Mostafa Safaie
@atmostafa.bsky.social
280 followers 200 following 25 posts
Neuroscience enthusiast. Studying rodent behaviour and brain with @clopathlab.bsky.social‬ and @juangallego.bsky.social at Imperial College London.
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atmostafa.bsky.social
🎉Amazing news🎉
Thrilled that I got a Wellcome Trust Early Career Award @wellcometrust.bsky.social
It's going to be amazing!
Over the next 5 years, I will look into how brains learn to control Brain-Computer Interfaces and how we can use this knowledge to further improve BCI performance 1/2
atmostafa.bsky.social
Excited to be at the Congress of the Italian society for neuroscience #SINS2025 in this magnificent theatre!
Pisa, Teatro Verdi
Reposted by Mostafa Safaie
mattperich.bsky.social
🚨 I’m excited to say that my CIHR Project Grant was funded! My NHP lab is now full-speed-ahead, and I’m hiring experimentalists (postdoc, PhD student, and/or a tech/manager). We’ll do multi-region ephys during reaching/grasping in macaques, with behavioral and spinal perturbations.
Reposted by Mostafa Safaie
mattneuro.bsky.social
#neuroskyence folks: as my postdoc grant is running out soon, I am looking for new opportunities in systems neuroscience!

Keywords: patch clamp ephys, opto, mouse behavior, (in vivo) voltage imaging. Would love to return to the Basal Ganglia.

Sharing appreciated, and happy #FluorescenceFriday !
Brightly labelled pyramidal cells in the mouse retrosplenial cortex. Blood vessels are visible of various thicknesses in darker colours.
atmostafa.bsky.social
Wow... I'd never seen an AI summary this bad
jimmycdooley.bsky.social
There's a very decent case to be made for no AI overviews for medical searches.

Someone is going to search for this and panic...
atmostafa.bsky.social
This never gets old, exciting every old...
Picture of spikes on a screen
Reposted by Mostafa Safaie
chiaramasnovophd.bsky.social
Having a hard time processing this. HHMI is pausing all competitions. Very demoralizing for early career scientists like me @hhmi.org
atmostafa.bsky.social
Ideally someone with with some experience working with rodents to perform behavioural / electrophysiological experiments, recording the activity of hundreds of neurons in behaving animals using Neuropixels and much more.

Please write to me if you are interested: [email protected]
atmostafa.bsky.social
This is a great opportunity to join Imperial College London, work on an exciting project with great mentors such as @clopathlab.bsky.social and @juangallego.bsky.social.
atmostafa.bsky.social
Job Alert (please repost)!

We are looking to hire a Research Assistant to join us in an exciting project looking into Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) and how brains learn to control them.
Reposted by Mostafa Safaie
adrianaguatame.bsky.social
A friend included this anti-acknowledgement section on her PhD thesis. She also added the proposition: “Systematic bullying and undermining of girls and women in STEM starts early on and is the reason why they do not stay in science and related fields.”
Absurd we still need to go through this
🧪👩‍🔬
There have been people less than helpful in my journey here. I wanted to acknowledge those too, bc I know I am not unique in this experience.
No thank you to the physics study assoc that made me sing songs about how women couldn't study physics without sleeping with the professor, the day I stepped into university life. No thank you to the 5th year physics student that decided to assign me a stripper name within the first minute of meeting me in the physics coffee corner in my first year. No thank you to the technician that was responsible for onboarding me on the use of the cluster in my third year who raised his eyebrows and asked me if that meant I was some sort of computer girl. No thank you to the senior researcher that sent me utterly inappropriate texts after a conference, then proceeded to apologise months later by telling me they had not been meant for me anyway so no hard feelings remain hopefully And no thank you to him for attending every conference I've been to since. No thank you to the people who told me that it was surprising that I was doing a PhD since I was a girl. No thank you to the man who mistook me for a coffee lady at a conference, and after having to correct him two times that I did not work there, responded with you should consider it. No thank you to the researcher that asked me what I was wearing underneath my outfit during a conference. No thank you to the physicist who declared to a room full of other physicists that biologists don't know how to design an experiment. No thank you to the people who have called me scary instead of strong and intimidating instead of intelligent.
And finally, no thank you to the exec board of the TU Delft, whose knee-jerk reaction to being held up a mirror about the social safety at the university, was to sue the party holding up the mirror instead of looking at the problems they highlighted.
... You have made me feel like I do not belong in science & I cannot forgive you for that.
atmostafa.bsky.social
I was planning on going to SfN this year, for the first time, and I was really looking forward to it too. But over the past few weeks I decided not to go. I'm sad and happy about this at the same time 🤷
Reposted by Mostafa Safaie
anne-urai.bsky.social
I'm looking for a public dataset of young+older people doing a simple perceptual decision-making task, with sufficient trial + subject numbers. Ideally, multiple stimulus difficulty levels but no manipulations (conditions, task switching etc).

This must exist - tips for where to look? 🧒👨‍🦳🧠
atmostafa.bsky.social
I see your point but I think any suspicion could be solved by auditing the highest expenses at the end of the year, rather than policing everyone all the time. It'll save a whole lot of public money as well
atmostafa.bsky.social
We really need to "consider how we can push back on the calamitous corporatization of our universities".
atmostafa.bsky.social
Then to book a hotel via booking.com, I had to take a screenshot of the offers from the contractor, and from booking.com, send both to the admin staff to prove it is cheaper to do it on my own, get an approval, and only then I could book.
atmostafa.bsky.social
A very timely read:
academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

I'm sure many have similar stories, here's mine:
Imperial has a contractor for travel bookings. It is often more $$ than booking online, takes much longer to go through the process and is much less flexible (location, sharing w/ colleagues).
On the responsibilities of intellectuals and the rise of bullshit jobs in universities
You may never have considered yourself to be one. Why would you? But if you’re reading this, there is more than a likelihood that you are one. If you’re a
academic.oup.com
atmostafa.bsky.social
Ooh, that's actually very handy! Thanks for sharing!
atmostafa.bsky.social
Oh right... Now I noticed Sara's on your paper :)
atmostafa.bsky.social
Cheers Ali. I'm very excited too 😀
atmostafa.bsky.social
Thanks!
And by the way, loved the BCI emoji: 🧠➡️🖥️