Caitlin Vander Weele, PhD
@caitvw.bsky.social
Founder & CEO at Stellate Communications. Midwest manners with Big Apple hustle. Ex-neuroscientist at MIT. She/her. Say hi 👋🏻 caitlin@stellatecomms.com
Heading to #CCN26? Stop by and see what the Rajan Lab has been working on! Don't miss presentations from John Vastola, Satpreet Singh, and Nathan Wu. Drop by their sessions to chat about our ongoing projects and say hello to the team! @purpleantelope.bsky.social @satpreetsingh.bsky.social
Congratulations to @jenbussell.bsky.social and the whole team on this work! I'm so happy to see it out in the world 🎉 @ryanpaulbadman1.bsky.social
Jennifer Bussell PhD@jenbussell.bsky.social · 7d agoHow does the brain represent the value of knowledge? In our paper--out now at Nature Neuroscience--we identify a representation of intrinsic information value within neural population structures in the orbitofrontal cortex in mice. www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02377-y #neuroskyence 🧠🧪 (1/8)
Today’s potent #cannabis products pose a risk to the mental health of adolescents. To the brave parents turning their pain into advocacy, thank you for all you do at Johnny's Ambassadors & for inviting me to speak at your conference ♥️ Learn more here: johnnysambassadors.org/research/
We just wrapped our first cycle of Fast Grants: we’re funding 37 projects across diagnostics, AI scientists, phage therapies, and more. Global demand for fast, flexible research funding is even larger than we expected, and it’s shaping how we’re building Cycle 2 this fall. More to come soon.
🤔 Why does prior stress make future stress hit harder? In new work led by @zachtpennington.bsky.social, the Cai Lab discovered a brain circuit that controls stress vulnerability, reshaping how the brain reacts to the next stressor. I'll be speaking about at @fens.org. Come check it out!
Cells control gene expression through combinatorial interactions between readers, writers, and erasers of chromatin marks, but most epigenetic editing tools rely on a single effector in isolation. COMBINE is the first platform to test those combinations at scale, screening 50,000+ effector pairs.
Start assembling your team because the 2026 Virtual Cell Challenge officially kicks off on Thursday, August 20. This is round two of our global competition to understand and predict how cells respond to internal cues and external stimuli.
Nobody spells it out like @kordinglab.bsky.social. In this latest @juanbenetpodcast.bsky.social episode, Konrad discusses why we need “compilers” to translate molecularly annotated connectomes into neural dynamics – generating data we could use to build better AI. www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHQf...
The Power of a Single Neuron and a Path to Simulating the Brain | Dr. Konrad Kording
YouTube video by Juan Benet Podcast
youtube.com
As kids break for summer, it’s important to talk with them about #cannabis use. The cannabis products sold today have a high THC content, risking addiction and long-term effects on developing brains 🧠 Empower kids to make the right decisions for a happy and healthy summer ☀️
Science Fellow Jingtian Zhou and colleagues traced stress-driven glioma growth in mice to a bone marrow-derived macrophage that infiltrates the brain tumor and acts on the immune environment rather than the tumor cells.
Two milestones in the Preston Lab this week 🎉 1️⃣ Andrei Amatuni defended his dissertation proposal! His work asks how we learn the hidden structure of experience & use it to reason in new situations + how that ability develops from childhood to adulthood. Congrats, Andrei!
🎉 Congratulations to @zachtpennington.bsky.social on receiving this year's Banting Discovery Award! I worked closely with Zach when he was a postdoc in my lab and I know he is incredibly deserving of this award. Read more about his award here: psych.ubc.ca/news/zachary...
Congratulations to PSFC on their new website. Coordinated philanthropy for safe, ethical, evidence-based access to psychedelic healing — visual identity, illustrations, and report design via @stellatecomms.bsky.social. psfc.co | stellatecomms.com/creative-portfolio
People spend ~5% of their lives sick the with cold & flu. Intercept — a $500M philanthropic initiative spearheaded by Stripe — aims to make respiratory infections a thing of the past. We're proud to have helped usher Intercept into the world today 🚀 www.interceptfund.com
Intercept
A philanthropic initiative accelerating technologies to reduce and ultimately eliminate respiratory viruses.
interceptfund.com
What if we could redesign AI to mirror biology’s efficiency? Reardon & the Flourish team are exploring exactly that. By mapping neural connections in the human brain, they aim to develop biology-inspired AI that is radically more energy-efficient. Read here: www.wired.com/story/jeff-b...
Jeff Bezos Is Funding a Wild Hunt for the Brain’s ‘Core Algorithm’
With $500 million in funding and a reported $2.5 billion valuation, Flourish wants to reinvent AI by putting real neurons under the microscope.
wired.com
A study in Communications Medicine explores whether a special, fat-based diet could be a safe and effective treatment for adults with anorexia nervosa. Participants showed significant improvements in eating disorder symptoms. go.nature.com/4dT0WCA #medsky 🧪
Humans already alter their own brain states — coffee boosts focus and alcohol relaxes. Neurotech could deliver the same effects with precision and without the systemic risks. Read about how neurotech can expand from purely clinical to consumer use ⬇️ zenodo.org/records/2011...
Only 1 week left until the Cycle 1 Fast Grants deadline! We're awarding 35 grants ($25K–$100K) for seed-stage projects at the intersection of AI & biomedicine. Apply today: www.biswasfamilyfoundation.org/science/fast...
Our understanding of depression is incomplete, leaving millions without effective treatment. I joined @hmarusak.bsky.social on her BrainSTEM podcast to discuss how my lab maps the mechanisms underlying the disease to develop better therapies. Listen here ⬇️ open.spotify.com/episode/2nX3...
In a field near Wicken, Cambridgeshire larkspur is grown for London florists along with cornflowers & Nigella. It’s quite a sight just now-some floral dopamine for you 🌿:
We're recruiting postdocs to study how people build structured knowledge from experience & use it to act flexibly. Behavioral work, fMRI, computational & AI models, with a lifespan focus. You don't need experience with every method; fit & curiosity matter most. Please repost & share! 🧠
Congrats to Blanchard Lab PhD student Anna Bright for presenting a poster at the #Myelin GRC in Italy this past week! Anna shared her work on APOE4 and oligodendrocyte development and represented our lab wonderfully at her first GRC. Well done, Anna!
✨ Our creative pages got a little facelift ✨ Visit the Stellate website to peep some of favorite design projects, and read what clients have to say about working with us! > Services: www.stellatecomms.com/creative > Portfolio: www.stellatecomms.com/creative-por...
Welcome to Emily Powell, our newest research coordinator! Emily joins us from UT Austin and will be central to our NIH-funded BrainWave Project, studying how memory changes through adolescence and shapes how we decide, reason, and learn. So glad to have you, Emily!
How does your brain filter out the noise and focus enough to learn efficiently? In our newest preprint, we use intracranial recordings + computational modeling to explore how selective attention shapes learning and state representations in the human brain 🧠 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/🧵
