Carl (CJ) Litif, Ph.D.

Individual differences in decision-making shape how mesolimbic dopamine regulates choice confidence and change-of-mind - Nature Neuroscience Differences in neuroeconomic decision-making influence nucleus accumbens dopamine dynamics and reflect choice confidence during evaluation, as well as past and future value during re-evaluation, which...

Dopamine dynamics in the nucleus accumbens core reflected decision confidence during evaluation of decisions in an economic foraging task in mice, as well as both past and future value during re-evaluation and change-of-mind

@perothwell.bsky.social

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

An integrated single-nucleus and spatial transcriptomics atlas reveals the molecular landscape of the human hippocampus - Nature Neuroscience The topographical organization of cells in the hippocampus reflects its ability to regulate mood and cognition. Here the authors generate a spatially resolved gene expression map in the human hippocam...

Excited to share this huge team effort collaboration supervised by Stephanie Page in Translational Neuroscience @lieberinstitute.bsky.social and @stephaniehicks.bsky.social @jhubiostat.bsky.social to generate a spatio-molecular resource of the hippocampus in human 🧠

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

The field of neuroscience views the goal of human genetics as "finding genes". This is an outdated view. In whole genome studies of rare variants, finding genes is the easy part. The more interesting and important goal is to map out the causal pathway from genes to brain function to cognitive traits

Good stuff from Alex. I touch on some of these themes here as well, from the perspective of an applied statistician (plus a few more refs on the topic).

statsepi.substack.com/p/statistica... (ICYMI)

Dr. Sudie Back - Prolonged Exposure for Substance Use Disorder and PTSD Podcast Episode · The Addiction Psychologist · 07/14/2025 · 1h 17m

Newest episode of The Addiction Psychologist (@addpsychpodcast.bsky.social) just dropped. In this episode, Dr. Sudie Back discusses Prolonged Exposure for Co-Occurring Substance Use Disorder and PTSD (COPE).

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Long-Term Effects of Adolescent 5F-MDMB-PICA Intravenous self-administration: Neurobehavioral Consequences and medial Prefrontal Cortex Dysfunction in Adult Mice https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.26.661592v1

Winter Conference on Brain Research January 24th to 29th 2026 Big Sky Montana!

Submissions for #WCBR2026 open today! Please go to www.winterbrain.org Big Sky is my absolute favorite venue for this meeting. The science is top notch, the people are great, the meaning is inclusive, and I learned to ski as a 35 year old! Please repost!

Modulation of Dopamine Neurons Alters Behavior and Event Encoding in the Nucleus Accumbens during Pavlovian Conditioning When a cue is located away from its associated reward, some animals will learn to approach the site of reward (goal-tracking behavior) while others will approach the cue (sign-tracking behavior). The ...

We are delighted to have the cover article in J Neurosci this week! Briefly: inhibition of DA neurons at reward blocks the acquisition of sign tracking; stimulation (or bigger reward) doesn't alter it, but *stopping* stimulation halts acquisition in its tracks. www.jneurosci.org/content/45/2...

Pict of article titled Adolescent and young adult access to opioid use disorder care

📣New paper out in Pediatrics about Adolescent & Young Adult OUD Care Access, by part of our UW team💕, & co-first-author, Dr. Alexis Ball!

📝Documenting part of what we already know in practice:

real care options & honest conversations @ drug use matter a lot.

publications.aap.org/pediatrics/a...

Judge Rejects Trump’s ‘Appalling’ NIH LGBTQ, Race Grant Cuts (1) The Trump administration’s cuts to scientific research grants for focusing on gender and diversity, equity and inclusion are illegal and vacated, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled from the bench ...

news.bloomberglaw.com/health-law-a...

So are they going to reinstate those that were cut? 👀

Today, my NIH colleagues and I did something scary but really important. We spoke up about egregious harms we are seeing happen to research participants and public health through thoughtless and politicized policies at NIH. 🧵1/3

apnews.com/article/nih-...

OPINION: Federal cuts put addiction treatment and recovery at risk I vividly remember growing up and my grandmother warning me to be careful with alcohol — because addiction “runs in our family.” She wasn’t wrong. For generations, both sides of

New op-ed out in the Albuquerque Journal. I share about the importance of federal substance use and addiction funding for families like mine.

www.abqjournal.com/opinion/arti...

and in case you hit a paywall: unmm-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/g/person...

