Are you at #NDiSTEM2025? Come by tomorrow to hear how important questions about the brain benefit from interdisciplinary & inclusive approaches. Featuring amazing scientists Cristina Román + @wutsaiyale.bsky.social fellows @lester-rodriguez.bsky.social & @josueortc.bsky.social !
@sacnas.bsky.social
Thrilled that our paper is out today in Nature!
www.nature.com/articles/s4...
@josueortc.bsky.social @wutsaiyale.bsky.social explored spatiotemporal cholinergic & calcium signalling dynamics across learning.
🎨Using dual-color imaging and multimodal transformers 🤖, he showed how cortical neuromodulation reshapes with experience and task demands.
Earlier this year, after receiving emails from people in the throes of AI psychosis, I stayed in touch with one man as he journeyed to recovery.
I'm grateful to James that he was willing to go on record. He wanted people to know: humanlike chatbots are dangerous.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkGk...
🚀 The Champalimaud Research Symposium 2025 (#CRSy25) kicked off today in Lisbon under the theme “#NeuroCybernetics at Scale”, exploring #intelligence and the future of brain–AI research!
Excellent list of speakers! Come join the symposium at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown. Register now. #neurocybernetics #computationalNeuroscience
What problem is explainability/interpretability research trying to solve in ML, and do you have a favorite paper articulating what that problem is?
The neural control & computation lab is recruiting!
If you're interested in using large-scale neural population recordings to study how the brain learns to produce complex and flexible behaviours, please get in touch.
www.ncclab.ca
Please share with anyone who cares about NSF support for graduate students and take 30 seconds to sign and leave a comment.
The deadline for the 2025 Graduate Research Fellowship Program is about one month away and literally no one can apply. #NSFGRFP
jasonjwilliamsny.github.io/grfp2025/
IMO, the #1 personality trait for a successful scientist is perseverance and #2 is a deep (insatiable) curiosity (dopamine!) about the world. After that is luck/serendipity, decent intuition and way down the list is “good grades”, problem solving or some other measure of intellectual capability 1/2
Call these representatives, tell them that funding NIH and protecting it from partisan political control serves their constituents, not only with cures but with jobs, too!
Got my summary statement back and all I got was: not enough experimental work. Yes Sherlock I am a comp neuroscientist. Apparently that makes it impossible to get a k99
The White House is taking new steps to undermine every international student at our universities.
It has approved a new rule restricting student visas to 4 years max. That's not long enough for PhD students, or about half of undergrads, to finish their degree.
Likely to enter force within days.
The GAO just found the Trump admin illegally delayed/cut $8B+ in NIH research grants—blocking Congress-approved funds, harming medical research, and violating the Impoundment Control Act. Science, equity, and accountability are on the line. Congress must act. www.highereddive.com/news/nih-cut...
Some people don't feel as close to this as they ought to. Most of us are just a bad break or two away from winding up on the streets, and addiction & mental health crises can affect anyone. They're gutting services and rendering more of us disposable, and there's a carceral disposal system waiting.
A beautifully written piece on a terrible time
www.science.org/content/arti...
“With these considerations, we expect to fund through the 4th percentile.”
There it is, in black and white, the destruction of cancer research in the US.
It didn’t help that the rejection came on my birthday…
Got my green card accepted and my k99 rejected within the same month. Academia is a roller coaster of emotions
How many trainees were supported by your award? Enter your answer 14.What was the reason given for your grant’s cancelation? Enter your answer 15.Is there anything else you would like to share with the Committee? Enter your answer 16.Are you comfortable with the Committee publicly sharing the information you provided? If you select “ask me first,” please be sure you have provided an email address or phone number. Yes No Ask me first
🧪 Attention those with terminated grants, including for NSF, NASA, EPA, NIH, etc:
Let Congress know about the impact of terminations via this form: democrats-science.house.gov/grantcancela...
Only Dem staff on the House Science Committee will have access (unless if you explicitly state otherwise).
All of NIH funding to Northwestern University is frozen. This pause includes noncompeting approved funding, new and competing grants with fundable scores. No reimbursements for money already spent have been received since March. This situation is rarely reported so please Please get the word out!
Abstract of the paper
Our paper "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: Is Mechanistic Interpretability Identifiable?" will be presented at #ICLR2025!
It's also the first paper of my first PhD student, congrats @maximemeloux.bsky.social ! 🎉
blog: melouxm.github.io/MI-identifia...
An explanatory thread 🧵:
What was it doing with my face? 😂
Here is a recording of my talk (and the others) on spatiotemporal modeling! youtu.be/BqFRKf7cpvE?...
It’s on the neurofm-workshop.github.io
Come to my talk today at #COSYNE2025 where I will talk about developing spatiotemporal models of brain dynamics
Hey scientists. This rules. Check it out.
JB Pritzker flat out says the birthright "order" is unconstitutional and "we will not obey an unconstitutional order," attacks Trump for having the oligarchs in the front row.
See, @schumer.senate.gov? It's not that hard!
We built a simple parametric test of this in our paper:
Similarity between (crossval) encoding weights tells you whether encoding dims are orthogonal.
Similarity between **absolute** (crossval) encoding weights tells you about the selectivity and sparsity.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
