Selmaan Chettih
@selmaan.bsky.social
here for the brains | https://selmaan.github.io
The real American 🇺🇸 “brain drain” isn’t that a few established scholars might get new jobs outside the US, it’s the enormous number of grad students - particularly international grad students - who can’t or won’t study in the US now or in years to come. That’s the body blow.
Check these three faculty searches at Yale and join me in New Haven! 1. Experimental neuroscience apply.interfolio.com/190736 2. Computational/Theoretical neuroscience apply.interfolio.com/190740 3. The (new!) Center for Neuroethology and Physiological Plasticity apply.interfolio.com/191722
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Today I received a note from a grad student who lives in Tehran. Her note gives you firsthand experience of what it’s like to live in a city that is being bombed, and what it’s like to be young and feel despair about your future. rezashadmehr.blogspot.com/2026/03/hope...
Hopeless in Tehran
Essays on neuroscience
rezashadmehr.blogspot.com
Many neuroscientists suspect brain mechanisms for natural behaviors are ‘specialized’, whereas mechanisms for trained behaviors are ‘general’. Where does this belief come from? Do biologists believe it? Seems like a conflation of ‘natural’ with pseudoscientific notions of ‘innate/hardwired’
If neuroscience is serious about building general principles of brain function, cross-species dialogue must become a core organizing principle rather than an afterthought, writes @suthanalab.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/animal-model...
Neuroscience has a species problem
If neuroscience is serious about building general principles of brain function, cross-species dialogue must become a core organizing principle.
thetransmitter.org
By the way, if you’re interested in working together on problems like this, I’m starting my lab at UCSF this summer. Get in touch if you’re interested in doing a postdoc! More info here: wj2.github.io/postdoc_ad (7/7)
W. Jeffrey Johnston - Postdoctoral position ad
wj2.github.io
Grateful to @pewtrusts.org for funding our snow fly work, in collaboration with Sebastian Brauchi at Universidad Austral de Chile. We are now looking for post-docs to work on the biophysical mechanisms that allow snow fly neurons and muscles to function below zero. newsroom.uw.edu/news-release...
Most insects slow down in bitter cold. Not snow flies. - UW Medicine | Newsroom
newsroom.uw.edu
A reminder to anyone interested in #brains #birds or behaviour, our new book is available for FREE as an ebook in addition to print copies. #neuroethology #neuroskyence #ornithology 🧪🧠🪶 direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...
Bird Brains and Behavior: A Synthesis
From two avian neurobiologists, a captivating deep dive into the mechanisms that control avian behavior.The last few decades have produced extensive resear
direct.mit.edu
I’m so excited to be a part of this! Looking forward to interesting dialogues btw researchers already working at a massive scale and those trying to grow out ‘bespoke’ systems (like myself w/ chickadee neuroscience)
allen institute@alleninstitute.org · 11mo agoMeet our 2025 cohort of Next Generation Leaders! For the next 3 years, they will network with other rising stars, participate in professional development, and share their ideas for future research directions.
🚨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
Come visit Calcutta in the last week of August and see some amazing neuroscientists talk about the neural basis of behaviour at @behaviour2025.bsky.social With @neuroetho.bsky.social @danielavallentin.bsky.social @selmaan.bsky.social @arkarupbanerjee.bsky.social and Michael Brecht!
My latest Aronov lab paper is now published @Nature! When a chickadee looks at a distant location, the same place cells activate as if it were actually there 👁️ The hippocampus encodes where the bird is looking, AND what it expects to see next -- enabling spatial reasoning from afar bit.ly/3HvWSum
So excited to see @hannahpayne.bsky.social‘s paper out today: rdcu.be/eqAd4 It’s a beautiful result, and using a great model species for this question makes it powerfully clear and simple. Scaling up tools in a single model system won’t get you there on its own!
Remote activation of place codes by gaze in a highly visual animal
Nature - Place cells in the chickadee hippocampus coherently represent locations in space, whether physically visited or viewed, enabling spatial reasoning at a distance through a unified process...
rdcu.be
"We will never use this agency to censor scientists who disagree. If scientists are censored, we can't have excellent science." -NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya. 9 days ago on Fox and Friends.
Exclusive: US NIH scientists barred from attending conferences on their own time and dime
Researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health have been told they cannot attend scientific conferences and meetings without official permission, even if they pay their own way and go during time off, three current and former NIH scientists told Reuters.
reuters.com
My first paper as a senior/corresponding author, had a fantastic experience with the eLife model! Revised manuscript coming soon
Ching Fang@chingfang.bsky.social · last yr.How does barcode activity in the hippocampus enable precise and flexible memory? How does this relate to key-value memory systems? Our work (w/ Jack Lindsey, Larry Abbott, Dmitriy Aronov, @selmaan.bsky.social ) is now in eLife as a reviewed preprint: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
Hi friends, If you haven't seen it already, I was part of a mess this week — about science in the United States, and about NIH research aimed at understanding things like Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, autism, and depression. 🧪 Thread with some details. 🧠📈 🧠🤖 1/10
Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · 2y agoCompelling pushback from @jmgrohneuro.bsky.social and the Board of Scientific Counselors at the National Institute on Mental Health (NIMH) regarding termination of tenure-track investigators driven by DOGE. 1/2
How does the brain work in natural scenarios, in multi-animal societies of wild animals? 🧠 🧪 🦇 doi.org/10.1126/scie... (1/n)
Congrats to @maxkozlov.bsky.social and @avaskham.bsky.social for having this story first, and glad the NYT picked it up from them and is sending it out to a broader audience.
Carl Zimmer@carlzimmer.com · 2y agoTrump Administration Stalls Scientific Research Despite Court Ruling. Story by Ben Mueller. Gift link: nyti.ms/435szDm
Further musings about how food-hoarding titmice and chickadees remember the locations of their caches.... link.springer.com/10.1007/s100...
What is the nature of cache memory in Parids? A comment on Chettih et al. 2024 - Animal Cognition
Recent findings by Chettih et al. (Cell 187: 1922–1935, 2024) from electrophysiological recordings in the hippocampus of black-capped chickadees shed light on the debate about how food-hoarding Parids...
link.springer.com
🔥 take on 🧪 industry silence to NIH changes: '“three levels of corruption” ... Biopharma CEOs: what will protect you then? Speak up, speak up now. Because as it stands, you're forming up on the wrong side of a very important line. Time will not be kind.' www.science.org/content/blog...
Stand Up And Be Counted
science.org
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!
Who’s calling who funky 😡
The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 2y agoMeet 10 neuroscientists bringing model diversity back with the funky animals they study. By @callimcflurry.bsky.social, @avaskham.bsky.social, @claudia-lopez.bsky.social, @shaena.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/animal-model...
my lab (www.tuthill.casa) at UW is hiring a research assistant/tech. basic scope is to apply machine learning/computer vision tools to measure and model 3D animal behavior and mechanics. we are a diverse, collaborative, curiosity-driven group. Apply: uwhires.admin.washington.edu/ENG/Candidat...
in time for the holidays - whether you’re looking for a gift for some else or you are looking to stock up for your own winter break - here are some terrific leads on science authors of all sorts! Recommended browse through & follow. go.bsky.app/2LmKSDN
