Katie Tschida

Imagine, if you will, that NASA updated its website to suggest gravity might not exist, prompting CalTech and CERN to release statements saying, "With great sadness, we can no longer recommend listening to NASA."

This is what's happening in epidemiology.

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick.

Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

My former postdoc @xinzhao322.bsky.social is recruiting a PhD student. Xin is a great scientist and mentor, can't say enough good things about him and his work! Please pass on to your undergrads and please RT!

The published version of our study on the early-life transition from isolation USVs to adult-like USVs in juvenile mice is out in Animal Behaviour!

authors.elsevier.com/a/1m1YDmjMA4GP

bsky.app/profile/kati...

The Tschida Lab is recruiting a new PhD student this cycle! We have ongoing projects related to (1) neural circuits that regulate vocal communication across behavioral contexts and/or development and (2) motor control of different vocalization types. Please RT! Strong neuro background a plus.

Looking forward to applying to the Harvard Trade school for kids who can't AI good.

Emory University Biology Department tenure-track assistant professor position in neuroscience - Atlanta, Georgia job with malia.escobar@emory.edu | 675335 Candidate uses experimental approaches to examine any aspect of neural function, including molecular, cellular, systems, or developmental neuroscience

Come be my colleague! Lots of exciting science, fantastic students and supportive colleagues. Emory University Biology Department tenure-track assistant professor position in neuroscience. share.google/945Jko4W1MTA.... Please feel free to retweet and share widely.

We hope these findings are useful to those studying mouse social behavior! Congrats to former undergrad Stephen Batter, whose honors project kicked off this study. Thanks also to co-first authors Patryk Ziobro and Cass Malone, and to our current undergrads who helped bring this to the finish line!

Interestingly, there is past work showing that mice will forgo reinforcers (even cocaine and amphetamine) to gain access to a running wheel. So one possibilty is that running wheels are like crack for mice and decrease their sensitivity to other rewards, perhaps even social rewards.

These effects on social behavior are somewhat long-lasting, as they're not reversed by a 2-week period with running wheels removed and replaced with a standard paper hut.

Unexpectedly, we found that free access to running wheels in the home cage, either for 5-weeks over adolescence (weaning till adulthood) or even for a 2-week period in adulthood, inhibits social motivation in group-housed female mice when they are given the chance to interact with a novel female.

a hamster is sitting in a hamster wheel in a cage ALT: a hamster is sitting in a hamster wheel in a cage

New story to share! We routinely put running wheels in our mouse cages. The mice love them, and there's lots of evidence that exercise is great for health. Given our focus on social behaviors, though, we wondered whether running wheels change mouse social behavior.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Image of a checklist, which included “control the media”

Controlling the media is one of the items on the authoritarian checklist; this includes not just hard news, and increasingly social media, but also threatening satirists who mock the regime.
The FCC is pushing this control, but corporations do not have to fold. open.substack.com/pub/donmoyni...

Report: You To Be Fired For Reading This Headline About Charlie Kirk NEW YORK—Insisting your fate was sealed the moment you clicked the link, a report released Tuesday found that you will be fired for reading this headline about Charlie Kirk. “Shortly after you navigat...

Report: You To Be Fired For Reading This Headline About Charlie Kirk

Dear Dr. Bhattacharya: I have listened to your performance on the “War Room” podcast with Steve Bannon. The segment begins with a discussion of Secretary Kennedy’s recent cancellation of $500M worth of contracts related to mRNA vaccines. You say “You can’t have a platform where such a large percentage of the population distrusts the platform as we use it for vaccines and expect it to work.” Later, you make comments that might explain why a large segment of the percentage distrusts this platform. For example, you say that the vaccine was not protective against contracting COVID and cite your own case on COVID after being vaccinated. However, you fail to cite the evidence for the clinical trials that led to the Emergency Use Authorization.

I listened to Bhattacharya on Steve Bannon's "War Room" podcast.

If you want to know how it went, see the following email that I just sent.

1/13

Agreed!!

New study from the lab! A follow-up to our finding that short-term social isolation promotes same-sex mounting in female mice. Led by grad student Cassidy Malone and post-doc @xinzhao322.bsky.social, with help from undergrad Selina Xu!

PhDone! Congrats to my student Nicole Pranic for successfully defending this week! We were too busy celebrating to take a picture, lol.

Pope Leo XIV: ‘There Couldn’t Be A Better Time To Get The Fuck Out Of America Forever’

Pope Leo XIV: ‘There Couldn’t Be A Better Time To Get The Fuck Out Of America Forever’

Rapid Response Bridge Funding Program In the face of recent abrupt shifts in federal funding for education research, including large-scale terminations of National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant awards, we have developed a rap...

The Spencer Foundation is offering rapid response bridge funding for those who lost NSF research grants.

www.spencer.org/grant_types/...

Harvard University Harvard University is devoted to excellence in teaching, learning, and research, and to developing leaders who make a difference globally.

Harvard redid its whole homepage to push back against the administration’s demands. I mean, this is just a website but I think it’s kind of a great PR move: www.harvard.edu

Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger | CNN Dr. Ardem Patapoutian says he watches “with deep sadness as the United States’ remarkable scientific enterprise, which took generations of hard work and national investment to build, faces a concerted...

Published an op-ed for @cnn.com: “Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger.”
A personal reflection on what’s at stake as science funding gets slashed. I’d be grateful if you could amplify both in and beyond the science world.
www.cnn.com/2025/04/09/h...

NIH freezes all research grants to Columbia University Amid negotiations with Trump, the university could risk losing nearly $700 million

See, if you just cooperate with the administration and comply, it all turns out OK...

www.science.org/content/arti...

chef’s kiss

Trump Says He Won’t Rule Out Third Reich

Trump Says He Won’t Rule Out Third Reich

These results set the stage for future work to investigate how changes in brain circuits important for vocalization enable the context-dependent regulation of vocal communication over development. Stay tuned!

In this study, we present evidence that mice begin producing social USVs earlier than thought, between postnatal days 20-24. Even though these early social USVs are produced at low rates, they're pretty well coordinated with non-vocal social behaviors (sniffing/following), as in older mice.

Baby mice produce "isolation" ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) when separated from the nest, and adolescent and adult mice produce "social" USVs during interactions with social partners. But the timing of this transition in vocal communication is not well characterized.

Vocal communication changes over development! Infants of many species produce distress calls when in need of parental care. As juveniles mature, they begin producing "adult-like" vocalizations in a variety of species-typical contexts, including during interactions with conspecifics.