Taufik A. Valiante

It was incredible to be part of #purpleday yesterday! 💜 Each year, this important day continues to grow bigger and stronger, bringing more awareness and support for the 1-in-100 people living with epilepsy.

@kbi-uhn.bsky.social @uhnresearch.bsky.social @tvaliante.bsky.social

Evolutionary convergence of sensory circuits in the pallium of amniotes The amniote pallium contains sensory circuits that are structurally and functionally equivalent, yet their evolutionary relationship remains unresolved. We used birthdating analysis, single-cell RNA a...

Happy to share this work putting forth the first #computational model of #developing #embrionic cortical circuits. Phenomenal team coordination by Fernando Garcia Moreno @achucarro.bsky.social. @kbi-uhn.bsky.social @kcnhub.bsky.social

A 210 gram bag of Hawkins Cheesies, made with real Canadian cheddar.

I’m not “abandoning my diet”; I’m “supporting my country.”

Save the date! Come learn about how we're using machine learning to reverse-engineer the human brain and build brain-machine interfaces kite-uhn.com/talk/rounds-...

@uoft.bsky.social @bme-uoft.bsky.social @uhnresearch.bsky.social @uhntoronto.bsky.social @kbi-uhn.bsky.social

New brain aging study is out today in Nature

The largest single-cell RNA seq dataset of mouse brain aging reveals incredible insights and could pave the way for future therapies to slow or manage the impacts of the aging process. 🧵 #studyBRAIN

Just bumping this up for those who may have missed earlier announcements-- we have a new PI position in the Neuroscience & Mental Health program here at SickKids. Neural and glial mechanisms in cognition.

We are proud to support this trial through our our extensive academic and clinical programs affiliated with @uoft.bsky.social @uhnresearch.bsky.social

bsky.app/profile/uhnt...

Canadian Ph.D. student, Sam Mestern, wins first MapMySpikes challenge The Allen Institute for Brain Science's MapMySpikes challenge aimed to address a key challenge in neuroscience by making connections between cells' electrical and molecular properties.

Congrats to Sam Mestern, Ph.D. student at @westernu.bsky.social, for winning the MapMySpikes challenge! His tool, PatchOTDA, excelled in mapping electrophysiological data to molecular properties. 🧠📈

More on his tool and the MapMySpikes challenge: alleninstitute.org/news/canadia...

🇨🇦 Woohoo great work Sam 🇨🇦

Collage of five smiling male researchers of diverse backgrounds with institutional logos at the bottom.

Three UHN research projects have received over $4M through the Ontario Research Fund, part of a $92M investment in Ontario research!

Learn how this funding advances:
▶️#MRI tech
▶️#AI for donor lungs
▶️Muscle & joint #health

Congrats to the awardees!
🔗 www.uhnresearch.ca/news/investi...

Hopfield and Hinton @nobelprize.bsky.social lecture today
John J. Hopfield: Physics is a point of view
Geoffrey Hinton: Boltzmann Machines
www.youtube.com/live/lPIVl5e...

Grateful for these two and that they find such joy in one another!! Photo cred @samravaliante.bsky.social

Holiday festivities have begun. Grateful for my amazing lab for making each year fun, and exciting!!

Reconfigure your work and mindset that brings a sense of meaning, find flow states, and reward yourself for your achievements - no matter how big or small.

When walking feel your feet, the wind, the sound of the trees, birds.

When you have your coffee taste it, not check your emails etc

I know this is going to be a bit cliche … focus on the moment, apply yourself to thing you can change, don’t ruminate on the past (regret = depression), or the future (uncertainty = anxiety)…pound away in the moment - make time for relationships, positive emotion (exercise, playing music etc)…

Beautiful work Scott!!

That would indeed be quite befitting 😀

Done Christmas Shopping? Or need inspiration what open MRI tools to get for your loved ones? After Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there is 🥁

#MRITogether Tuesday (and Wednesday-Thursday-Friday 😉). There is still time to register for our free online event mritogether.esmrmb.org/24m/registra...

Thank you to the global community for citing, sharing, and building on this work! 🙏
Read the paper here: nature.com/articles/s41...

Stay tuned for MedSAM2, set to be released next month, offering enhanced efficiency and accuracy for medical video and 3D image segmentation.

thanks @haoyin.bsky.social 🙏🙏

H- and m-channel overexpression promotes seizure-like events by impairing the ability of inhibitory neurons to process correlated inputs Channelopathies affecting h- and m-channels present a paradox in epilepsy research: while both over- and underexpression of these channels can be epileptogenic, channel overexpression does not appear ...

An early Thanksgiving gift to you all… a new preprint, representing the final piece of my postdoc work at @kbi-uhn.bsky.social @kcnhub.bsky.social @uhnresearch.bsky.social with @tvaliante.bsky.social.

Full description to come next week 😀

#neuroskyence #compneuro

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Oh I know this guy. I listen to him all the time. But more importantly, you should see what his colleagues have to say about
"To Keep or Not to Keep"

Also for those with broader brain health related interests where you get to play with these toys! If it sounds interesting, let’s chat at ACNP in Phoenix!

I am giving a 2-day #advanced #course on #astrocyte multiscale #models at the University of #Padua IT on April 10--11, 2025 #EMBO. An excellent opportunity to learn how to include #neuron-#glia #interactions in your models, from molecules to networks. Info & Registration: tinyurl.com/yx3m6acy

Same!! Best 5 years of my life… to be fully applied to a few key problems and to have the luxury of time. As a surgeon trying to balance clinical and research life, I pine for the halcyon days when life/time was a little lower dimensional 😀… yet always grateful for those 5 years of bliss.

The most fun paper I have ever written. Great theory, too. Read it if you want to understand the American Psyche.

Wow one of the best videos of basic hippocampal anatomy for the human brain.

Very helpful for those curious to see where memories for events and episodes are first stored in the brain:

When the conference doors close, these scientists rock out.

A "skinny-tie rock" show by the band Pavlov’s Dogz has become tradition at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting.
www.thetransmitter.org/community/wh...

Prefrontal transthalamic uncertainty processing drives flexible switching - Nature By examining neural responses from tree shrews performing hierarchical decision tasks with rule reversals, the authors identify a thalamocortical mechanism for regulating cognitive flexibility.

A potential role for the thalamus in demixing cortical signals while providing a low-dimensional pathway for cortico-cortical communication

New paper from Halassa lab in Nature

www.nature.com/articles/s41...