The Neuroscience Department at UC Berkeley is hiring an Asst Professor in Computational Neuro. All areas of computational/theoretical neuro are welcome. Deadline Oct 30. Join our neuroscience community! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05446 #AcademicJobs #Neuroscience #NeuroJobs

Assistant Professor - Computational Neuroscience - Department of Neuroscience

University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

aprecruit.berkeley.edu

Spring 2026 PhD grads: miller.berkeley.edu postdoc fellowship at UC Berkeley is calling. If you want the freedom to pursue your most ambitious ideas, this is for you. And if you are interested in development, neural circuits, or anything retina, I'm happy to sponsor your nomination. Email me!

Very happy to share our new review on visual computation in the cephalopod brain, with @vangeliqueallen.bsky.social, out now! We discuss exciting recent advances in understanding how the radically different brain of cephalopods processes the visual scene. 🐙🔬👀 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The final version of our amygdala dopamine paper is out! BLA dopamine dynamically tracks emotional salience and not value or reward prediction error. Congrats to Dr. Megan Brickner!! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Basolateral amygdala dopamine transmits emotional salience - Nature Communications

The basolateral amygdala dopamine system has received little attention. Here, authors show that BLA dopamine plays a unique role in learning, by encoding the emotional salience of sensory cues to supp...

nature.com

message to some people: please, stop using chatgpt to email. it is very obvious, and it is embarassing for you.

I am deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Susumu Tonegawa. He was the founding director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and a remarkable scientific force. I am personally grateful for all that he has done for me. @picowerinstitute.bsky.social

Long-term editing of brain circuits with engineered electrical synapses! I still remember years ago when Kafui Dzirasa from @dukeuni.bsky.social @hhmi-science.bsky.social called me beaming with excitement about this new technology. Here it is today in Nature. www.nature.com/articles/s41... .

Long-term editing of brain circuits using an engineered electrical synapse - Nature

Connexin proteins found in white perch fish were used to engineer synthetic electrical synapses, enabling precision circuit editing in mammals.

nature.com

What has changed in mama bear brain (well, actually mice) to make her risk her life to attack a potential threat and protect her young? Oxytocin is the key! Happy to share our new study led by two awesome postdocs: Takashi Yamaguchi and Rongzhen Yan. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The neural mechanisms supporting the rise and fall of maternal aggression - Nature

In mice, female aggression is governed by an amygdala–to–medial hypothalamus circuit that is strengthened during pregnancy and is dynamically amplified by oxytocin during lactation.

nature.com

Sharif University in Tehran was just bombed Founded in 1965, it is one the most elite science and engineering institutions in the world. Alumni include the mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, first woman to win the Fields Medal Here is the list of other alumni en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

Excited to share my postdoc work is out in @natneuro.nature.com today! We examined how the brain enables social groups to collectively coordinate their behavior in the face of environmental challenge ❄️🐭🐭🐭🐭❄️ : www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Cortical regulation of collective social dynamics during environmental challenge - Nature Neuroscience

Raam, Li, Gu and colleagues identify neural mechanisms underlying group huddling in mice during cold exposure. They find that the prefrontal cortex encodes decisions to huddle and that silencing neura...

nature.com

We often think of survival as an individual act. But when facing hardship together, social groups may function more like a unified system than a collection of separate individuals. We are excited to share our latest work @natneuro.nature.com studying collective social dynamics. See: rdcu.be/e8LrV

Iran’s people were facing a horrible shortage of water before the war began. If we are destroying desalination plants and setting fire to Teheran we are committing unfathomable crimes.

Thrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #blueprint 1/7

Estrogen modulates reward prediction errors and reinforcement learning - Nature Neuroscience

Dopamine encoding of reward prediction errors naturally fluctuates over females’ reproductive cycles with estrogenic signaling due to reduced expression of dopamine reuptake proteins.

nature.com

missing out on all the SfN fun this year, but for the very best reason 🥰🫶🏼

I am excited to share my PhD work on head-direction cells recorded in the wild, now published in @science.org, where we recorded neurons in bats flying outdoors on an island. doi.org/10.1126/sci... With @ray-neuro.bsky.social, Shir Maimon, Liora Las, Nachum Ulanovsky and many others

During these uncertain times, I’m very happy to see that my institution, @scripps.edu has an open tenure-track Assistant Professor position. Any field in Chemistry or Biology is welcome. I’d especially love to see fellow neuroscientists apply. Please repost! apply.interfolio.com/174756

Finally out: our recent work with Nick Betley is a view into how the brain reshapes its behavior in the face of competing survival needs- and also a potential angle on treatment targets for enduring pain. A brief rundown... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A parabrachial hub for need-state control of enduring pain - Nature

Activity in a set of parabranchial neurons in the mouse brain is increased during chronic pain, predicts coping behaviour, and can be modulated by circuits activated by survival threats.

nature.com

And we are live! Excited to announce the 2025 Multi-Agent Behavior Challenge on cross-lab supervised action recognition in mice 🐁🐀🖱️ Running on Kaggle until December 15th, with a $50,000 prize pool going to the top five submissions! www.kaggle.com/competitions...

✨ The Art of Open Science ✨ This beautiful crossstitch was created by Leah Blankenship, an undergraduate student at the @uoregon.bsky.social! This meticulously embroidered art uses data from our Allen Brain Reference Atlases. #OpenScienceWeek

Can't wait to read this preprint from Misha Ahrens and team. Calcium imaging in larval zebrafish, in every cell in the body! Amazing. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Important initiative 👇

1. The philosophy of science sometimes gets an unearned reputation as a purely academic exercise that offers little by way of concrete tools for advancing research. This is wrong. And today, as we grapple with how AI is changing the nature of scientific activity, it's desperately wrong.

1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said." It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy. I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.

RFK Jr. in interview with Scripps News: ‘Trusting the experts is not science’

HHS Secretary RFK Jr. sat down with Scripps News for a wide-ranging interview, discussing mRNA vaccine funding policy changes and a recent shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

scrippsnews.com

Aidan Bedford "Interspecies interaction between humpback whale and bottlenose dolphins."

It's officially published!! In my main postdoc work with @markplitt.bsky.social and @lgiocomo.bsky.social, we found that the hippocampus simultaneously encodes an animal's spatial position and its experience relative to reward in parallel population codes. 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A flexible hippocampal population code for experience relative to reward - Nature Neuroscience

Sosa et al. find that hippocampal neural activity in mice encodes both environmental location and experience relative to rewards, spanning distances far from reward, through parallel and flexible popu...

nature.com

What they aren’t showing on Fox News

Fascinating new paper shows that when researchers “pivot” to new areas of work the outcome is less impactful. #ScienceOfScience www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The pivot penalty in research - Nature

An analysis of millions of scientific papers and patents reveals a ‘pivot penalty’ when researchers shift direction, with the impact of studies decreasing rapidly the further they move from their prev...

nature.com

With mRNA and CRISPR this country could be entering a scientific heyday and instead we’re torching the institutions that make it all possible.

Baby Is Healed With World’s First Personalized Gene-Editing Treatment

nytimes.com

I’m excited to share a new paper from the lab. The study led by Xiaowei Gu reveals how the mPFC encodes complex emotional memories, using an internal model to infer emotional associations and memories via projections to the amygdala. a🧵(1/8) rdcu.be/el19t

Prefrontal encoding of an internal model for emotional inference

Nature - Neurons in the rodent dorsomedial prefrontal cortex encode a flexible internal model of emotion by linking directly experienced and inferred associations with aversive experiences.

rdcu.be

Another scoop from Jeff Mervis (@policyhound.bsky.social): NSF's ~1400 grant terminations have disproportionately affected PIs from groups underrepresented in science: women, racial & ethnic minorities, & those with disabilities. 1/3 www.science.org/content/arti...

Trump officials take steps toward a radically different NSF

Efforts to shrink staff, budget, and focus have alarmed members of Congress

science.org