Academic friends,
It's beyond heartbreaking to watch what's unfolding in Iran & the region.
A few of us drafted an open letter calling for protection of civilians & of educational, research, medical & cultural institutions.
Please read & sign if you agree:
sites.google.com/view/protect...
#IranWar
The US/Iran war and escalating rhetoric are already disrupting civilian life and academic infrastructure across the region. We drafted a letter in defense of academic life, and to mobilize concrete support for affected students, scholars, and collaborations. Please check Sepi’s message and sign.
Applications are open for the Junior Theoretical Neuroscientists Workshop which will take place July 21-24, 2026 at the Center for Computational Neuroscience, @flatironinstitute.org
Travel, lodging, and meals will be covered for accepted participants.
Application deadline: April 15, 2026
Virtual rally, tomorrow. Tell your friends, come on out!
Applications are now open for our Junior Theoretical Neuroscientists Workshop which will take place July 21 - 24, 2026 at the Center for Computational Neuroscience @flatironinstitute.org
Learn more and apply by April 15 at www.simonsfoundation.org/event/jrwork...
New preprint: our lab’s first Alzheimer’s paper! “Loss of neuronal population organization links pathology to behavior in a model of Alzheimer's disease”
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧪🧵1/
To accommodate applicants and PIs attending Cosyne, we’ve extended the MCN application deadline to Sunday, Mar 22.
Please repost.
Today I received a note from a grad student who lives in Tehran. Her note gives you firsthand experience of what it’s like to live in a city that is being bombed, and what it’s like to be young and feel despair about your future.
rezashadmehr.blogspot.com/2026/03/hope...
Join us in Woods Hole for Methods in Computational Neuroscience (MCN) at MBL (July 24–Aug 21).
Four weeks of computational + systems neuroscience, hands-on training, and close interaction with an exceptional faculty.
Can electrical microstimulation be used to steer cortical population activity on- and off-manifold? Our new preprint says yes — using data-driven control in macaque PFC. Joint work with @gbarzon.bsky.social, Anandita De, Isaac Moran, Conner Carnahan, and Luca Mazzucato.
Can't make it to #NJ12? Wherever you are, donate to my campaign!!. Wherever you are in the country, if you want to fight gerrymandering, defend science, and rebuild democracy, I'm on your side!
Donate:
secure.actblue.com/donate/sam4nj
I'd love to hear what your students think too.
Thanks, Armin. Once we allow that confidence is part of the action-related code in these action-initiation circuits, persistence during movement is exactly what we’d expect—similar to cortex. The progressive transformation and stabilization across the pallidothalamic pathway surprised me even more.
In the first systematic, multi-node recordings of spiking activity across the human basal ganglia–thalamic circuit, @dennislondon.bsky.social explains how this pathway integrates cognitive variables with ongoing action. We’d love to hear your thoughts.
We are very excited to announce that our new preprint with Saleh Esteki, @stefanofusi.bsky.social, and @roozbehkiani.bsky.social is now available on biorxiv! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... We investigated how reward context is learned, represented, and updated to bias decisions. Thread 🧵👇! 1/13
At #NeurIPS2025!
🎉 Excited to present Conditionally Linear Dynamical Systems (CLDS). We leverage the dependence of neural dynamics on task covariates to yield an interpretable, flexible model of dynamics.
Come meet and check it out!
📍: Poster #2209, Hall C,D,E on Thu Dec 4, 11 am–2 pm, PST.
🧵/6
So far this year at #NIH, I had to
- cancel a visiting speaker I was hosting
- cancel a distinguished lecture I was giving at a midwest university
- cancel another seminar visit to talk about our work
- cancel my trip to the Society for Neuroscience meeting
- now cancel my trip to NeurIPS
1/
Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵
Looking for a PhD program where you can study vision from different perspectives (computer vision, visual neuroscience, visual perception, image processing)? Consider applying to NYU!
visionscience.com/pipermail/vi...
Consider submitting your recent work on stimulus synthesis and selection to our special issue at JOV!
My message to Trump’s NIH Director? No one in America wants us to do LESS cancer research.
No one is asking Trump to make it harder to cure Alzheimer's disease.
Yet Trump is cutting all of this NOW and demanding an $18 BILLION cut to NIH next year. Not on my watch.
Me holding the first copies of Elusive Cures
Elusive Cures is my first book. I was surprised by how much was required to make it happen (beyond writing it). If you're curious, here's the who and how behind it ... 🧵
(My amazing publisher: @princetonupress.bsky.social)
I urge everyone to read Unbreaking’s new page on everything the govt is doing to destroy & diminish medical research funding.
It’s the best thing I’ve read on this topic: @lizneeley.bsky.social & co have such done an incredible job.
unbreaking.org/issues/medic...
David Hocker’s paper about compositional pretraining for RNNs that efficiently produces animal-like behaviors! Modeling cognitive tasks in RNNs requires thinking about latent abilities that animals bring to an experiment. Funded by NIH/CRCNS. www.nature.com/articles/s42...
Congrats Mark. Very well deserved.
Congratulations to Adrienne Fairhall, Prof. of Neurobiology and Biophysics, Adjunct Prof. of Applied Mathematics, and Adjunct Prof. of Physics, who has just been elected to the National Academy of Sciences! 🍾 🎉
30 days to the launch of Elusive Cures! I learned so much writing it, and I want to share it.
For the next 30 days, I'll post brain & mind research breakthroughs on odd days, and highlight unmet needs on even ones. #ElusiveCures30
First breakthrough: /1
press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
"Where Law Ends Tyranny Begins"
Engraving on the exterior of the United States Department of Justice headquarters.
All NIH study sections canceled indefinitely. This will halt science and devastate research budgets in universities.
