Just spotted this cool preprint from @aheadofthenerve.bsky.social

Hippocampal trace coding dominates and disrupts place coding

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

thank you!! :D

New paper in collaboration with @mhburrell.bsky.social @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social and @gershbrain.bsky.social !

"Phasic dopamine drives conditioned responding beyond its role in learning" 🧵 (1/8)

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

Straight from the horse's mouth:

If Trump's proposed $5B cut to NIH were enacted in FY27, the number of new NIH research grants would drop **47%**

To be clear, this is from a document justifying the request. It's what they *want*. They think this is good.

officeofbudget.od.nih.gov/pdfs/FY27/br...

Exciting news for ICOM7 (International Conference on Memory), in Glasgow, 26th-30th July 2027. The conference website is live and we can announce our keynote speakers!

Roughly half of STEM PhD students in the U.S. are international students.

75% of them stay in the U.S. long term after graduating to contribute their skills to U.S. scientific research and development.

Cutting international student visas hurts U.S. science now and long into the future.

NSF awards record number of coveted PhD fellowships in surprise move Quantum science and AI research are big winners just a year after the US funding giant slashed its Graduate Research Fellowship Program awards in half.

In an unexpected turnaround, the US NSF has handed out a record 2,599 of its prestigious graduate fellowships to young researchers — after slashing the number to a low of just 1,000 last year
go.nature.com/48loNI3

Nice summary of our recent work on neural population geometry and generalization across multiple tasks with shared latent structure.

Thank you @natmesanash.bsky.social and @thetransmitter.bsky.social for the great article!

Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Spread the word! UChicago BSD is currently searching for an instructional professor (open rank) to help develop and support graduate training in quantitative biology at UChicago. This is an Instructional Professor position (open rank). apply.interfolio.com/183517.

congrats, of course!!

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

We’ve got an exciting new thing to share! We have causal evidence (using TMR) that memory reactivation during sleep promotes abstract understanding of underlying structure, allowing transfer learning in a new domain with zero superficial feature overlap with the learned one.

Trump is still trying to DOGE the NIH. Republicans are tired. The NIH has proven a difficult target for the White House budget director, because lawmakers have a symbiotic relationship with the agency.

www.politico.com/news/2026/04...

It’s brutal in academia right now. A lot is out of our control, but it doesn’t cost anything to remember that there are humans behind papers and grants…reviewers, program officials and funders can be more empathetic in the face of unprecedented chaos in the US scientific enterprise.

Spatial and semantic memory reorganize a hippocampal long-axis gradient | PNAS The hippocampus supports episodic memory by binding spatial and semantic information, yet how this information is simultaneously organized along it...

New paper from our group out in @pnas.org! doi.org/10.1073/pnas.... Big thank you to coauthors @vosstacular.bsky.social and @anikka-jordan.bsky.social. Anikka spearheaded this project during her time as an RA and is now a grad student at Yale.

congrats!!! love this :D

Thank you @sfnjournals.bsky.social for highlighting our recently shared open-source restraint system for awake fMRI in rats!

Is this as excellent news as it seems to me? www.statnews.com/2026/04/08/t...

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Indirect Costs (But Were Afraid to Ask) This is a guest post from Jeremy M.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Indirect Costs (But Were Afraid to Ask)

I have been working on this post for some time.

Lots of data, analysis, and some policy recommendations.

goodscience.substack.com/p/everything...

Questions and comments welcome.

Hippocampal place code plasticity in CA1 requires postsynaptic membrane fusion Rapid delivery of glutamate receptors to the postsynaptic membrane via vesicle fusion is a central component of synaptic plasticity. However, it is un…

New paper! Congrats to @markplitt.bsky.social, Konstantin and team! The brain’s spatial map isn’t static but for hippocampus CA1 maps to change with experience, they need postsynaptic membrane fusion. A new link between synaptic machinery and flexible coding!

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

Rescuing specific memories by rejuvenating engram cells Partial cellular reprogramming can modulate aging-associated decline across multiple tissues. However, whether targeting memory-encoding ensembles within specific brain regions is sufficient to restor...

Rescuing specific memories by rejuvenating engram cells.

Commentary by Louisa Zielke at @tcddublin.bsky.social on a recent important paper from @graeffjohannes.bsky.social & Graff Lab at @epfl-brainmind.bsky.social in @cp-neuron.bsky.social

www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

do we have to wear a yellow star?

shocking literally no one....

It was absolutely rich that Bhattacharya kept calling what happened last year “turbulence” as if he didn’t directly contribute to and benefit from the decimation of the NIH.

NIH pivots away from agency-directed science US biomedical funding behemoth says the approach will boost innovation, but some researchers worry that understudied areas of science will suffer.

The US NIH is stepping back from 'top-down' science.

My latest analysis for @nature.com shows that funding calls have plummeted by 90%, funneling billions into broad, 'investigator-initiated' ideas, rather than targeted, agency-driven ones.

A massive shift for the American biomedical enterprise.

Understanding Impacts of Federal Policy on Early Career Scientists

The Dana Foundation is helping to fund reporting on the real-time challenges facing students and early-career scientists as a result of sweeping changes to federal funding for science. A series of articles by @statnews.com aims to bring those stories into focus.

#scicomm #neurosociety #neuroscience

If you consider 'hiring’ AI instead of a graduate student, you're saying the quiet part out loud: PhDs are viewed as a PI's labor force not academics studying for an advanced degree... www.science.org/content/arti...

a small consolation in a terrible time :-p

#cosyne2026 fomo :-p