Next meeting in this series is this Thursday 4.30pm at Crick institute with Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social presenting work on place and grid cells, and how to integrate theory and experiment better. Free registration, free food and free thinking. 😉
Congratulations @pipcoen.bsky.social 🎉
Had great fun discussing some recent work and the value of toy models in neuroscience last night!
Our next workshop will be:
* 16.04
* 16-20:30
* At the Crick
Sign up (for free) and come along!
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/understand...
If you're in London next Thursday afternoon/evening, come along to our seminar/workshop on how to get theory and experiment working together better in neuroscience. There'll be a short talk by @marcusghosh.bsky.social on "A taxonomy of recurrence" (see below) and a long discussion with free food.
With @caswell.bsky.social + @flor-iacaruso.bsky.social + @meganakpeters.bsky.social + @sdrsd.bsky.social + @neural-reckoning.org
How can we build better experiment-theory collaborations in neuroscience?
We're hosting a series of 6 in-person, interactive workshops to discuss this.
Come along!
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/understand...
Congratulations!
If you want to tackle the "biggest problem holding neuroscience back right now" - comparing mechanisms of cognition across species - join us in @ox.ac.uk and @tcddublin.bsky.social . Please share!
3x Job Details below:
(fantastic article @suthanalab.bsky.social ) #neuroskyence #neurojobs
Had a great week teaching at The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Cape Town!
With fellows from @schmidtsciences.bsky.social
PhD opportunity in "The role of neural development in multimodal intelligence" with me, @marcusghosh.bsky.social and @flor-iacaruso.bsky.social. Read details below 👇.
Note there's a very short window for applying (deadline Feb 27).
🤖🧠🧪
www.imperial.ac.uk/school-of-co...
I’m a bit late to reading this article by @marcusghosh.bsky.social in the @thetransmitter.bsky.social
I really enjoyed it.
I’m definitely pro toy mathematical models, I believe they can be informative and push research forward.
Happy to share our preprint with @neworderofjamie.bsky.social , @danakarca.bsky.social and @drtnowotny.bsky.social !
We’ve been working on a neuron position learning algorithm by coupling space and time! See manuscript below 👇
Come do your PhD with me and @ktsetsos.bsky.social ! It's such an exciting time for cognitive and computational neuroscience at @tcddublin.bsky.social . And in this PhD you get to do both!
Currently assembling a larger fleet 🚀
For the first Learning Club @cmc-lab.bsky.social in 2026, @marcusghosh.bsky.social on Jan 15, Thu, 2pm CET, will tell us about his recent paper (👇) [joint work w/ @neural-reckoning.org]. Want to attend, send an empty email to virtual talk-link-request@cmclab.org to get the link!
Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike.
The 10th of these, would you believe?
This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more
Enjoy!
medium.com/the-spike/20...
Adam Kampff prioritized spreading knowledge over publishing flashy papers in prestigious journals, but colleagues say his mark on neuroscience was undeniable. The researcher and educator passed away on 9 December.
By Lauren Schneider
www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...
That’s exactly the right question!
What is the smallest / simplest model for your phenomenon of interest.
Some recent work, cited in the article, shows that very small models can be surprisingly powerful.
And often we may be far above the lower bound, which then hinders interpretability
2. Brains are massively complex, but if our goal is to understand them, then building scale models may not be the best approach.
In physics, many breakthroughs have come from abstracting away complexity, as this article highlights!
doi.org/10.1111/ejn....
Thanks for reading the article!
1. The multi-billion parameter model discussed in the article was developed by Meta but then fine-tuned by neuroscientists (for research).
This could become more common, or neuroscientists could start to train their own "foundation" models from scratch.
Toy models, just in time for Christmas!
Excited to share my first article for @thetransmitter.bsky.social
#neuroskyence
I'm excited to be teaching with @trendcamina.bsky.social again this summer.
Come along!
🚨new work with the dream team @danakarca.bsky.social @loopyluppi.bsky.social @fatemehhadaeghi.bsky.social @stuartoldham.bsky.social @duncanastle.bsky.social
We use game theory and show the brain is not optimally wired for communication and there’s more to its story:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Adam was a truly inspiring scientist.
He made neuroscience fun and exciting, and made everything seem possible.
The Behaviour and Neural Systems course was formative for many of us.
The photo below is from my time @champalimaudr.bsky.social in 2016.
Finally got the job ad—looking for 2 PhD students to start spring next year:
www.gao-unit.com/join-us/
If comp neuro, ML, and AI4Neuro is your thing, or you just nerd out over brain recordings, apply!
I'm at neurips. DM me here / on the conference app or email if you want to meet 🏖️🌮
Actually, according to an eLife information session, eLife desk reject ~90% of submissions.
So the ones which do get reviewed tend to be high-quality!
Even if, like the paper @neural-reckoning.org is referring to, the reviewers don't agree with everything.
Excited to read!
You may be interested in our recent work too!
We define 128 RNN architectures then compare their behaviour and dynamics (using gradient-based metrics).
bsky.app/profile/marc...
📍Excited to share that our paper was selected as a Spotlight at #NeurIPS2025!
arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03972
It started from a question I kept running into:
When do RNNs trained on the same task converge/diverge in their solutions?
🧵⬇️
For the two I've held at Imperial, applications will open summer 2026, for a September 2027 start.
* AI in Science (2 years) - www.imperial.ac.uk/ix-ai-in-sci...
* ICRF (4 years) - www.imperial.ac.uk/research-and...
I'm always open to talking about postdoctoral fellowships!
I'm not quite ready to post my applications online, but am happy to share them privately.
Just DM or email me 🙂