🧬🔬 Who are we? At UCL's Department of Cell & Developmental Biology, we're passionate about answering some of biology's biggest questions. 🌱🧠🧫 Find out more here: www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science...
Caswell Barry
@caswell.bsky.social
Neuroscientist interested in representations of space & memory. Using tools from experimental & theoretical neuroscience as well as machine learning. @UCL https://barry-lab.com
Great to see SWC's Professor Tiago Branco in The Scientist! In the feature, he reflects on how his research has expanded from studying single neurons to mapping the brain circuits that drive escape and survival. Read the article: www.the-scientist.com/then-and-now...
Tiago Branco Unveils How the Brain Computes Behavior | The Scientist
Neuroscientist Tiago Branco reflects on how his research expanded from studying single neurons to exploring how brain circuits dictate survival behaviors.
the-scientist.com
Very excited to see this out — real teamwork, led by @laurenb29.bsky.social & Will de Cothi with @lgiocomo.bsky.social, @colinlever.bsky.social, Laurenz Muessig, Fábio Rodrigues, Francesca Cacucci, Tom Wills, Yanjun Sun & Steven Poulter. In Nature Comms: www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-76686-y
Our online seminar series is back for the new academic year! Excited to welcome Dr. Ji-An Li from NYU, who’ll be talking about: "Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks" 🧠🤖 🗓️Wed 16 September 2026 ⏰4-5pm BST via zoom Register here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ucl-neuroa...
UCL NeuroAI Talk Series
A series of NeuroAI themed talks organised by the UCL NeuroAI community. Talks will continue on a monthly basis.
eventbrite.co.uk
A gastropod veliger (about 2 mm in extended state) from the Red Sea. These planktonic larvae travel really far with the help of powerful currents - and help the slow snails to conquer the vastness of the ocean.
Lovely result from the Stephenson-Jones lab at SWC: during sleep, mice replay newly-learned motor skills in the striatum — and it continues even after the hippocampus is fully removed. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02362-5
Some housekeeping: data from Shipley et al. (@shipleysj.bsky.social; Curr Biol, 2026) is now on the barry-lab site. In an Alzheimer’s model, hippocampal replay during rest is disrupted — not the rate, but the quality — predicting failure to stabilise spatial memory. barry-lab.com/public-datasets/
🧠 New publication: Rethinking acetylcholine's role in how we learn and remember 🔗 Read more: www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science... #Hippocampus #Acetylcholine #UCL #CellAndDevelopmentalBiology #BarryLab
Brain chemical acetylcholine may help us update our understanding of the world
A Nature Reviews Neuroscience perspective suggests hippocampal acetylcholine serves as a learning signal, tracking prediction errors to update brain models during memory and learning.
ucl.ac.uk
MIT Professor Susumu Tonegawa, renowned molecular biologist and Nobel laureate, dies at 86 news.mit.edu/2026/mit-pro... #neuroscience
MIT Professor Susumu Tonegawa, renowned molecular biologist and Nobel laureate, dies at 86
Susumu Tonegawa, a renowned MIT professor of biology and neuroscience and a Nobel laureate, has died at the age of 86. His discovery of how the immune system generates many different antibodies earned...
news.mit.edu
A bit of housekeeping: I've tidied up the public-data page on the Barry Lab website. The raw datasets behind most of our main experimental papers — grid rescaling (Barry 2007), coordinated replay (Ólafsdóttir 2016), place-cell stability (Tanni 2022) — are now downloadable. barry-lab.com/github
We are recruiting! We are seeking a Research Technical Specialist in Mass Spectrometry. The main purpose of this position is to provide general and specialist research support including leading on method development in relation to Mass Spectrometry.
UCL – University College London
UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).
ucl.ac.uk
I mean ... grid cells ... they're not exactly the fraught or dangerous subject
Caswell Barry@caswell.bsky.social · 2mo agoHmmm so I see Fable is back. Though of the first five things I tried (Alzheimer's research related, grid cells, fine tuning the local LLM setup on my Mac, better gridness measures etc) all switched back to Opus because of 'safeguards'... that's a bit rubbish.
Hmmm so I see Fable is back. Though of the first five things I tried (Alzheimer's research related, grid cells, fine tuning the local LLM setup on my Mac, better gridness measures etc) all switched back to Opus because of 'safeguards'... that's a bit rubbish.
