Excited to share a new review by @kocherlab.bsky.social and me:

Nature-inspired neuroscience

We discuss diverse sensory systems and behaviors across the animal kingdom and argue for their integration into neuroscience. New tools in diverse systems are making this possible ✨

tinyurl.com/y5y9du27

New preprint from my lab! We study how reinforcement learning & selective attention interact. To do so, we built a set of models describing different ways that value & reward prediction error can modulate top-down attention. We compare model outcomes to monkey data from a color value learning task

Applications are open for the Lake Conference on Comparative and Evolutionary Neurobiology - co-hosted with Circuit Neuroscience Basel!

🗓️ Oct. 25-29, 2026
📍 Seattle, WA
🧠 All career stages welcomed.

🔗 alleninstitute.org/events/lake-conference-c...

Promotional image for the Dana Foundation's "Dana Professional Development Awards" under the NextGen Program. Application deadline is May 10, 2026. Includes a link: on.dana.org/professional-dev-awards-2026. The Dana Foundation logo appears in the bottom right corner.

Apply to the Dana Foundation's Professional Development Awards by May 10th. Trainees can request up to 5,000 USD for a conference, workshop, coursework, or other interdisciplinary activity that furthers your training in neuroscience and society.

🔗 https://on.dana.org/professional-dev-awards-2026

Addressing degeneracy in rodent studies of cognition In order to relate neural dynamics to cognitive computations, it is critical to determine whether subjects are employing behavioral strategies that ac…

Excited to share our recent review, which highlights algorithmic and implementational degeneracy in studies of cognition: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

For #NSF and #NIH watchers, Grant Witness now has interactive data on numbers of grants and total funding obligations, broken down by institute and directorate, new awards and non-competitive renewals.

The stranglehold on new awards is still a disaster.

grant-witness.us/funding_curv...

Wait… localized norepinephrine transients in the awake visual cortex?!
Who would have guessed this neuromodulatory signal is that spatially precise, right where visual processing is happening. Brain state control just got a lot more local. @ruedigersarah.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I defended my PhD 10 years ago today. That was the least remarkable thing that happened that day. Sharing something I wrote about it last year. Since then "the horrors persist but so do we." And with dignity.

NIH grant terminations affected women scientists more than men, study finds A new paper shows that women, particularly those early in their careers, have been disproportionately affected by NIH grant terminations

A new paper suggests that grant terminations from the NIH over the past year may have further punctured the so-called "leaky pipeline" because women were more impacted by grant terminations than men

www.statnews.com/2026/03/23/n...

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. 💔

To accommodate applicants and PIs attending Cosyne, we’ve extended the MCN application deadline to Sunday, Mar 22.

Please repost.

22 years of Brain Science: what CoSyNe tells us about the evolution of Neuroscience Tracking the intellectual DNA of Computational and Systems Neuroscience through its flagship meeting

I tracked every keyword in 22 years of Cosyne abstracts to map how computational neuroscience evolved — from Bayesian brains to neural manifolds to LLMs — and where it's heading next.

Join us at TENSS 2026 to open black boxes, explain how things/brains work and debate the impact (or lack or it) of various new technologies on understanding of the brain and on society. tenss.ro Apply by: March 15th!

Excited to introduce ScaRCaMP — a highly blue-light resistant red GECI. 🔴

Now live on bioRxiv and marking my first PhD preprint (2nd for the Marko lab).

Would love feedback from the community!!

Attention-related modulation in the superior colliculus encodes perceptual sensitivity, but not perceptual choice @natcomms.nature.com

Neuroscience has a species problem If neuroscience is serious about building general principles of brain function, cross-species dialogue must become a core organizing principle.

Differences between species should be treated as informative constraints that refine theory, not as inconsistencies to be explained away, writes @suthanalab.bsky.social.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/animal-model...

Trainees: check out the Neurobiology of Cognition Gordon Research Seminar that is taking place this summer in New Hampshire. The theme is "Cells, Circuits, and Computation".
www.grc.org/neurobiology...

Do you work or study in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, computer science, artificial intelligence, or philosophy?

What does the term 'representation' mean to you?

We invite you to participate in a brief survey on key conceptual questions across fields.

eu.surveymonkey.com/r/VX9GNXM

Duration between rewards controls the rate of behavioral and dopaminergic learning - Nature Neuroscience Cue–reward learning rate scales proportionally with the time between rewards. Consequently, learning over a fixed duration is independent of the number of trials. This challenges trial-based dopamine ...

Big if true. Anyone know if human learning curves are also (mostly) trial count independent?

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

🔬🧠 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...

From genes to dynamics: Examining brain cell types in action may reveal the logic of brain function Defining brain cell types is no longer a matter of classification alone, but of embedding their genetic identities within the dynamical organization of population activity.

Defining brain cell types is no longer a matter of classification alone, but of embedding their genetic identities within the dynamical organization of population activity, writes @lmprida.bsky.social.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/defining-cel...

Konstanz School of Collective Behavior 2026 is one of a kind school where students delve into state of the art research on collective behavior.
Apply here: www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/kscb/applica...
Deadline: March 15th, 2026
@cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social @uni-konstanz.de

Baseline activity of V1 interneurons connects pupil-linked arousal to engaged behavioral state www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02...

Orofacial behaviors, not eye movements, govern neural activity in mouse visual cortex www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02...

Presynaptic control of top-down signaling in neocortical layer 1 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01...

Notice of Extension to Early-Stage Investigator (ESI) Eligibility Period by NIH: Investigators whose ESI end date was in Sept, Oct, or Nov 2025 will have ESI status extended through March 31, 2026

But what about if the end date was Dec 25 or Jan 26?
grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Our work with @georgkeller.bsky.social on testing predictive processing (PP) models in cortex is out on biorvix now! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A short thread on our findings and thoughts on where we should move on from PP below.

Cholinergic modulation of dopamine release drives effortful #behavior Nature, Published online: 28 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-025-10046-6In the nucleus accumbens, acetylcholine boosts dopamine release to promote effortful behaviour.

Cholinergic modulation of dopamine release drives effortful #behavior @Nature.com

"NIH will provide a warning when the Common Forms are not used but will not withdraw applications that don’t comply with the use of the Common Forms. We expect the leniency to be in place through May 2026"

grants.nih.gov/faqs#/common...

If you are a PhD student or post-doc who wants to learn everything about #electrophysiology or #imaging, consider registering to the Paris Spring school in optical imaging and electrophysiology, that will take place in the center of Paris 11-23 May 2026. Application deadline Feb 2nd
parisneuro.ovh