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Michael Beierlein

@mbeierlein

Principal Investigator at UTHealth - Houston Cellular Neuroscience | Thalamocortical circuits in health and disease | Electrophysiology | Neuromodulation https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2210-3118

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13.11.2024
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Latest posts by Michael Beierlein @mbeierlein

Have said this before in other forms, but will reiterate it here: if you're doing long-form writing of any sort, reading the words aloud into a microphone is a completely unparalleled cheat code. It's free, easy, and so effective it feels like it shouldn't be allowed. I do it in a few stages...

07.03.2026 11:51 πŸ‘ 765 πŸ” 156 πŸ’¬ 26 πŸ“Œ 44
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Train booking in Germany!

06.03.2026 12:02 πŸ‘ 11 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

UAB is recruiting neuroscience faculty at two different levels - come join our vibrant neuroscience community!

03.03.2026 15:14 πŸ‘ 43 πŸ” 40 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1

I think this is a *super* important paper - if this result can be replicated with other regions or tasks then this may come to form our core understanding of credit assignment signals in the neocortex!

#neuroscience πŸ§ͺ

26.02.2026 15:37 πŸ‘ 68 πŸ” 13 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0
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As new Kopchick Fellows are named, we are sharing a brief series highlighting the leadership and impact of the fellowship. Our first features the Kopchicks, Huda Zoghbi, MD, and Fellow, Stephen Farmer, whose neurodegenerative disease research continues this fall in the Huda Zoghbi Lab. More to come.

27.02.2026 13:45 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1

Over the last few years, they won against Roma (twice), Celtic, Zagreb, Besiktas, Lazio, Man City, Man United, Atletico Madrid, and now Inter. This ain't no Appalachian State. This is a really good team.

24.02.2026 22:24 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Today, I would like to honor the memory of Roger Y. Tsien, born on February 1, 1952. His legacy lives with all who use his technologies, including calcium sensors, fluorescent proteins, the acetoxymethyl (AM) ester, & many more! #FluorescenceFriday
www.nature.com/articles/nme...

30.01.2026 14:52 πŸ‘ 76 πŸ” 17 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 2
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Lyon fans held up this banner during a poignant minute's silence before their game vs. PAOK πŸ–€

Seven fans of the Greek club were killed in a minibus crash en route to the Europa League tie.

29.01.2026 20:47 πŸ‘ 1008 πŸ” 120 πŸ’¬ 10 πŸ“Œ 4
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Excited to be on the organization meeting for the 6th annual NCM conference on Neural Circuits in Health & Disease. Terrific line up of speakers!

22.01.2026 17:56 πŸ‘ 11 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Listening to a discussion about AI in university education with Amol Rajan & Prof Duncan Iveston on Radio 4 Today. Too short to get into the nuance of course, but an observation that copilot can do a literate review for you very quickly perfectly illustrates one of my main concerns with AI…1/1

19.01.2026 08:58 πŸ‘ 380 πŸ” 96 πŸ’¬ 28 πŸ“Œ 7

1. If the goal is to stop us from doing science, then doing science is more important than ever now.
2. We have radical uncertainty about the future. There is no sense in giving up in advance.
3. We have agency over the future. If you don't like what's happening, work to change what is happening.

18.01.2026 01:24 πŸ‘ 117 πŸ” 35 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 0
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Tracking the details of an experiment in successively cited Methods sections

17.01.2026 09:05 πŸ‘ 167 πŸ” 17 πŸ’¬ 9 πŸ“Œ 1

Excited to share our new study showing how subcortical inputs are routed through ventromedial (VM) thalamus to layer 1 interneurons in the medial PFC, all done by my graduate student Sanne Casello:
sannemcasello.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

15.01.2026 20:25 πŸ‘ 18 πŸ” 6 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1
Hiking and Camping in Great Sand Dunes National Park | sand & snow
Hiking and Camping in Great Sand Dunes National Park | sand & snow YouTube video by Meredith

Went on a short backpacking trip as I was finishing up my thesis last December. Compiled some of the footage into a YouTube video :)

We were at the great sand dunes in Colorado- so much snow! and sand! and wind! β„οΈβ³βŒ›οΈ

14.01.2026 19:06 πŸ‘ 5 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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We've got ISSUES. Literally.

We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?

arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563

A 🧡 1/n

13.01.2026 08:24 πŸ‘ 504 πŸ” 314 πŸ’¬ 17 πŸ“Œ 49

when doing neuroscience projects I often advocate for computational modelling, followed by data analysis to test model's predictions.

however a few times now I have had pushback from collaborators/reivewers suggesting it would be better to do the data analysis first, then the modelling.

thoughts?

