Mostafa Safaie

Huntington's disease successfully treated for first time One of the most devastating diseases finally has a treatment that can slow its progression and transform lives, tearful doctors tell BBC.

www.bbc.com/news/article... science ftw! Amazing work described here.

Excited to be at the Congress of the Italian society for neuroscience #SINS2025 in this magnificent theatre!
Pisa, Teatro Verdi

🚨 I’m excited to say that my CIHR Project Grant was funded! My NHP lab is now full-speed-ahead, and I’m hiring experimentalists (postdoc, PhD student, and/or a tech/manager). We’ll do multi-region ephys during reaching/grasping in macaques, with behavioral and spinal perturbations.

Brightly labelled pyramidal cells in the mouse retrosplenial cortex. Blood vessels are visible of various thicknesses in darker colours.

#neuroskyence folks: as my postdoc grant is running out soon, I am looking for new opportunities in systems neuroscience!

Keywords: patch clamp ephys, opto, mouse behavior, (in vivo) voltage imaging. Would love to return to the Basal Ganglia.

Sharing appreciated, and happy #FluorescenceFriday !

Wow... I'd never seen an AI summary this bad

*time

Picture of spikes on a screen

This never gets old, exciting every old...

Having a hard time processing this. HHMI is pausing all competitions. Very demoralizing for early career scientists like me @hhmi.org

Ideally someone with with some experience working with rodents to perform behavioural / electrophysiological experiments, recording the activity of hundreds of neurons in behaving animals using Neuropixels and much more.

Please write to me if you are interested: m.safaie@imperial.ac.uk

This is a great opportunity to join Imperial College London, work on an exciting project with great mentors such as @clopathlab.bsky.social and @juangallego.bsky.social.

Job Alert (please repost)!

We are looking to hire a Research Assistant to join us in an exciting project looking into Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) and how brains learn to control them.

There have been people less than helpful in my journey here. I wanted to acknowledge those too, bc I know I am not unique in this experience. No thank you to the physics study assoc that made me sing songs about how women couldn't study physics without sleeping with the professor, the day I stepped into university life. No thank you to the 5th year physics student that decided to assign me a stripper name within the first minute of meeting me in the physics coffee corner in my first year. No thank you to the technician that was responsible for onboarding me on the use of the cluster in my third year who raised his eyebrows and asked me if that meant I was some sort of computer girl. No thank you to the senior researcher that sent me utterly inappropriate texts after a conference, then proceeded to apologise months later by telling me they had not been meant for me anyway so no hard feelings remain hopefully And no thank you to him for attending every conference I've been to since. No thank you to the people who told me that it was surprising that I was doing a PhD since I was a girl. No thank you to the man who mistook me for a coffee lady at a conference, and after having to correct him two times that I did not work there, responded with you should consider it. No thank you to the researcher that asked me what I was wearing underneath my outfit during a conference. No thank you to the physicist who declared to a room full of other physicists that biologists don't know how to design an experiment. No thank you to the people who have called me scary instead of strong and intimidating instead of intelligent. And finally, no thank you to the exec board of the TU Delft, whose knee-jerk reaction to being held up a mirror about the social safety at the university, was to sue the party holding up the mirror instead of looking at the problems they highlighted. ... You have made me feel like I do not belong in science & I cannot forgive you for that.

A friend included this anti-acknowledgement section on her PhD thesis. She also added the proposition: “Systematic bullying and undermining of girls and women in STEM starts early on and is the reason why they do not stay in science and related fields.”
Absurd we still need to go through this
🧪👩‍🔬

I was planning on going to SfN this year, for the first time, and I was really looking forward to it too. But over the past few weeks I decided not to go. I'm sad and happy about this at the same time 🤷

I'm looking for a public dataset of young+older people doing a simple perceptual decision-making task, with sufficient trial + subject numbers. Ideally, multiple stimulus difficulty levels but no manipulations (conditions, task switching etc).

This must exist - tips for where to look? 🧒👨‍🦳🧠

Science must step away from nationally managed infrastructure Scientific data and independence are at risk. We need to work with community-driven services and university libraries to create new multi-country organizations that are resilient to political…

A great read from @neuralreckoning.bsky.social
www.thetransmitter.org/policy/scien...

I see your point but I think any suspicion could be solved by auditing the highest expenses at the end of the year, rather than policing everyone all the time. It'll save a whole lot of public money as well

We really need to "consider how we can push back on the calamitous corporatization of our universities".

Then to book a hotel via booking.com, I had to take a screenshot of the offers from the contractor, and from booking.com, send both to the admin staff to prove it is cheaper to do it on my own, get an approval, and only then I could book.

On the responsibilities of intellectuals and the rise of bullshit jobs in universities You may never have considered yourself to be one. Why would you? But if you’re reading this, there is more than a likelihood that you are one. If you’re a

A very timely read:
academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

I'm sure many have similar stories, here's mine:
Imperial has a contractor for travel bookings. It is often more $$ than booking online, takes much longer to go through the process and is much less flexible (location, sharing w/ colleagues).

Ooh, that's actually very handy! Thanks for sharing!

Oh right... Now I noticed Sara's on your paper :)

Preserved neural dynamics across animals performing similar behaviour - Nature Recordings of neural populations from motor cortex and striatum spanning monkeys and mice demonstrate that neural dynamics in individuals from the same species are preserved when they perform sim...

Oh interesting works... And both seem along the line of my paper:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Looking forward to reading them

Thanks!

Cheers Ali. I'm very excited too 😀

Thanks!
And by the way, loved the BCI emoji: 🧠➡️🖥️

Thanks Olivier, I'm very excited!

Also, very excited to join the Clopath lab @clopathlab.bsky.social at Imperial @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social, while still working with my current mentor, Juan @juangallego.bsky.social and the team.
Lots of new experiences and hopefully cool science ahead... Stay tuned 😁 2/2

🎉Amazing news🎉
Thrilled that I got a Wellcome Trust Early Career Award @wellcometrust.bsky.social
It's going to be amazing!
Over the next 5 years, I will look into how brains learn to control Brain-Computer Interfaces and how we can use this knowledge to further improve BCI performance 1/2

Very interesting... Could we say that perhaps social behaviour in CD1s is richer / more complex than C57s?

A very good list of you're a neuroscientist migrating from Twitter