@mfranch.bsky.social
Postdoc in the Hayden lab at Baylor College of Medicine studying neural computations of natural language & communication in humans. Sister to someone with autism. F32 NIDCD Fellow | Autism Research Institute funded | she/her. melissafranch.com
The complex and emerging landscape of autism - Nature Mental Health - Editorial - 2026 www.nature.com/articles/s44...
If you work at the intersection of computational neuroscience and machine learning, consider applying for this postdoc position (January 2027 start date):
academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15868
An opportunity to work with a great group of people across Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley.
OK If we are moving to Bluesky I am rescuing my favourite ever twitter thread (Jan 2019).
The renamed:
Bluesky-sized history of neuroscience (biased by my interests)
Are you allowed another tweeprint for a revised preprint? Anyways, it's been a year since we first put out PhysMAP (I also do [many] monkey experiments!) and thanks to some excellent reviews + additional co-authors, we're really excited about where we've landed! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Could not agree more with the need for comparative cross species differences to serve as “informative constraints”…
“With enough evidence, researchers tend to accept cross-species differences, but they rarely use these differences to refine or revise theory”
Those of us who were totally confused by the new NIH biosketch requirements--turns out we were all probably doing it wrong?? (or at least I was). Our admin asked the ScienCV folks and made it into the FAQs.
This still has got to win a prize for most confusing and arbitrary instructions, ever.
Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks.
@zuckermanbrain.bsky.social
@flatironinstitute.org
@kempnerinstitute.bsky.social
1/14
Oscillatory traveling waves during visual entrainment in autistic and neurotypical adults https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.29.702587v1
Theta-gamma phase amplitude coupling serves as a marker of social cognition and visual working memory deficits in individuals with elevated autistic traits
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
#neuroscience
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)
A standard response to people who say “everything is everywhere” is that we just haven’t found the right question yet. Our response is, we should care about explaining function, not finding areas, and if the functions we are interested in aren't arealized, that’s important to know.
New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵
rdcu.be/eVZ1A
I’m thrilled to share the preprint with @sangkjyuson.bksy.social. It’s a fun example of applying dynamical systems approaches to social behavior, and the first two-author manuscript from Y-Lab.
Sangkyu has put together a well-written thread to walk you through the ideas (see below ⬇️)
Excited to announce a new book telling the story of mathematical approaches to studying the mind, from the origins of cognitive science to modern AI! The Laws of Thought will be published in February and is available for pre-order now.
Bichan Wu (@bichanw.bsky.social) & I wrote a tutorial paper on Reduced Rank Regression (RRR) — the statistical method underlying "communication subspaces" from Semedo et al 2019 — aimed at neuroscientists.
arxiv.org/abs/2512.12467
Our preprint is out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Peter Skovorodnikov and I are excited to present FERAL: a new video-understanding toolkit that maps raw video directly to behavior, no pose estimation required.
It works across species, from lab to field, and even in collective systems. (🧵1/n)
🎉 Our paper has been selected for a Neurips Spotlight:
“Scaling and Context Steer LLMs along the Same Computational Path as the Human Brain”
👥led by J Raugel, w/ S. Ascoli, Rapin & @valentinwyart.bsky.social
📄https://openreview.net/pdf?id=4YKlo58RcQ
📍 Hall C-E Poster #2006
🧵thread 👇
New preprint!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
As you are silently reading this, you may experience a little voice in your head. How is it represented in the brain, and what purpose does it serve? Our new study answers the questions.
Together with @adriendoerig.bsky.social and Radek Cichy.(1/8)
Automatic binding of basic sensory features requires consciousness https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.10.693567v1
From this preprint
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
In many brain areas, neuronal tuning is heterogeneous. But how does this diversity help behavior? We show how tuning diversity shapes representational geometry and boosts coding efficiency for perception in our new preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
(w/ @sueyeonchung.bsky.social&Tony Movshon)
“The only reason I don’t have this funding is because my last name is Rodriguez.”
MOSAIC checked many of the boxes of the administration — but that didn't matter. It was terminated, and left grantees scrambling
Next installment of American Science, Shattered:
www.statnews.com/2025/12/08/t...
When people, on occasion, DO careful lesions that spare white matter then tend to get VERY different results than classic lesion studies, for example, Broca's Area lesions sparing language, or this:
www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
Lesions needs to be revisited because almost all lesions intrude on adjacent white matter. Lesions disrupt complex circuits, not areas. This problem was ignored until recently because it was believed, incorrectly, that white matter was largely composed of connections to adjacent gray matter.
Thoughtful review with some good recent historical perspective on the ongoing paradigm shift that is radically changing the way we think about what brain areas do.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀?
Do they even exist...?
Join @lucinauddin.bsky.social who will present, followed by discussion in the Neuroscience & Philosophy Salon.
Open to all.
Date: Dec 9, 12pm EST-US
Register: umd.zoom.us/meeting/regi... (you need a zoom account which is free)
#neuroskyence
This is a really nice neural model for the Minimalist Program's central claim that the core language system (compositional syntax-semantics) provides instructions to distinct cognitive systems, and that these systems have their own unique 'interface conditions' for readouts.
Y’all are reading this paper in the wrong way.
We love to trash dominant hypothesis, but we need to look for evidence against the manifold hypothesis elsewhere:
This elegant work doesn't show neural dynamics are high D, nor that we should stop using PCA
It’s quite the opposite!
(thread)
Research statement for postdoc positions.
Any good resources on this? Samples people would be willing to share?
@neural-reckoning.org @kordinglab.bsky.social @gunnarblohm.bsky.social