Ann Kennedy
@antihebbiann.bsky.social
Theoretical neuroscientist interested in brain-body interactions and evolution of adaptive behavior. Associate Professor at Scripps Research Institute in San Diego.
Join me on Zoom tomorrow at 10am PST for a high-level talk on our hypothalamus work, plus a fun preview of our mouse behavior forecasting project. Talk title shamelessly stolen from the most badass Larry Swanson paper pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16254987/ luma.com/pfj56a5v
Ann Kennedy | The anatomy of the soul: neural circuits for flexible and adaptive survival behaviors · Zoom · Luma
Foresight Institute’s Neurotech Group The anatomy of the soul: neural circuits for flexible and adaptive survival behaviors Abstract: The struggle for survival…
luma.com
Come be my colleague!! 🎉 We’re hiring an Assistant Professor in Developmental Biology at UCSD! If you’re doing exciting work in development or regeneration, come join us!! Please spread the word and apply! apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04591
Assistant Professor of Developmental Biology
University of California, San Diego is hiring. Apply now!
apol-recruit.ucsd.edu
💡 Learn to design behavioral workflows, apply ML approaches to behavioral modeling, and connect behavior to neural and experimental manipulations. Register: www.jax.org/education-an... Organized by: @vivekdna.bsky.social @antihebbiann.bsky.social @gordonberman.bsky.social @goldenneuron.bsky.social
Experimentalists are the new model organism
Carl Zimmer@carlzimmer.com · last wk.The lab is a mysterious place--where some people have "magic hands," and some experiments just won't work. Here's my story about the unspoken knowledge of science, and the struggle to share it. Gift link: nyti.ms/3UccF7Z
Check out episode one, where @gauteeinevoll.bsky.social talks with Tatjana Tchumatchenko about her group's mathematical model for exploring how neurons can save energy by optimizing whether proteins are made locally or distally. #TheoreticalNeurosciencePodcast www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-...
How energy determines where proteins are produced in neurons
Tatjana Tchumatchenko explains how mathematical modeling elucidates whether ion-channel proteins are produced locally in the soma or in the dendrites.
thetransmitter.org
There's still time to apply for our Short Course on the Application of #MachineLearning for Automated Quantification of Behavior! Join us October 11 – 16 at #JAXBehavior for expert lectures, hands-on workshops, evening sessions & more: www.jax.org/education-an... #Neuroskyence
Short Course Machine Learning for Automated Quantification of Behavior
This course covers fundamentals of quantitative behavior analysis, machine learning, and data science for neuroscience, genetics, and biomedical researchers.
jax.org
This plan will make peer review less transparent and more confusing to applicants and program staff. Y'all killed it on the OMB proposal, you know what to do here. Comment deadline is October 13.
Jenna Norton@jenna-m-norton.bsky.social · 3w agoOf course this RFI drops late on Friday. NIH proposes to stop providing specific scores and instead bin grants into 3 broad categories: most competitive, competitive, not discussed. A score would be calculated but not provided to the PI (or PO). grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...
It's a wrap for this year’s Cajal Advanced Neuroscience Training Programme at @champalimaudf.bsky.social! 👥 We hosted the courses ‘Quantitative Approaches to Behavior and Virtual Reality’ and "The Brain Prize Course – Computational and Theoretical Neuroscience".
AgRP neurons are fascinating. They get called "hunger" neurons, but this and work like the Krashes lab's suggest their activity is more like "motivation to forage". Finding food suppresses them; finding food that's far away/scary to access reduces suppression. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Toggling between food-seeking and self-preservation behaviors via hypothalamic response networks
Motivated behaviors are often studied in isolation to assess labeled lines of neural connections underlying innate actions. However, in nature, multip…
sciencedirect.com
bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · last mo.Hunger neurons track available food locations during foraging and spatial memory recall https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.28.741066v1
Today is the day from “There Will Come Soft Rains” https://users.wpi.edu/~zrbutzke/Docs/BradburyStories(1).pdf
New preprint led by @rgast.bsky.social- part 1 of Richard's ongoing effort to make a better firing rate model: developing mean-field models that can be fit to biological data to capture both the dynamics of neural populations and the underlying physiological heterogeneity that sculpt those dynamics.