Why use a $20k+ centrifuge to spin your qpcr plate when you have $20 salad spinners 🤣

Newest version of Cellpose can spot cell boundaries even in cloudy conditions Picking out individual cells in distorted microscopy images is now as easy as clicking a button. A new version of Cellpose – the popular tool that maps the boundaries of diverse cells in microscopy

🖱️ Picking out individual cells in distorted microscopy images is now as easy as clicking a button, thanks to Cellpose3: www.janelia.org/news/newest-...

Motor learning refines thalamic influence on motor cortex - Nature Imaging and optogenetics in mice provide insight into the interplay between the primary motor cortex and the motor thalamus during learning, showing that thalamic inputs have a key role in the executi...

Our paper is out in Nature.

By examining various inputs to the motor cortex during learning, we found that thalamic inputs learn to activate the cortical neurons encoding the movement being learned.

Tour de force by Assaf in collab with Felix and Marcus. Congrats!

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

Sex differences are often claimed based on faulty comparison of statistical significance status rather than direct comparison.

That's the upshot of an amazing talk I got to hear this week from Donna Maney @ Emory based on this paper & others: elifesciences.org/articles/70817

#stats #neuroskyence

Circulating Immune and Endocrine Markers in Currently Drinking and Abstinent Individuals With Alcohol Use Disorder and Controls Circulating concentrations of BDNF, GLP-1 and IL-8 were altered only in abstinent individuals with AUD, likely reflecting greater disease burden and comorbidities compared to current drinkers.

My first post doc data paper!!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

informative thread here

Me to my brain organoid in an operant chamber after animal research is defunded

Molecular and genetic mechanisms of plasticity in addiction Drugs of abuse result in well-characterized changes in synapse function and number in brain reward regions such as the nucleus accumbens. However, rec…

New review from Kasey Brida on transcriptional & molecular mechanisms in drug-induced plasticity. Here we focused on mechanisms that determine which neurons are activated by drugs, and dynamic transcriptional cascades that facilitate plasticity in these cells.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Found this in the women’s bathroom of our science building today.
Honestly, the most accurate peer review I’ve gotten all week.

#LabNotesFromTheStall

Publishing Addiction Science Webinar Wednesday, April 23, 2024 at 1:00 pm ET

Don't miss this upcoming webinar by @cpddorg.bsky.social with our Editor in Chief, Bryon Adinoff! Register here: us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Addiction Science Defense Network | npsc The ASDN is an information exchange and action network for individuals and organizations devoted to studying, treating and preventing problems caused by psychoactive substance use, including alcohol, ...

🚨 I have been working with several addiction scientists and clinicians through the Addiction Science Defense Network (www.npscoalition.org/projects/add...) to craft a statement of concern about recent executive orders and actions that can be shared with members of congress.

This upcoming UCSD CaSAS (Community and Science Advancements in Spanish) seminar I'll be hosting Dr. Monica Lopez-Hidalgo, Associate Professor, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Thursday April 17th, from 4:00- 5:00 PM! followed by a social hour afterwards (Bonner Hall, 2130)!

Chronic ethanol exposure produces sex-dependent impairments in value computations in the striatum Chronic ethanol exposure disrupts adaptive decision-making and striatal neurocomputations in a sex-dependent manner.

Thrilled to share our work in ScienceAdvances: “Chronic ethanol exposure produces sex-dependent impairments in value computations in the striatum.” Huge thanks to Tricia @janaklab.bsky.social, Daeyeol @ungteoriz.bsky.social, Angela, and my friend Robin!
www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Opinion | Every Hospital Should Offer Addiction Treatment Failing to offer this care is a discouraging and dangerous missed opportunity

"Given the massive human and financial toll of the opioid epidemic, it is imperative that national regulatory standards are updated to ensure U.S. hospitals are prepared to provide addiction treatment," writes Dr. Melissa Weimer in @medpagetoday.bsky.social.
www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/seco...

Piriform cortex is an ictogenic trigger zone in the primate brain Objective Area tempestas, a functionally defined region in the anterior piriform cortex, was identified as a crucial ictogenic trigger zone in the rat brain in the 1980s. However, whether the primat...

Very proud of this paper, which spans three decades of work. (1/17) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Check out this amazing symposium coming up at #USASP2025!