Tim Vogels

@tpvogels.bsky.social

Boutique Neurotheory & Snazz Compneuro at IST Austria

Gentle reminder to my biosci tweeps that there are graduate students and postdocs in non-STEM disciplines at your University. Their compensation may differ somewhat from what is most familiar to you.

Heya @cimoore444.bsky.social, tell us the story around that paper again? I remember you told me not having heard of Carl vanVreeswijk's work; thinking everyone knew E and I were tightly locked; not worth a bigger fuss? Then, five years on, it was big news, albeit published by elseone? Story time!

Tim Vogels@tpvogels.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Thursday PSA: What's the first experimental observation of excitation inhibition balance? Probably (very likely) the (somewhat understated) (& undercited) Moore 1998 JNeurophys paper, Figure 7/ 8, in wich they casually observe E/I interactions, no drama. journals.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

With just four molecules, you get a grid cell attractor with functional 2D path integration. With N molecules, you get exponentially many Hebbian assemblies with discrete attractor dynamics. With smart biases between the molecules, you can get any dynamical system. Sequences, motor programs, …

*** New paper from the lab in Nature Comms !! *** “Noradrenaline causes a spread of association in the hippocampal cognitive map” by the amazing @reneecabbage.bsky.social in collab. w labs of Jill O’Reilly, Will Clarke, and modeling from Prakriti Parthasarathy and @tpvogels.bsky.social, see below!

Renée Koolschijn@reneecabbage.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Very pleased to share that our study “Noradrenaline causes a spread of association in the hippocampal cognitive map” is out in @natcomms.nature.com (my final PhD paper, only 3.5 years post PhD! 🙃) Find the paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is such a cool idea! Not long term "networks" of young profs that create and cement in in-groups and out-groups, but summer schools, tailored to the acute needs of the young PI. Transient, but tailored, tidal and totally timeous, too. Terrific. Try today!

The Viking (Gunnar Blohm)@gunnarblohm.bsky.social · 7mo ago

@kordinglab.bsky.social and I ran a summer school last year to help young profs (<5 yrs) in systems/comp neuro thrive. compneurosci.com/Neuro4Pros/i... It was great! Now we want to know if you'd be interested in participating if we did this again this year? Let us know!

Excited to see the paper fully published. It's an important milestone for training SNNs with exact gradients, replacing our earlier tricks of a "delay line augmentation" to capture temporal relationships. Delays can now be learnt alongside weights naturally. Amazing work @mbalazs98.bsky.social !

Balázs@mbalazs98.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Our paper on event-based delay learning is now published! @neworderofjamie.bsky.social @drtnowotny.bsky.social TL;DR: It’s now possible to train synaptic delays in large-scale spiking neural networks with high temporal precision—even in recurrent connections. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

13 yrs ago some crusty prof asked me if I were "able to teach quantum chromo dynamics" during a faculty interview, as a means to disqualify me (his preferred candidate got the job, surprise!). These days, I am subjugated vicariously, when my postdocs experience the same BS. WTAF. So infuriating.

Last of my fave books back on a shelf, after 5 years in a box. I wouldn’t have thought it takes a full grant cycle to move but here we are. And there’s still more boxes. Of garbage. Mostly. But could not be happier to have the books back

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"Spiking Networks Hate It! Find Out the One Plasticity Trick They Don’t Want You to Know! Never stabilise models by hand again." - I woke up thinking we missed an opportunity with the title of this one. :/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Also: It snowed in Vienna, 10cm white fluffies! Happy Sunday!

Inhibitory Plasticity Balances Excitation and Inhibition in Sensory Pathways and Memory Networks

Plasticity at inhibitory synapses maintains balanced excitatory and inhibitory synaptic inputs at cortical neurons.

science.org

...and when I say @worldwideneuro.bsky.social, I really mean @bozelosp.bsky.social, obvs. Also, ...there is an all new front end for worldwideneuro coming soon. Stay tuned!

Tim Vogels@tpvogels.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Here is the product of a collab between @thetransmitter.bsky.social, @worldwideneuro.bsky.social & @moritzstefaner.bsky.social A portrait of the #StateofNeuro 2025: Text mining of (publicly available) neuro resources: Easy in concept, tricky in realisation, made possible by @simonsfoundation.org 🙏

I just found this stub in a jacket that I guess I have not worn in twenty three years? 12 bucks for Lali Puna, sweat and spit and all, at the (tiny) Middle East downstairs on Mass Ave. Those were the days. So so good.

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Maybe check out the associated website. icg-explorer.org. I know I know, it's not fully integrated with ICG1, but these things are difficult.

Ion Channel Genealogy Visualizer

Interactive visualization and analysis of ion channel models from ModelDB and ICG databases

icg-explorer.org

Tim Vogels@tpvogels.bsky.social · 10mo ago

“Mapping ion channel function” doi.org/10.7554/eLif... isn’t exactly a citation slayer, but it’s still one of my favourites (& my first independent project). Today we push pt 2, where we trace code origin & unite almost all channel models in a common expression. Boom! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Some addendum here. The '17 elife paper only has 43 citations in 8 years :( but the associated ionchannelmodels.org had 900+ unique visitors in 2024. Some 180 of them used the "compare ion channel models" function, pretty deep into the page. Every two days someone used a service we didn't advertise!

ICGenealogy - the ion channel model database

A comprehensive and interactive ion channel model database for computational neuroscientists.

ionchannelmodels.org

Tim Vogels@tpvogels.bsky.social · 10mo ago

“Mapping ion channel function” doi.org/10.7554/eLif... isn’t exactly a citation slayer, but it’s still one of my favourites (& my first independent project). Today we push pt 2, where we trace code origin & unite almost all channel models in a common expression. Boom! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The working title of this project was “super models”, but we chickened out in carrying that terminology through. We were worried anyone was gonna think we were making fun of human supermodels, or worse, ion channels!! And we weren’t sure blue steel was the right association for a CA++ channel…

a man wearing a pajama shirt with penguins on it is looking at the camera .

ALT: a man wearing a pajama shirt with penguins on it is looking at the camera .

media.tenor.com

Tim Vogels@tpvogels.bsky.social · 10mo ago

“Mapping ion channel function” doi.org/10.7554/eLif... isn’t exactly a citation slayer, but it’s still one of my favourites (& my first independent project). Today we push pt 2, where we trace code origin & unite almost all channel models in a common expression. Boom! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

“Mapping ion channel function” doi.org/10.7554/eLif... isn’t exactly a citation slayer, but it’s still one of my favourites (& my first independent project). Today we push pt 2, where we trace code origin & unite almost all channel models in a common expression. Boom! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

An ion channel omnimodel for standardized biophysical neuron modelling

Biophysical neuron modeling is an indispensable tool in neuroscience research, with the combination of diverse ion channel kinetics and morphologies being used to explain various single-neuron propert...

biorxiv.org