Ilana Witten

@ilanawitten.bsky.social

Congratulations to Rebekah Rashford and team, it’s finally out! We tagged early life stress-activated neurons in VTA and found that chromatin those cells was much more open, even into adulthood, and that open CREs predicted greater gene expression in response to stress later in life rdcu.be/eLa9z

Persistent open chromatin state in early-life stress-activated cells of the VTA

Scientific Reports - Persistent open chromatin state in early-life stress-activated cells of the VTA

rdcu.be

I'm incredibly honored to receive the Janett Rosenberg Trubatch Career Development Award from @sfn.org SFN was the first research conference I ever attended and presented at. I feel truly humbled! Thanks to my fab research team who make me look good!

Society for Neuroscience@sfn.org · 9mo ago

Congratulations to the 2025 SfN award & prize recipients! Their dedication to advancing the understanding of the brain paves the way for future discoveries. SfN looks forward to celebrating their achievements at #SfN25. Learn about the recipients. 🔗 vist.ly/4cni8 #neurosky

🚨Pre-print alert🚨 We stimulated serotonin with optogenetics while doing large-scale Neuropixel recordings across the mouse brain. We found strong widespread modulation of neural activity, but no effect on the choices of the mouse 🐭 How is this possible? Strap in! (1/9) 👇🧵 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Serotonin drives choice-independent reconfiguration of distributed neural activity

Serotonin (5-HT) is a central neuromodulator which is implicated in, amongst other functions, cognitive flexibility. 5-HT is released from the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) throughout nearly the entire f...

doi.org

I’m very excited to share that I will join the University of Utah Department of Neurobiology as an Assistant Professor in Jan 2026!! 🎉🏔️🏜️ My lab will focus on body–brain interactions in learning & memory — how do signals from our internal organs remodel the brain & behavior?

University of Utah Health Campus in winter. Image courtesy of the University of Utah.

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Searchable database of tangible benefits that federally-funded research gave us.

A crowd-sourced site. Health and Well-being. National Security. Prosperity.

publicusaresearchbenefits.com

America cannot long remain free, nor first among nations, if it becomes the kind of place where universities are dismantled because they don't align politically with the current head of the government.

Now there's a memorable stat! "Colleges and universities are among America’s most competitive international exporters. In dollar terms, last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined." wapo.st/3EvzMCI

Opinion | Trump is killing one of our strongest exports

The president wants to balance U.S. trade deficits? He can’t do it without this industry he hates.

wapo.st

How do we associate the flavors we experience during a meal 🍽️😋 with postingestive effects like food poisoning 🤢🤮 that arise much later? Our answer in @nature.com this week: Illness signals from the gut reactivate and strengthen flavor representations in the amygdala. 📄: nature.com/articles/s41...

A neural mechanism for learning from delayed postingestive feedback - Nature

Illness signals from the gut reactivate and strengthen flavour representations in the amygdala to support learning from delayed postingestive feedback.

nature.com