Katie Tschida
@katietschida.bsky.social
350 followers 340 following 30 posts
Assistant professor at Cornell, neuroscientist studying the neural circuits for vocal communication. Mom of 4 kiddos. Also, coffee, Will Ferrell, and bad sci-fi movies.
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Pinned
katietschida.bsky.social
New story to share! We routinely put running wheels in our mouse cages. The mice love them, and there's lots of evidence that exercise is great for health. Given our focus on social behaviors, though, we wondered whether running wheels change mouse social behavior.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
a hamster is sitting in a hamster wheel in a cage
ALT: a hamster is sitting in a hamster wheel in a cage
media.tenor.com
Reposted by Katie Tschida
flscitriguy.bsky.social
Looking forward to applying to the Harvard Trade school for kids who can't AI good.
Reposted by Katie Tschida
katietschida.bsky.social
We hope these findings are useful to those studying mouse social behavior! Congrats to former undergrad Stephen Batter, whose honors project kicked off this study. Thanks also to co-first authors Patryk Ziobro and Cass Malone, and to our current undergrads who helped bring this to the finish line!
katietschida.bsky.social
Interestingly, there is past work showing that mice will forgo reinforcers (even cocaine and amphetamine) to gain access to a running wheel. So one possibilty is that running wheels are like crack for mice and decrease their sensitivity to other rewards, perhaps even social rewards.
katietschida.bsky.social
These effects on social behavior are somewhat long-lasting, as they're not reversed by a 2-week period with running wheels removed and replaced with a standard paper hut.
katietschida.bsky.social
Unexpectedly, we found that free access to running wheels in the home cage, either for 5-weeks over adolescence (weaning till adulthood) or even for a 2-week period in adulthood, inhibits social motivation in group-housed female mice when they are given the chance to interact with a novel female.
katietschida.bsky.social
New story to share! We routinely put running wheels in our mouse cages. The mice love them, and there's lots of evidence that exercise is great for health. Given our focus on social behaviors, though, we wondered whether running wheels change mouse social behavior.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
a hamster is sitting in a hamster wheel in a cage
ALT: a hamster is sitting in a hamster wheel in a cage
media.tenor.com
Reposted by Katie Tschida
donmoyn.bsky.social
Controlling the media is one of the items on the authoritarian checklist; this includes not just hard news, and increasingly social media, but also threatening satirists who mock the regime.
The FCC is pushing this control, but corporations do not have to fold. open.substack.com/pub/donmoyni...
Image of a checklist, which included “control the media”
Reposted by Katie Tschida
jeremymberg.bsky.social
I listened to Bhattacharya on Steve Bannon's "War Room" podcast.

If you want to know how it went, see the following email that I just sent.

1/13
Dear Dr. Bhattacharya:

I have listened to your performance on the “War Room” podcast with Steve Bannon. The segment begins with a discussion of Secretary Kennedy’s recent cancellation of $500M worth of contracts related to mRNA vaccines.

You say “You can’t have a platform where such a large percentage of the population distrusts the platform as we use it for vaccines and expect it to work.”  Later, you make comments that might explain why a large segment of the percentage distrusts this platform. For example, you say that the vaccine was not protective against contracting COVID and cite your own case on COVID after being vaccinated. However, you fail to cite the evidence for the clinical trials that led to the Emergency Use Authorization.
katietschida.bsky.social
New study from the lab! A follow-up to our finding that short-term social isolation promotes same-sex mounting in female mice. Led by grad student Cassidy Malone and post-doc @xinzhao322.bsky.social, with help from undergrad Selina Xu!
biorxiv-behav.bsky.social
Same-sex mounting in single-housed C57BL/6J female mice is not regulated by estrous state https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.01.662591v1
katietschida.bsky.social
PhDone! Congrats to my student Nicole Pranic for successfully defending this week! We were too busy celebrating to take a picture, lol.
Reposted by Katie Tschida
theonion.com
Pope Leo XIV: ‘There Couldn’t Be A Better Time To Get The Fuck Out Of America Forever’
Pope Leo XIV: ‘There Couldn’t Be A Better Time To Get The Fuck Out Of America Forever’
Reposted by Katie Tschida
malindalo.bsky.social
Harvard redid its whole homepage to push back against the administration’s demands. I mean, this is just a website but I think it’s kind of a great PR move: www.harvard.edu
Harvard University
Harvard University is devoted to excellence in teaching, learning, and research, and to developing leaders who make a difference globally.
www.harvard.edu
Reposted by Katie Tschida
ardemp.bskyverified.social
Published an op-ed for @cnn.com: “Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger.”
A personal reflection on what’s at stake as science funding gets slashed. I’d be grateful if you could amplify both in and beyond the science world.
www.cnn.com/2025/04/09/h...
Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger | CNN
Dr. Ardem Patapoutian says he watches “with deep sadness as the United States’ remarkable scientific enterprise, which took generations of hard work and national investment to build, faces a concerted...
www.cnn.com
Reposted by Katie Tschida
Reposted by Katie Tschida
theonion.com
Trump Says He Won’t Rule Out Third Reich
Trump Says He Won’t Rule Out Third Reich
katietschida.bsky.social
These results set the stage for future work to investigate how changes in brain circuits important for vocalization enable the context-dependent regulation of vocal communication over development. Stay tuned!
katietschida.bsky.social
In this study, we present evidence that mice begin producing social USVs earlier than thought, between postnatal days 20-24. Even though these early social USVs are produced at low rates, they're pretty well coordinated with non-vocal social behaviors (sniffing/following), as in older mice.
katietschida.bsky.social
Baby mice produce "isolation" ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) when separated from the nest, and adolescent and adult mice produce "social" USVs during interactions with social partners. But the timing of this transition in vocal communication is not well characterized.
katietschida.bsky.social
Vocal communication changes over development! Infants of many species produce distress calls when in need of parental care. As juveniles mature, they begin producing "adult-like" vocalizations in a variety of species-typical contexts, including during interactions with conspecifics.