Leon Aksman
@leonaksman.bsky.social
Asst. Prof of Research at USC's Laboratory of Neuroimaging, working on dementia progression
MATLAB was my first programming language, and it opened up a whole new avenue for me as a scientist. What a massive legacy Dr. Moler's work has had!
Luke Sjulson@lukesjulson.bsky.social · 2mo agoPeople like to dunk on MATLAB now, but it’s hard to overstate how large an advance it was at the time and the impact it has had on scientific computing. RIP Cleve Moler www.nytimes.com/2026/06/11/s...
🧠 New paper out in 𝘉𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘯 Why does tau pathology often begin in the entorhinal cortex in Alzheimer’s disease? We show that brain-wide gradients of neuronal activity and amyloid-β may make this region particularly vulnerable to tau pathology. academic.oup.com/brain/articl...
Sharing this screen grab from a friend at NIH (with permission). This is a checklist program officers have to complete before a grant can be awarded. The first question: "Is this grant All Clean/Clear in the NIH Text analysis Tool?" 🧵1/3
Biomedical researchers breathed a collective sigh of relief after the White House loosened the purse strings that had hindered the U.S. National Institutes of Health from spending its 2026 budget on research grants. https://scim.ag/4uTZpCT
White House lifts hold on NIH research spending
Director Jay Bhattacharya tells House lawmakers that grantmaking, hiring are on track
scim.ag
🚨 NEW study out in Alzheimer's & Dementia from our very own @meredithbraskie.bsky.social & Amaryllis Tsiknia 🧠 Learn how subtle changes in how blood flows through the brain and how brain tissue uses oxygen may be closely linked to Alzheimer’s disease risk Press release: bit.ly/46UqkUu
UCL London seeks a Research Assistant to support data driven modelling of neurodegenerative disease within the POND group, working with clinical cohorts. www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/job/research...
Research Assistant: Early Detection of Neurodegenerative Diseases
UCL London seeks a Research Assistant to support data driven modelling of neurodegenerative disease within the POND group, working with clinical cohorts.
dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk
For this who are unaware, the reason NIH now posts these data habitually on the data book site is… Jeremy Berg. He pioneered this openness as NIGMS Director.
Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · 11mo agoSince there is some discussion that NIH institutes should not simply use paylines to determine which grants to fund, I thought I would share some old data. These are plots of funding probability fas a function of percentile score for 9 institutes. 1/7
🧠New paper alert! We define PI-2620 tau PET cutpoints in a diverse cohort — summary of 🗝️ findings below ⬇️ 675 adults: • AB+ cognitively impaired (CI) • AB– cognitively unimpaired (CU) • 28% Hispanic, 31% NH Black, 41% NH White 🔗 Read it here: (bit.ly/44RLVwe) @victoriatennant.bsky.social
🎉Congrats to PhD student, Amaryllis Tsiknia, who led our new paper bit.ly/3ZndVVh studying how diabetes relates to cortical thickness in Hispanic & non-Hispanic Black & White older adults! Read more here: bit.ly/3GS0Ddj More on our findings soon...
USC INI@uscini.bsky.social · last yr.🧠 Our new study finds a strong link between type 2 diabetes and brain atrophy in older adults—especially in memory-related regions. Managing blood sugar could be key to protecting brain health as we age. Learn more 👉 bit.ly/3GS0Ddj
Blood-based biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease and incident dementia in the community Increased p-tau181, p-tau217, NfL, and GFAP demonstrated strong predictive performance (area under the curve ranging from 70.9% to 82.6%) for 10-year all-cause and AD dementia www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Blood-based biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease and incident dementia in the community - Nature Medicine
In a community-based cohort of more than 2,000 older adults from Sweden, blood biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease were able to predict dementia up to 16 years before disease onset.
nature.com
The crush of new grant cancellations hasn't let up. If your grant was terminated (or your app was pulled) please use this Google Form👇 to submit details for tracking purposes. Multiple advocacy efforts are moving forward, but we must must must know more about what grants were cancelled and why.
Cancelled NIH grant information submission form
Please use this form to submit information identifying specific NIH grants that have been cancelled for any reason after January 20, 2025. Data from this form will be used to update the Rescinded NIH...
forms.gle
Some good-ish news from NIH “Federal Register notices for study sections run by CSR (but not those by ICs) will start being permitted again” As far as I know, the timing for this is not clear, but I will be checking the Federal Register.
a man in a red suit and tie is holding a piece of paper that says breaking news on it
ALT: a man in a red suit and tie is holding a piece of paper that says breaking news on it
media.tenor.com
41/47 (87%) of NIH study sections are cancelled this week Frustrating to see all this good research stalled (& not funded) You can search for study sections that ‘did not meet as scheduled’ here with ones with * ⤵️ www.csr.nih.gov/RevPanelsAnd...
Review Dates
csr.nih.gov
What can we do to get Science Magazine to drop their paywall for a while, while all this critically important news is being reported on? The public needs to know. Great journalists are covering these stories. where will they and the magazine be without the scientists and the research?
I just wanted to share that I received the NoA for the second year of my R21 today. I know people are feeling anxious and I just hope some good news from the NIH can help. Hang in there - we'll get through this! ❤️
“The impact of the collective executive orders and directives appears devastating.” scim.ag/40ureTO
Trump hits NIH with ‘devastating’ freezes on meetings, travel, communications, and hiring
Researchers facing
scim.ag
I got a lot of insights into how AI might work in scientific research from this convo: www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/arc...
The Scientist vs. the Machine
What happened when AI took over these researchers’ jobs?
theatlantic.com
The importance of sleep microarchitecture- in addition to total sleep time - for cognition academic.oup.com/sleep/articl...
Obstructive sleep apnea, cognitive impairment, and dementia: is sleep microstructure an important feature?
Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and dementia are both prevalent conditions in the aging population [1, 2]. Scientific evidence indicates that OSA is associat
academic.oup.com
A Nature Aging paper identifies 13 proteins linked to brain aging. Changes in the concentrations of these blood proteins may peak at 57, 70, and 78 years old, and suggest that these ages may be important for potential interventions in the brain aging process. https://go.nature.com/3ZvGLSy 🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Tau filaments are tethered within brain extracellular vesicles in Alzheimer’s disease - Nature Neuroscience
Using cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) and proteomics, this study identifies the tethering of pathological tau filaments within defined brain extracellular vesicles in Alzheimer’s disease, shining l...
nature.com
