"the quickest way to get a collaborator to return edits on your manuscript is to write down their affiliation wrong" (ancient academic proverb)

Can one bring together Reinforcement learning and Drift Diffusion models to understand collective foraging ?

Congrads to Jonathan Marienhagen , Lisa Blum Moyse and Dominik Deffner on this new study. Very happy that I was part of this collaboration.

Preprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

PLOS Comput. Biol.: Stochastic activity in low-rank recurrent neural networks
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013371

“NeuroAI should not remain limited to learning statistical relationships, but should also help in building mechanistic and causal models of neural activity. These models will incorporate biological properties of neural circuits, including cellular characteristics and network properties.”

💯💯💯

New preprint from @darbly.bsky.social‬ @briandepasquale.bsky.social‬ and my labs! If you love (or hate) mosquitoes, have a look:

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

We used TEM to describe the circuitry used for CO2 detection by mosquitoes. As usual with mosquitoes, nothing is as expected! 🌬️🦟

Congrats to the 2025 cohort of McKnight Scholars!

www.mcknight.org/news-ideas/2...

How do brain circuits evolve? We started looking for some answers by using synapse-resolution cross-species comparative connectomics on an entire olfactory circuit 👇

bit.ly/44aVm9E

Can #AI become a true scientist? @ninamiolane.bsky.social ‬explores how new technologies are reshaping scientific discovery, and why human expertise remains essential as we enter a new era of research powered by intelligent algorithms. 🧪‬
plos.io/4kZi0aB

Tired of your boring old DDM? Check out recent work by grad student @ryguy.io that introduces a *state-dependent* DDM using an underlying HMM. We find mice change their speed-accuracy strategy from trial to trial! Code provided! (in Julia of course!)

90% of doing science is being open to new ideas.

Unsurprising, but nevertheless tragic. Makes it very hard for integrators and multidisciplinarians to exist in academia. #academicsky

Hivemind, what's the best approach/tool to aggregate neural data across sessions (and animals) in dimensionality reduction analyses, particularly when it's not known how overlapping the pool of neurons are over different sessions?

"The core strategy is to slow NIH spending to generate surpluses...then use surpluses as justification for slashing the budget...unspent [$] won’t be because NIH doesn’t have good science to spend on [but] because the administration has blocked spending" donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...

Using pretrained vision-language models to align neural signals from different modalities:

arxiv.org/pdf/2407.14020

Cool stuff, though I would still love to see if we could align different neural modalities without the pretrained VLMs...

🧠📈 🧪 #NeuroAI

“Science is a smart, low cost investment. The costs of not investing in it are higher than the risk of doing so… talk to people about science.” - @kevinochsner.bsky.social makes his case to the field #sans2025

First big new @simonsfoundation.org neuroscience collaboration launches - exciting!! The product of a HUGE competition among the best minds and teams.

Congrats to this group:

www.simonsfoundation.org/neuroscience...

Try Julia!

Olfactory neuroscientists have known for a while that their stimuli stink. A new analysis illuminates the extent of the problem.

By @callimcflurry.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/olfaction/sm...

Would love to be added. Developing StateSpaceDynamics.jl

Cool project led by Victor Geadah, fitting smoothly time-varying (and condition-varying) linear dynamical systems to neural activity.

arxiv.org/abs/2502.18347

I feel compelled to acknowledge the dread and dismay that many international students in the US are feeling at the moment - we see you, even if we feel rather powerless for now. Here's the very first visa stamp on my Indian passport ~40 years ago to come to UW Seattle for an MS in Bioengineering.

📣 Grad students and postdocs in computational and theoretical neuroscience: please consider applying for the 2025 Flatiron Institute Junior Theoretical Neuroscience Workshop! All expenses are covered. Apply by April 14. jtnworkshop2025.flatironinstitute.org

🙋‍♂️

@petersenpeter.bsky.social @jakhmack.bsky.social @sejdevries.bsky.social @bingbrunton.bsky.social @jeremymagland.bsky.social @briandepasquale.bsky.social @maryamshanechi.bsky.social
+others not on sky: David Kleinfeld , Tim Gardner, Maryam Shanechi, Carlos Ponce, Eli Schlizerman, Edgar Walker,...