Richard Gast@rgast.bsky.social · last mo.The Ott-Antonsen ansatz revolutionized our understanding of coupled oscillator systems with heterogeneous oscillators. We developed a multi-ensemble method that increases the applicability of the OA ansatz to empirical data substantially arxiv.org/abs/2607.09516, as we demonstrate on neural data.
Happy Monday! Come learn how jellyfish swim. In a review led by fluid dynamics maestro Alex Hoover, we outline how neuromechanical modeling will help us understand how modulation of neural activity allows jellyfish to jet and pirouette through fluids www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Two tiny hydrozoan jellies talking to each other (Melicertum octocostatum, 5 mm). Kattegat, The North Sea.
Push it (get up on this 😤😤) #whitegrunt #gruntfight #pushit #mouthoff #coralcitycamera
Happy summer! Share my short review on Oxytocin in Social Conflict. Full text link below. urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...
Oxytocin in social conflict
Nature Reviews Endocrinology - Although oxytocin is widely known as the ‘love hormone’, it is also released during social conflict, promoting acute social defence and facilitating...
urldefense.com
Researchers turned a friendly mouse into a bully to study how the brain updates an animal’s emotions about a social interaction. #neuroskyence By @natmesanash.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/social-behav...
Friend to foe: How the brain updates feelings toward others
A specific pathway reassigns emotional valence to a known mouse, while the hippocampus’s own representation of that animal’s identity remains stable.
thetransmitter.org
We’re excited to welcome Joan Pulupa to Scripps Research as an assistant professor! Using smell-sensing neurons and advanced microscopy, including MINFLUX, Pulupa’s lab will explore how genome organization shapes brain cells and what it may reveal about neurodegenerative conditions.
Joan Pulupa joins Scripps Research faculty to study the organization of DNA in brain cells and its links to neurodegeneration
Using smell-sensing neurons and advanced microscopy, Pulupa’s lab will explore how genome organization affects brain cells, and what it may reveal about neurodegenerative conditions.
ow.ly
Freeman Dyson writes about having Hans Bethe as a thesis advisor. Uncovering the nature of the universe is impressive and all, but being the platonic ideal of a mentor on top of that? Good lord
This is an extremely cool finding by our neighbors in the Ye lab: learning reduces the glucose consumption of neurons, even without changes in firing rates. Really want to try to model this!
Ye Lab@liye-tsri.bsky.social · 2mo agoOur new preprint is out!! The human brain runs on ~20 watts. Computers and modern AI systems require vastly higher energy. This gap raises a fundamental question: how does the brain compute so efficiently? In our new study, we take a critical step toward measuring and understanding this directly 1/3
a figure comparing the scale of two videos in our Kaggle dataset
Using in vivo glucose sensors in behaving mice, we asked: what is the neuronal fuel cost of performing a learned task? Key finding: After learning, the same task required less fuel, suggesting learning may not only improve performance—it may lower the energy cost of computation. 2/3
Our new preprint is out!! The human brain runs on ~20 watts. Computers and modern AI systems require vastly higher energy. This gap raises a fundamental question: how does the brain compute so efficiently? In our new study, we take a critical step toward measuring and understanding this directly 1/3
bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 2mo agoLearning Shapes the Energy Cost of Neural Tasks https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.01.735889v1
Going to be in Nova Scotia for #CNS2026? Make sure you swing by the workshop I've organized with @rgast.bsky.social entitled "Neuronal heterogeneity's role in network dynamics and computation." The preliminary schedule and talk abstracts are now available! richlab.pnb.uconn.edu/cns2026/
And 11 months after getting our scores, an NOA has arrived!!!
Ann Kennedy@antihebbiann.bsky.social · 5mo ago9 months later, we are at the top of the to-fund pile but still no NOA and we're told NICHD has not awarded a single new R01. Sure would like to work on this project!
Cajal Behavior summer course presentation day! After 5 days of hard work, we'll see data from student-designed projects on grooming and freezing flies, RL-learning and foraging robots, human VR exploration, and closed-loop loom escape in fish. An amazing group :)
We regret that our event on Extreme Heat: Improving governance and strengthening action around the world has been cancelled due to the red extreme heat warning issued by the UK Met Office. Our apologies to everyone who was planning to attend the event.