(1/2) Hiring! 🦠🧠 Postdoc position in my group @univie.ac.at on microbiome-brain interactions as part of the ERC-funded project “MemoryLane: Neural plasticity through the lens of gut-brain interactions”. 📍 Vienna, Austria 📅 Application deadline: 2 Aug 2026 ℹ️ shorturl.at/2E4sf
Well well well this is incredibly cool and important
Neil Burgess@neilburgess10.bsky.social · 2mo agoEver wondered how the hippocampal cognitive map is read-out? @changmin-yu.bsky.social @zilong-ji.bsky.social with Jake & John, show that, during navigation, theta sweeps indicate remembered goal-directions (cf. current/next movements or perceptual targets) 1/2 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Ever wondered how the hippocampal cognitive map is read-out? @changmin-yu.bsky.social @zilong-ji.bsky.social with Jake & John, show that, during navigation, theta sweeps indicate remembered goal-directions (cf. current/next movements or perceptual targets) 1/2 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
This looks interesting: in familiar environments all active CA1 pyramidal cells are place cells — the "non-place" ones just have unstable fields. Broadly fits my experience; a shift from earlier work holding that many weren’t place cells. https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(25)00750-3
Really excited to see this out from the lab & CDB colleagues 🧠✨ A new perspective in Nature Reviews Neuroscience brings together an elegant idea: acetylcholine may help the hippocampus learn by prediction, not just store memories. Worth a read 👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Acetylcholine: a candidate substrate for hippocampal predictive learning? - Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Predictive models have emerged as a normative lens for understanding neural function. In this Perspective, de Cothi, Shipley and Barry plausibly unify the diverse roles of hippocampal acetylcholine in...
nature.com
Caswell Barry@caswell.bsky.social · 3mo agoReally excited about this work with the awesome Will de Cothi & @shipleysj.bsky.social, out in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. We propose acetylcholine is an analogue of dopamine — tracking not reward prediction errors but state-transition prediction errors. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-026-01058-w
Acetylcholine: a candidate substrate for hippocampal predictive learning? A Perspective by William de Cothi, Sarah Shipley & Caswell Barry @shipleysj.bsky.social @caswell.bsky.social #neuroscience #neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Acetylcholine: a candidate substrate for hippocampal predictive learning? - Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Predictive models have emerged as a normative lens for understanding neural function. In this Perspective, de Cothi, Shipley and Barry plausibly unify the diverse roles of hippocampal acetylcholine in...
nature.com
Really excited about this work with the awesome Will de Cothi & @shipleysj.bsky.social, out in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. We propose acetylcholine is an analogue of dopamine — tracking not reward prediction errors but state-transition prediction errors. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-026-01058-w
Really excited about this work with the awesome Will de Cothi & Sarah Shipley, just out in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. We propose acetylcholine is an analogue of dopamine — tracking not reward prediction errors but state-transition prediction errors. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-026-01058-w
Cracking lab walk in the sunshine today. Whole team out together — exactly what summer's for. 🌞
The QS rankings are a crude, reductive instrument that flattens the rich complexity of a university into a single number. But @ucl.ac.uk is at number 8 this year, and I think that's pretty awesome. It's a brilliant place to work, and the science coming out of here right now is genuinely exciting.
People 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...
Cleve Moler, Who Unlocked the Power of Computing for Millions, Dies at 86
nytimes.com
Nice theory paper: prospective coding and path integration emerging as equilibrium solutions of self-organising networks, no pre-wired attractor required. The forward-shifted activity bump lines up with anticipatory firing in superficial entorhinal cortex. arxiv.org/abs/2606.14649
Interesting Transmitter article by Brian DePasquale on what will be the effect of the increasingly widespread use of LLMs to code up research ideas in neuroscience. Includes a somewhat sceptical commentary from me. 😉
The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 3mo agoAgentic coding makes it possible to specify a neuroscience model in hours instead of months, writes @briandepasquale.bsky.social. The field risks becoming prolific but shallow—generating models faster than we can generate insights. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...
Job klaxon 📣 UCL is hiring two NeuroAI / computational neuroscience specialists (Lecturer or Associate Prof) — a big part of the new NeuroAI centre we're growing in Biosciences. Do consider applying if it's relevant to you. JD & details: https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRX021 Happy to take questions.
We're excited to announce that we're recruiting for new academic posts in #AI for #Biodiversity Science, Future #Food Systems & #Health, #NeuroAI, Computational #Neuroscience, and #Cardiovascular/Metabolic Neuroscience. 📅 Apply by 10 July 2026. www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science...