12.01.2026 12:47 πŸ‘ 29 πŸ” 6 πŸ’¬ 16 πŸ“Œ 0
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Apply to the Neurobiology course at MBL! It is supercool. Apps due Feb 4.

10.01.2026 21:17 πŸ‘ 5 πŸ” 4 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Please spread the wordπŸ”ŠMy lab is looking to hire two international postdocs. If you want to do comp neuro, combine machine learning and awesome math to understand neural circuit activity, then come work with us! Bonn is such a cool place for neuroscience now, you don't want to miss out.

10.01.2026 17:39 πŸ‘ 33 πŸ” 37 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 1
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The Neural Systems & Behavior Course (Marine Biol. Lab) is an amazing opportunity to learn about many different approaches to studying nervous system control of many behaviors. Learn from experts, expand your science network, go to "science summer camp"!

09.01.2026 19:06 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 4 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

We've got a great lineup of speakers for our Thalamocortical Interactions GRS! Only a few spots remaining for poster presenters - apply soon!

08.01.2026 19:40 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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What is the computational role of dendritic excitations? Byung Hun Lee and team mapped voltage dynamics throughout the dendritic trees of CA1 pyramidal neurons in mice navigating in virtual reality. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

04.01.2026 06:17 πŸ‘ 130 πŸ” 50 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 2

2025 has been the year of change for me. I said goodbye to people and things I hold dear, moved back to the other side of the globe, got a new job, rekindled some old relationships, and despite the lingering sadness in me, I have, surprisingly, found peace in this new way of life.

31.12.2025 14:20 πŸ‘ 10 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Every week, Nature publishes yet another breathless puff piece about some AI startup, based only unpublished claims from the company and interviewing only those who work there.

How can the leading scientific journal publish piece after piece that would make Kevin Roose blush?

I think it's that...

30.12.2025 22:08 πŸ‘ 531 πŸ” 117 πŸ’¬ 19 πŸ“Œ 7

Anyone else have a coauthor who is so much fun to write with that you just find yourself grinning in some combination of satisfaction and pride as you edit a manuscript?

If not, get yourself one.

24.12.2025 06:34 πŸ‘ 381 πŸ” 16 πŸ’¬ 20 πŸ“Œ 4
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@erictopol.bsky.social posted this diagram earlier today. When I pointed out the obvious AI slop and copious errors, he blocked me. But you can also find it on his substack. Topol poses as a serious medical person, but disseminating such graphical nonsense is disqualifying. Unfollow.

21.12.2025 23:55 πŸ‘ 16 πŸ” 4 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

This smells distinctly like collider bias and/or selection bias and/or regression to the mean... You simply can't select teen prodigies, and world class athletes rom databases, and go run regressions without serious consideration of the selection process!

20.12.2025 15:48 πŸ‘ 340 πŸ” 68 πŸ’¬ 23 πŸ“Œ 13
A ChatGPT diagram of a skull with some weird labels. The lower jaw is both the mandible and the occipital bone. Also, the nasal cavity is between two teeth!

A ChatGPT diagram of a skull with some weird labels. The lower jaw is both the mandible and the occipital bone. Also, the nasal cavity is between two teeth!

Given all the recent buzz about how great ChatGPT has gotten, including its prowess with images, I figured I'd check in on its anatomical skills. Nope.

19.12.2025 15:35 πŸ‘ 352 πŸ” 94 πŸ’¬ 36 πŸ“Œ 35
Preview
Policies and Procedures

Verboten for dissertations and candidacy exam proposals, unless clearly indicated. For courses, completely at the discretion of the instructor gsbs.uth.edu/academics/po...

18.12.2025 02:45 πŸ‘ 5 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0

I've spent all day struggling to write a single page of a popular science article. I bang away at a word processor; give up; start diagramming on paper. Take some notes; draft a few sentences in pen; return to the computer...and very slowly I figure out what I was trying to say in the first place.

16.12.2025 23:41 πŸ‘ 497 πŸ” 73 πŸ’¬ 11 πŸ“Œ 23
screenshot of a homework worksheet that includes the sentence: "Methyl groups, a type of chemical group, are present in the environment and may enter cells and attach to the DNA as a person ages, as shown in the diagram below"

screenshot of a homework worksheet that includes the sentence: "Methyl groups, a type of chemical group, are present in the environment and may enter cells and attach to the DNA as a person ages, as shown in the diagram below"

absolutely losing it at my 14yo's biology homework

15.12.2025 02:02 πŸ‘ 209 πŸ” 40 πŸ’¬ 46 πŸ“Œ 38