Katie Insel

@katieinsel.bsky.social

Assistant Professor @ Northwestern Director of CATS Lab (nucatslab.com)

I'm starting a lab at the University of Notre Dame! 🎉🍀🧠 Doors open Jan 2027. I'm most excited to meet my future students (recruiting psych grad students for 2027!), help grow a budding neuroscience area, and head home to the midwest after many years away. Please reach out! @notredame.bsky.social

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🚨🚨 Job Alert! 🚨🚨 We are seeking a full-time Study Coordinator for a NIMH-funded project that aims to uncover cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying maladaptive food-choice behavior in anorexia nervosa using behavior, eye tracking, fMRI, and computational models. Pls spread the word!

Study Coordinator

Department SSD Institute for Mind and Biology: Staff and Temporary Employees About the Department The Eating Disorders Program in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the Univer...

uchicago.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com

New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.

Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is

The neuroscience of planning has long been analogized to search algorithms in artificial intelligence (AI), which simulate future actions to guide immediate choices. We argue that advances in both neu...

annualreviews.org

As we read this about the Roberts Court let’s remember the shadow docket grievously harmed American scientific research, cancer cures, and public health over the past year. For ex, KBJ’s “Calvinball” quote was in an NIH case. More, short 🧵 1/

Sean Casten@seancasten.bsky.social · 4mo ago

If you are as infuriated as you read this as I am, know that Congress not only has the power to fix the abuse of the Shadow Docket but also that the legislation is already drafted. We just need to get it to the floor. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...

New preprint from my lab! We study how reinforcement learning & selective attention interact. To do so, we built a set of models describing different ways that value & reward prediction error can modulate top-down attention. We compare model outcomes to monkey data from a color value learning task

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Modulation of feature attention by reward prediction error explains value learning behavior https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.10.717847v1

How can researchers better champion evidence-based policy? Join us on Monday in Guild Lounge for a conversation with Dean Karlan, @katieinsel.bsky.social, and @statstipton.bsky.social on engaging policymakers and advocating for research-informed policy. Register ➡️ spr.ly/63321B6xywD

Research in Action: Lessons from Policy Advocacy

How can researchers better champion their work and make the case for evidence-based policy?

spr.ly

Check out this @nature.com paper on how the brain’s functional hierarchy evolves from birth to 100. Infants' gradient architecture is anchored by sensory systems, differentiates along association and control axes during childhood/adolescence & dedifferentiates in aging www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Functional hierarchy of the human neocortex across the lifespan - Nature

fMRI data from individuals of a wide range of ages (from a few days to 100 years old) are used to map the key organizational axes of functional connectivity in the human cortex throughout the lifespan...

nature.com

When I retired only around 25% of Full Professors in STEM were women. I was proud be one of them, and to support the success of fellow women in STEM through mentoring. This was not an organic process. It took hard work and persistence. And now The Regime is setting us back decades.

NIH grant terminations affected women scientists more than men, study finds

A new paper shows that women, particularly those early in their careers, have been disproportionately affected by NIH grant terminations.

statnews.com

NIH is requesting comments on a new draft policy that may require human brain imaging data (and other data) from nih-funded research to only be shared via controlled access, & only with certain countries. I suggest neuroimagers read closely & submit comments by 3/18. osp.od.nih.gov/comment-form...

Comment Form: Draft NIH Controlled-Access Data Policy and Proposed Revisions to NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Science Policy (OSP): Request for Information on Draft NIH Controlled-Access Data Policy and Proposed Revisions to NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy

osp.od.nih.gov