Big congrats to @cambria-jensen.bsky.social on being awarded an NIH F31 fellowship today! Her project brings together training in MTL circuits in our lab with expertise in sensory circuits from the Wachowiak lab. This award reflects her talent, hard work, and perseverance. Way to go, Cambria!!

Excited to join this community and very grateful for the support!

Klingenstein Philanthropies@klingensteinorg.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Congratulations to Christopher Zimmerman, Ph.D., recipient of a 2026 Klingenstein Fellowship Award in Neuroscience for the project, "Neural Algorithms for Learning Across Long Delays." @czimmerman.bsky.social zimmerman-lab.org

New preprint from the lab. @markgergues.bsky.social and crew show that the PVT gates ventral hippocampal salience coding, shifting output between threat- and reward-weighted representations during associative learning and anxiety-related behavior. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Proposed structures/ mechanisms for magnetic sensing in bird (so far): 1) In the beak/ trigeminal Nerve (biogenic magnetite) 2) radical pair-Cryptochrome mediated reaction in the retina 3) The lagena 4) Vestibular canals (electromagnetic induction) 5) Supermagnetic macrophages in the liver.

Science Magazine@science.org · 3mo ago

Researchers have identified superparamagnetic macrophages in the livers of rock pigeons to be crucial for magnetic sensing. The finding uncovers an unexpected role for immune cells in sensory perception and may fundamentally change our understanding of animal navigation. https://scim.ag/4nTQ3nq

Feeling energized after hearing this year’s Rising Stars in Neuroscience speak about their science. It has been a real pleasure getting to know this talented group over the last three days.

Excited to share the upcoming 6th Annual Rising Stars in Neuroscience Symposium @utah.edu! great lineup of graduate students presenting exciting neuroscience research. Looking forward to a fun couple days of science and discussion with a fantastic group of early career scientists.

I am so proud to share @gritz122.bsky.social my first PhD student's first preprint! This #compneurosky #neuroscience study tackles a controversial question in hippocampal place cell research – do place fields require spatially tuned synaptic inhibition? (1/5) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

To accompany my textbook (Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience) and the class I taught this semester, I'm open-sourcing my lectures slides: gershmanlab.com/lectures.html I'll continue to update these as I improve them.

My main postdoc work is now published: www.nature.com/articles/s41...! We (myself, Isabel Low, Frances Cho, and @lgiocomo.bsky.social) discovered task-relevant remote representations in entorhinal cortex independent of CA1. #paperthread below! 1/13

My mom represents many people who haven’t typically been as politically active but recognize that this is such a critical moment for everyone to speak up. Go mom! #NoKings

Thrilled to share our new paper, which shows that the relative timing of cholinergic and dopamine release dynamically gates whether dopamine acts as an RPE for in vivo plasticity and reinforcement learning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Acetylcholine demixes heterogeneous dopamine signals for learning and moving

Nature Neuroscience - Jang et al. measured dopamine and acetylcholine release in the striatum of rats performing a decision-making task and found that the relative timing of cholinergic and...

nature.com

I had the wonderful opportunity to be part of Rising Stars Symposium this year and it was amazing! Great science, great people and a great place!! It was one of my highlights of this year! If you are a neuro grad student, I highly encourage you to apply! ✨

Jim Heys@jim-heys.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Neuro grad students! Applications for the 6th annual - Rising Stars in Neuroscience - due Jan 9! Don’t miss this chance to present research, sharpen science communication skills and connect with peers & faculty. Plus you’ll get to experience stunning Utah! medicine.utah.edu/neurobiology...

New preprint from the lab! A frontal motor circuit for economic decisions and actions: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We use a novel task in mice, cortex-wide imaging and optogenetics, NPX recording and modelling to reveal a circuit mechanism that transforms abstract decisions to spatial actions.

