to implanting larger prisms - 1mm or larger)
Researchers using microprisms: I am planning to place a custom order from FST for 1.5 mm wide diamond knives with a 30 deg point (similiar to finescience.com/en-US/diamon... but with a 1.5mm wide blade), but there is a minimum lot number. Anyone else interested in purchasing one? Let me know!
What is the computational role of dendritic excitations? Byung Hun Lee and team mapped voltage dynamics throughout the dendritic trees of CA1 pyramidal neurons in mice navigating in virtual reality. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Want to track the dynamics of estrogen in the brain across long periods of time? New paper as part of very fun collab with team UCLA Ed Van Veen and Steph Correa! We use a specialized optical reporter and show that this is possible and actually very easy! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Our lab is hoping to hire a long-term lab manager / research associate to help with admin tasks and neuroscience experiments (3-year minimum commitment). bilh.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/External/job...
Excited to share my first PhD preprint!
“How human aging disrupts the head direction network: evidence from VR experiments and mechanistic models”
We investigated why our sense of direction becomes less stable as we age.
Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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