To accompany my textbook (Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience) and the class I taught this semester, I'm open-sourcing my lectures slides:
gershmanlab.com/lectures.html
I'll continue to update these as I improve them.
2025 Cozzarelli Prize Class I Winner: “Physics-tailored machine learning reveals unexpected physics in dusty plasmas.” Authors: Wentao Yu, Eslam Abdelaleem, Ilya Nemenman, and Justin C. Burton
Join us in celebrating our 2025 Cozzarelli Prize–winning paper for Class I: Physical and Mathematical Sciences, “Physics-tailored machine learning reveals unexpected physics in dusty plasmas.” Read the article here: https://ow.ly/iTVL50YH7gp
Yard signs are here! Residents of New Jersey's 12th District, from Trenton to Princeton to Plainsboro to Plainfield, get yours now!
SamForNJ.org
We're thrilled to support geneticist Alexander Starr as a FutureHouse AI-for-Science Fellow. From human-chimp cell data to AI-driven discovery, his work is uncovering the genetic roots of uniquely human traits and predicting how gene regulation evolves across species.
Very same.
It is an honor and a privilege to be a scientist supported by the public to do work in service of knowledge and future cures.
photo of people in an auditorium
This week, #FlatironCCB brought together a mix of theorists and experimentalists studying simple organisms for a two-day workshop on Information Processing in Biological Networks. #science #biology
speaker prepared an elaborate science talk on the chalkboard in preparation for discussion
Elaborate chalkboard for the upcoming talk by Tim De Coster of the Max Plank Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS) with the KITP Program: Multi-Scale Physics of Normal and Diseased Heart: from Ion Channels to Whole Organ.
Online talks here: online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/cardi...
Wanna do neuroscience in Paris but can't find interesting lab?
Want to come do a sabbatical but don't know who to collaborate?
Check this webpage aggregating ~all the neuroscience labs (+200) in Paris.
⚠️only the information of 'verified' profiles is reliable⚠️
Please retweet 🙏
parisneuro.fr
Apply for #FlatironCCN's Neural Data Analysis workshop at #FENS2026 before April 10! Learn more: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/event/ccn_fens2026/ #science #neuroscience
A graph titled “the public health success of the measles vaccine” that shows the number of measles cases in the United States plummeting after the vaccine was introduced in 1963
I showed this graph in class yesterday on how measles cases in the United States plummeted dramatically after the vaccine was licensed in 1963. It’s not subtle and I could not resist observing: “This stunning design in measles cases was not thanks to vitamin A. It was not due to beef tallow.”
Welcome to the Multi-Scale Physics of Normal and Diseased Heart: from Ion Channels to Whole Organ (#cardio26) program at KITP!
March 30 - April 23, 2026
Learn more: www.kitp.ucsb.edu/activities/c...
A big thank you to everyone who attended in-person and online our One-day meeting: David MacKay: Energy and Information on Friday. @cambridgephysics.bsky.social @eng.cam.ac.uk
An unedited live-stream is available to watch on YouTube: youtube.com/live/unuuHyd...
A vintage sepia-toned portrait photograph of Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann taken in 1932, at around age 44. She is posed formally against a softly draped curtain backdrop, gazing directly at the camera with a calm, intelligent, and composed expression. She has short, neatly waved dark hair and wears a simple, elegant dark blouse or dress with a light-colored V-neck insert or scarf tied loosely. The image captures her poised and thoughtful demeanor during the early years of her groundbreaking career in seismology, before her landmark discovery of Earth's solid inner core in 1936. #seismology #WomensHistoryMonth
Educational diagram in exploded view showing the internal layers of the Earth. From left to right: a cutaway globe with blue surface and white continents labeled “CRUST,” followed by the thick brown mantle labeled “MANTLE,” the red outer core labeled “OUTER CORE,” and the small yellow inner core labeled “INNER CORE.” A complete blue globe with continents appears on the right for scale. All layers are separated horizontally to reveal the structure.
#OTD in 1936, Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann wrote a famous letter to a colleague outlining her theory that seismic waves (P-waves) recorded from distant earthquakes indicated Earth had a solid inner core.