A frontal motor circuit for economic decisions and actions

Flexible behaviour requires transforming abstract cognitive representations, such as value preferences, into concrete motor actions. During economic decision-making, individuals evaluate options to gu...

biorxiv.org

Neuro grad students! Applications for the 6th annual - Rising Stars in Neuroscience - due Jan 9! Don’t miss this chance to present research, sharpen science communication skills and connect with peers & faculty. Plus you’ll get to experience stunning Utah! medicine.utah.edu/neurobiology...

“Our findings challenge the conventional focus on low-dimensional coding subspaces as a sufficient framework for understanding neural computations, demonstrating that dimensions previously considered task-irrelevant and accounting for little variance can have a critical role in driving behavior.”

Neural dynamics outside task-coding dimensions drive decision trajectories through transient amplification

Most behaviors involve neural dynamics in high-dimensional activity spaces. A common approach is to extract dimensions that capture task-related variability, such as those separating stimuli or choice...

biorxiv.org

Highly recommend checking out Thomas’ lab! Perfect for students and postdocs looking for rigorous training and a chance to help shape the next wave of the field.

That’s a wrap on #SfN2025 for our lab. Feeling grateful to do neuroscience with such an outstanding group — and to catch up with friends and colleagues across the community. SfN always reminds me how lucky we are to be part of this field.

Today’s the day—our lab presents this afternoon at #SfN2025! Stop by and check out the new work.

Jim Heys@jim-heys.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Excited to share new work from our lab at #SfN2025! @sfn.org Posters on how the brain learns about time and space—from foraging and MEC dynamics, to RNN + hippocampus in curriculum learning, to MTL vs striatal activity across learning, and cognitive aging in social isolation stress. Check them out!

Excited to share new work from our lab at #SfN2025! @sfn.org Posters on how the brain learns about time and space—from foraging and MEC dynamics, to RNN + hippocampus in curriculum learning, to MTL vs striatal activity across learning, and cognitive aging in social isolation stress. Check them out!

thanks for speaking out @markhisted.org

Science and Freedom Alliance - SAFA@safa-science.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Federal workers are speaking out on how the Trump regime is harming Americans: "We stand here today at a moment of the greatest assault of our lifetimes on our freedoms. The US Constitution is being shredded... We are here to call on Congress to stand up and stop it." youtu.be/uw1KwIBgrCw?...

How does the brain decide? 🧠 Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc. After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up. rdcu.be/eGUrv

Transitions in dynamical regime and neural mode during perceptual decisions - Nature

Simultaneous recordings were made of hundreds of neurons in the rat frontal cortex and striatum, showing that decision commitment involves a rapid, coordinated transition in dynamical regime and neura...

nature.com

Congratulations to the Rising Stars in Neuroscience – Class of 2025! This is one of my favorite events each year, and this year was no exception. Keep an eye on this incredible group of scientists—they’re doing amazing things!

Heading to #COSYNE2025? Don't miss our latest work, led by Jack Bowler, on curriculum learning! We've uncovered how recurrent networks in the entorhinal cortex and RNNs develop specific dynamical mechanisms for abstract learning, depending on how they are trained. Poster #1-058| Thursday Eve

Perfect day on the mountain with my little shredder! ❄️⛷️ Fresh snow, big smiles, and a well-earned après—hot chocolate for him, a beer for me. #DadLife #ApresSki

Just spent 30 hours reviewing for an NIH study section set for Thursday—now postponed indefinitely. 20 other scientists did the same. This is happening across multiple sections. A huge waste of time, resources, and funding, with real costs for science and economy. Trump admin is bad for everyone.

Being a scientist in the U.S. feels especially stressful right now. Here’s a bit of early morning backcountry ski zen to share with you.

BREAKING: Federal judge extends the restraining order on NIH capping indirect costs to 15% www.statnews.com/2025/02/21/t...

Federal judge extends restraining order on Trump administration's cap on NIH indirect costs

Judge Angel Kelley kept in place an order blocking the Trump administration from implementing a 15% cap on NIH indirect cost payments

statnews.com

NIH indirects case update: Hearing ongoing now, and I'll try to live tweet some notable exchanges. Prior to more detailed arguments, Judge Kelley starts off with a few point questions to both sides: (I'm paraphrasing here)