Excited to be joining a fantastic community of neuroscientists!

The lab is officially up & running at Duke! 🥳

Huge thanks to @dukemedschool.bsky.social for the amazing space, & to our lab team for getting everything installed & operational within a month 😅

Excited for what’s ahead!

Happy Birthday Dick Tsien! So happy to join former labmembers in celebration. Amazing to be reminded of the breath and depth of your contribution to science - with a strong flavor of "what is the underlying mechanism" @deisseroth.bsky.social @yulonglilab.bsky.social

Honored to speak at Tsien@80—a beautiful reminder that mentorship, curiosity, and generosity leave the deepest legacy. Thank you, Dick Tsien, for welcoming me into your scientific family. Happy 80th! 🎉 #DickTsien80

As an author on the paper Vinny skewers here, I say ouch and read this.

Superb Duke piece on Alzheimer's Research:
today.duke.edu/2025/04/how-...

Over 50 yrs since the discovery of protein kinases, 80% of human kinases still have ≤20 known substrates, and many are “dark.” I'm EXCITED to announce our new work towards solving this- combining (1) deep learning with (2) proximity proteomics in vivo! ➡️
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

"This is a massive loss for neuroscience,” says Cory Miller.

By @avaskham.bsky.social

www.thetransmitter.org/funding/u-s-...

Still, while thrilled our 2 TTIs and 3 staff scientists were rescued, many other great scientists were terminated, incl lab and core staff

wtaf

🚨 New lab paper!🚨

A dream study of mine for nearly 20 yrs not possible until now thanks to NIH 🧠 funding & 1st-author lead @seeber.bsky.social

We tracked hippocampal activity as people walked memory-guided paths & imagined them again. Did brain patterns reappear?🧵👇

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Suthana et al. studied brain recordings from implanted electrodes in freely moving humans. They show that neural dynamics encoded actual and imagined routes similarly. @suthanalab.bsky.social @seeber.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“Why Facts Don't Work”—my talk at Winter Brain. Thanks to Joyce Woo for organizing “Synaptic Control of Mesolimbic DA Neurons” & co-presenters Tom Hnasko, Abigail Elerding, Miguel Lujan, Thomas Jhou. Sorry I missed it (thanks United!) but silver lining—here’s the recording: youtu.be/vZAZ6uCkkWI

Same with general University functions. They think that taking away the words diversity, equity, and inclusion changes things. Libs love their labels (on that I agree 😅) so banning "DEI" will make us all cry. That's really their point, as juvenile as it is. But just live DEI, be it. Can't ban that.

Let me give a concrete example of the importance of applications with high risk-high reward as well as the role of NIH staff in taking risks.

Decades ago, a physical chemist proposed ideas about doing mass spectrometry on proteins (when this was deemed probably impossible).

1/n

“Why Facts Don't Work”—my talk at Winter Brain. Thanks to Joyce Woo for organizing “Synaptic Control of Mesolimbic DA Neurons” & co-presenters Tom Hnasko, Abigail Elerding, Miguel Lujan, Thomas Jhou. Sorry I missed it (thanks United!) but silver lining—here’s the recording: youtu.be/vZAZ6uCkkWI

Tune uses epigenetic editing to control gene expression without modifying the DNA sequence itself. The startup's technology is based on research from Tune co-founder and Duke BME Professor Charles Gersbach.

Received bad news about Carl Olson. Sad to hear that he passed away. Carl was a major influence on my early years as an Assistant Prof, with our labs down the hall from each other. He was a highly rigorous neurophysiologist, with a wry sense of humor. Please see attached images for more info.

More catchup :) 2 bioRxiv preprints related to our goals of mapping and modeling entire brains: Dense Continuous Membrane Labeling and Expansion Microscopy..., synthneuro.org/publications... Scaling Properties for Artificial Neural Network Models of Entire C. elegans, synthneuro.org/publications...