Her discovery fundamentally changed our understanding of the Earth's interior. #WomenInSTEM
roon @tszzl the private sector has been remaking its own versions of NIH, ARPA etc as these public science institutions have seen structural decline and defunding and it will be supercharged by the funding NPV of machine intelligence and its firepower at allocation decisions
This is only true for people who understand neither science nor economics.
The NIH budget for this year is FIFTY times larger than OpenAI’s $1B pledge.
The foundation of US science & innovation is public funding. The private sector cannot replace it.
US science is being killed
Big news from @edvardmoser.bsky.social and @m-bmoser.bsky.social — the grid cell toroidal manifold, like the HD ring, is preconfigured before experience. Guardamagna et al. show it’s there at P10, before eye opening, before locomotion. The spatial map exists before the animal has ever navigated.
A line graph of the number of NSF awards in fiscal 2026 compared to fiscal years 2021-2025. The fiscal year 2026 is well below the other curves and increasing only very slowly.
NSF Update through March 13, 2026
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A heartbreaking message from a brilliant med student in Iran, determined to pursue neuroscience. She graduated only one week before the war started and now is volunteering to care for the injured.
What would you tell her? (Part #4, especially). Please share your thoughts and comments.
#IranWar
Just arrived in Lisbon for #COSYNE2026!
Check out what our lab is presenting at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social
Looking forward to catching up with friends over the next few days.
A new Department of Cognitive Science is being created at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy.
Here is the call for a cluster hire (for around 10 faculty) in all areas of cognitive science, at both junior and senior levels:
www.unibocconi.it/en/faculty-a...
Deadline: May 4th, 2026
At @cosynemeeting.bsky.social?
Come see some of our works!
Tonight (March 12):
[1-050] From sequences to schemas: How recurrent neural networks learn temporal abstractions
20:30 – 23:30
Pavilion 1
(I will present on behalf of the lead author Vizhe Boboeva, who is on maternity leave)
#cosyne2026
A basin exit plot, showing chaotic structure
Title/author list/abstract of the paper. The abstract reads: The photon ring of a Kerr black hole decomposes into a self-similar hierarchy of subrings. Here, we show that this self-similar structure persists in phase space. Moreover, near the photon shell of bound photon orbits, dynamics are controlled by a Lyapunov exponent γ, whose role we highlight by computing the first-return map for light rays close to an unstably bound orbit. Despite an exponential e^γ sensitivity to initial conditions, nearly bound rays do not exhibit chaotic behavior. However, as the background spacetime is deformed away from the Kerr geometry, chaos sets in, with its first onset most visible near strongly resonant bound orbits in the photon shell. We display two animations: one illustrating the emergence of chaos near the photon shell, which results in a fractal phase-space structure, and another exhibiting how this chaotic, fractal, self-similar structure is encoded in the first-return map.
In my head, the title of this paper is "Chaos! At the light ring."
arxiv.org/abs/2603.08790
Chaos and fractals of the black hole photon ring
Roman Berens, Peter Galison, Trevor Gravely, Alexandru Lupsasca, Leo C. Stein
🧪⚛️🧮🔭
Is spatial navigation innate 🧠? Using #NeuroPixels we show that the #torus 🍩 underlying the #GridCell map exists already on day 10 in rats — before pups open eyes and ears and before they start upright walking. 🧵1:4
👇
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
The deadline for applying to the Methods in Computational Neuroscience summer course at MBL in Woods Hole is approaching (March 16)! An exciting course with an amazing lineup of lecturers in a beautiful location www.mbl.edu/education/ad...
The Ig Nobel is being far more serious than “serious” scientific conferences.
arstechnica.com/science/2026...
“A unifying perspective on neural manifolds and circuits for cognition” from Langdon, Genkin, and Engel 2023
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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These reviews on neural manifolds are super relevant to today’s world of large-scale population recordings. How do we link circuits, population geometry, dynamics, and function?
“A neural manifold view of the brain” from Perich, Narain, and Gallego 2025
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
(1/2)
VMH SF1 neurons are the gift that keeps on giving. They control defensive behaviors! elifesciences.org/articles/6633 copulatory behaviors! www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... exercise-induced improvements in endurance! www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... Such overachievers.