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2 weeks ago | 
thetransmitter.org | Avram J. Holmes |Andrew Jahn |Emily Finn |Austin Coley
Human thought and behavior emerge through complex and reciprocal interactions that link microscale molecular and cellular processes with macroscale functional patterns. Functional MRI (fMRI), one of the most common methods for studying the human brain, detects these latter patterns through the “blood oxygen level dependent,” or BOLD, signal, a composite measure of both neural and vascular signals that reflects an indirect measure of brain activity.
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1 month ago | 
thetransmitter.org | Rebecca M. Shansky |Rachel Buckley |Angie Voyles Askham |Austin Coley
“Becca! Becca! I have something to tell you!”During a conference coffee break in 2019, I looked up to see a long-time colleague approaching me with what appeared to be great urgency. What could his exciting news be? I wondered. He looked at me and beamed. “I studied a female!”On the surface, you might not think that the simple act of performing an experiment on a female mouse should be cause for such celebration.
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1 month ago | 
thetransmitter.org | Calli McMurray |Austin Coley |Angie Voyles Askham
It’s easy to do less-than-rigorous science without realizing it. Yet there isn’t a systematic way to learn good science practice, says Konrad Kording, professor of neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. As a student, “it felt like I was soaking all that up from my supervisor, and there was no training,” he says.
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1 month ago | 
thetransmitter.org | Andrew Jahn |Emily Finn |Evelyn MR Lake |Austin Coley
Neuroimaging research practices and methods evolve at remarkable speeds each year. These advances—which have been driven in large part by an influx of computer programmers and statisticians to the field over the past 15 years—push the boundaries of what we can learn about the human brain. But they also run the risk of leaving some people behind.
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1 month ago | 
thetransmitter.org | Lydia Denworth |Katie Moisse |Mark Humphries |Austin Coley
When Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung of Princeton University saw high-resolution 2D electron microscope images in a 2018 Cell paper, they decided to try to build a fruit fly connectome with that dataset. Funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative, Murthy and Seung used the electron microscopy data to launch the work that resulted in FlyWire, a nine-paper package published in Nature in October 2024. The work made international headlines for its novelty and ambition.
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2 months ago | 
thetransmitter.org | Ashley Juavinett |Angie Voyles Askham |Austin Coley |Olivia Gieger
It is widely accepted that decades of publicly funded scientific research have helped us develop novel vaccines, reduce deaths from cancer and extend our life expectancies. On the neuroscience front, we have translated brain activity into speech as well as movement, stimulated deep parts of the brain to alleviate symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and identified the genetic causes of some types of epilepsy—largely thanks to U.S. government funding.
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2 months ago | 
thetransmitter.org | Angie Voyles Askham |Claudia Lopez Lloreda |Calli McMurray |Austin Coley
D-SPAN Award recipient, postdoc-to-faculty diversity award applicant Last February, I applied to a diversity-focused postdoc-to-faculty transition award. It was reviewed a few months later, and I resubmitted in November. My study section was set to meet on 26 February. But for the past few weeks, programs exist, and then they don’t, and then they do again.
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2 months ago | 
thetransmitter.org | Angie Voyles Askham |Claudia Lopez Lloreda |Austin Coley
Senior reporterThe Transmitter Share this article: Tags: Funding, Policy, Science and society Neuroscientists who applied for grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) have faced weeks of confusion—and last week was no exception. On 4 February, several open grant opportunities aimed at boosting diversity appeared to close prematurely and without explanation, following President Donald Trump’s executive order that called for the termination of such programs.
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2 months ago | 
thetransmitter.org | Katie Moisse |Calli McMurray |Linda Nordling |Austin Coley
Contributing editorThe Transmitter Share this article: Tags: Academia, Computational neuroscience, Funding, Policy Gerry Rubin loved his time as a Stanford University postdoctoral researcher. The two years were intense, he admits—he worked up to 80 hours a week in the lab, for pay that ended up being less than minimum wage. But he was 24, staying out of debt and could afford a car and a one-bedroom apartment (with a pool) in Palo Alto, California.
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Jan 13, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | John C. Tuthill |Nicole Rust |Angie Voyles Askham |Austin Coley
Professor of neurobiology and biophysicsUniversity of Washington Share this article: Tags: Craft and careers, Animal models, Drosophila, early career researchers, Education, Teaching On a muggy July evening in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, as vacationers lounged on nearby beaches, a group of scientists clustered around a solitary fruit fly suspended in a virtual reality flight simulator. The scientists flicked a switch to bathe the tethered fly in spooky red light.
