Neuroscience Graduate Vanessa Frelih Wins Glushko Prize for Research on Cognitive Flexibility and Aging #AcademicSky #higherEd www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social @rachellegaudet.bsky.social @harvard.edu @harvardbrainsci.bsky.social @franklandlab.bsky.social

Neuroscience Graduate Vanessa Frelih Wins Glushko Prize for Research on Cognitive Flexibility and Aging - Harvard University - Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology

Recent Harvard graduate Vanessa Frelih has been awarded the Robert J Glushko Thesis Prize which recognizes outstanding undergraduate thesis research in cognitive science.  A Neuroscience concentrator ...

mcb.harvard.edu

New paper in collaboration with @mhburrell.bsky.social @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social and @gershbrain.bsky.social ! "Phasic dopamine drives conditioned responding beyond its role in learning" 🧵 (1/8) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

@jhennig.bsky.social has shown that dopamine exerts a real-time effect on conditioned responding, beyond its role in learning: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Another indication that dopamine is more than a learning signal! A joint effort with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social and @mhburrell.bsky.social.

The deadline for applying to the Methods in Computational Neuroscience summer course at MBL in Woods Hole is approaching (March 16)! An exciting course with an amazing lineup of lecturers in a beautiful location www.mbl.edu/education/ad...

🚨🚨New Preprint Alert!🚨🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Animal learning is painfully slow (at least initially). Yet, well trained animals can learn very fast, sometimes displaying few-shot inference. How does this transition occur?

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning? Read on to find out more! 🧵

My first paper with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social is finally out in @natcomms.nature.com ! rdcu.be/eACGf TL;DR: asymmetric learning rates can be induced by shifts in tonic dopamine giving rise to pessimistic/optimistic biases in agents or animals undergoing reinforcement learning .

Tonic dopamine and biases in value learning linked through a biologically inspired reinforcement learning model

Nature Communications - Accurate future predictions are essential for guiding behavior, and disruptions in this process are associated with psychiatric disorders. Here the authors show that changes...

rdcu.be

Our paper on foraging is now published in Neuron! Read it here: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... This project was co-led by Michael Bukwich (not on Bluesky) and me, with major contributions from all co-authors. Huge thanks to the whole team!

Competitive integration of time and reward explains value-sensitive foraging decisions and frontal cortex ramping dynamics

Bukwich and Campbell et al. show that mice integrate elapsed time and reward intake, scaled by a latent patience variable, to decide when to leave virtual “patches.” Frontal cortex ramping activity ma...

cell.com

This year's Kyoto Prize in Adavanced Technology goes to Dr. Shun-ichi Amari! www.kyotoprize.org/en/laureates...

Shun-ichi Amari | Kyoto Prize

Shun-ichi Amari

kyotoprize.org

Our work with Pablo Tano, @hyunggoo-kim.bsky.social Athar Malik, Alexandre Pouget and @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social exploring how dopamine neurons could enable multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain is out in @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain - Nature

Individual dopaminergic neurons encode future rewards over distinct temporal horizons.

nature.com

we're crowd-sourcing a searchable repository of tangible benefits stemming from federally-funded research. Come enjoy the great stories; or send in an idea; or volunteer to join the team. publicusaresearchbenefits.com please share and re-share so we get more great stories in there!

New in the Deeper Learning blog: The Kempner’s Demba Ba explains his team’s recent Neuron paper on DUNL, a deep learning framework that tames the complexity of brain data. bit.ly/KempnerDUNL #AI #neuroscience #neuroskyence #ML

Mechanistic Interpretability: A Challenge Common to Both Artificial and Biological Intelligence - Kempner Institute

In neuroscience, the past decade has witnessed major advances in our ability to record activity from the brain at both larger and finer scales. And yet, a mechanistic theory linking […]

bit.ly

MCB’s Daniel Cardozo Pinto and Wendy Valencia Montoya Named 2025 Harvard Junior Fellows www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... @dcardozopinto.bsky.social @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social @rachellegaudet.bsky.social @dulaclab.bsky.social @harvardoeb.bsky.social

MCB’s Daniel Cardozo Pinto and Wendy Valencia Montoya Named 2025 Harvard Junior Fellows - Harvard University - Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology

Harvard has named Daniel Cardozo Pinto and Wendy Valencia Montoya as two of its newest Junior Fellows, joining the prestigious Society of Fellows this year. They will begin […]

mcb.harvard.edu

Our new paper. Prospective contingency explains behavior and dopamine signals during associative learning. Collaboration with @neurovenki.bsky.social , @gershbrain.bsky.social rdcu.be/ed1na

Mark Burrell@mhburrell.bsky.social · last yr.

I’m happy to share our latest work (co-lead by Selina Qian) has today been published in its final form in @:natureneuro.bsky.social: Read here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-01915-4 (1/12)

Decoding Learning: How Cues and Rewards Shape Behavior and Dopamine Signals 🧠 🧪🧫 🧬 #science #neuro www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... @saramatias.bsky.social @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social @neurovenki.bsky.social @harvardbrainsci.bsky.social @natureneuro.bsky.social @rachellegaudet.bsky.social

Decoding Learning: How Cues and Rewards Shape Behavior and Dopamine Signals - Harvard University - Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology

A new study from Naoshige Uchida’s MCB lab provides new insight into how the brain processes contingency during associative learning. Published in Nature Neuroscience (PDF), the study demonstrates […]

mcb.harvard.edu

How can we design human-interpretable AI models to explain why neurons behave as they do? Excited to share our work in collaboration with @saramatias.bsky.social, Hao Wu, Simona Temereanca, @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social, @neurovenki.bsky.social, @paulmasset.bsky.social, and Demba Ba @harvard.edu 1/21

Happy to be a part of it! Congratultations, Bahareh Tolooshams, Sara Matias, and the team! Thanks, Demba Ba and Paul Masset, for their leadership! "Interpretable deep learning for deconvolutional analysis of neural signals" authors.elsevier.com/c/1klDA3BtfH...

Harvard_MCB@harvardmcb.bsky.social · last yr.

New Deep Learning Framework Reveals Hidden Structure in Neural Activity 🧠 #neuro #science www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social @saramatias.bsky.social @neurovenki.bsky.social @btolooshams.bsky.social @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social @harvardbrainsci.bsky.social

New Deep Learning Framework Reveals Hidden Structure in Neural Activity 🧠 #neuro #science www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social @saramatias.bsky.social @neurovenki.bsky.social @btolooshams.bsky.social @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social @harvardbrainsci.bsky.social

New Deep Learning Framework Reveals Hidden Structure in Neural Activity - Harvard University - Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology

Understanding how neurons encode information is one of the most pressing challenges in neuroscience. A new study from a multidisciplinary team including MCB researchers and those from the […]

mcb.harvard.edu

Our new study: Dopamine in the tail of the striatum facilitates avoidance in threat–reward conflicts. Congrats Iku-Tsutsui Kimura, Melissa Tian and others! Led by Mitsuko Watabe-Uchida. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Dopamine in the tail of the striatum facilitates avoidance in threat–reward conflicts - Nature Neuroscience

During foraging with threat–reward conflicts in mice, dopamine modulates two competing neuron types in the striatum for flexible threat coping, from initial threat avoidance to eventual overcoming of ...

nature.com

Harvard_MCB@harvardmcb.bsky.social · last yr.

Avoid or ignore? How the Brain Copes with a Potential Threat www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... 🧠 🧪🧬 #science #neuro @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social @yulonglilab.bsky.social lilab.bsky.social @rachellegaudet.bsky.social @dulaclab.bsky.social @neurovenki.bsky.social @harvardbrainsci.bsky.social

Turing Award Goes to 2 Pioneers of Artificial Intelligence www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/t...

Turing Award Goes to A.I. Pioneers Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton

Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton developed reinforcement learning, a technique vital to chatbots like ChatGPT.

nytimes.com

In our new paper @dulaclab.bsky.social, we investigated a fundamental question in social neuroscience: the origin of "sociality" (the need of being together) at the levels of behavior, neuron type, neural circuit and sensory modulation. (Detailed digest below) (1/7) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our paper @dulaclab.bsky.social on social homeostasis is online today! We characterized “social rebound” behavior after social isolation in multiple mouse strains and revealed its neural basis. Intriguingly, soft touch plays a key role in satisfying social need! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Dulac Lab Identifies “Loneliness” Neurons in the Hypothalamus 🧠🧪🤖💡 #Science #Neuron www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... @dingliu.bsky.social @blogeman.bsky.social @dulaclab.bsky.social @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social @harvardbrainsci.bsky.social @neurovenki.bsky.social @rachellegaudet.bsky.social

Dulac Lab Identifies “Loneliness” Neurons in the Hypothalamus - Harvard University - Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology

Loneliness is encoded in the brain in a way that closely resembles the neural architectures governing drives like thirst and hunger, researchers from the Dulac Lab report. A […]

mcb.harvard.edu

Our latest findings on social behavior circuits is out: how does the brain responds to social isolation? Terrific work by @dingliu.bsky.social et al. uncovering a circuit with similar neural architecture as physiological needs (hunger, thirst, sleep..). Detailed thread soon. rdcu.be/ebo63

A hypothalamic circuit underlying the dynamic control of social homeostasis

Nature - New data on brain-wide circuits centred around two interconnected hypothalamic neuron populations provide significant mechanistic insights into the emergence of social need during social...

rdcu.be

Stand up for Science, on March 7th, in Boston. Please help spread this widely.

Boston, MA

Location: Massachusetts State House 24 Beacon St, Boston, MA, United States Address: 24 Beacon St., Boston, MA, 02133 Time: 12-4 PM Important information: Please do not fully block the sidewalk, st…

standupforscience2025.org

Here it is finally: Our mathematical methods book for life scientists! Aimed at advanced undergrads and beginning grad students, plus all those who want a deeper look at the math behind quantitative biology. @portugueslab.bsky.social. 1/3

MIT Press@mitpress.bsky.social · last yr.

"Mathematics in Biology" is a concise but rigorous textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students across the biological sciences that provides a foundation for understanding the methods used in quantitative biology: @mameister4.bsky.social

Our new paper on distributional reinforcement learning.

Jan Drugowitsch@jdrugowitsch.bsky.social · last yr.

Excited that Adam Lowet's PhD work has been just been published in @nature.com at doi.org/10.1038/s415.... He has already posted about it on Twitter/X (see twitter.com/Adam_Lowet/s...), but let me re-post his thread here. 1/9

Excited that Adam Lowet's PhD work has been just been published in @nature.com at doi.org/10.1038/s415.... He has already posted about it on Twitter/X (see twitter.com/Adam_Lowet/s...), but let me re-post his thread here. 1/9

Interested in understanding how things work? In particular the tools you use to study the brain? Join us at TENSS 2025 where we brainstorm ideas, build and debug microscopes, electrophysiology and behavior rigs amidst the picturesque Transylvanian hills! tenss.ro Apply by: February 16th!

Nice to see this paper out from Jack Lindsey and his collaborators: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... They diagnose a fundamental problem with existing models of striatal plasticity, show how to fix it, and then reanalyze data from recordings of striatal projection neurons to support the model.