Tristan Shuman

Excited to share that I landed my dream job!🎉🎉🎉 The Pennington Lab will be opening at the University of British Columbia in January 2026!
@ubcpsych.bsky.social @dmcbrainhealth.bsky.social

We're looking forward to the first annual New York Memory Hub conference later this week! Can't wait for all the talks and discussion about all things learning and memory 🧠

🚨New preprint alert🚨
We used closed-loop optogenetics to causally test the importance of inhibitory spike timing in network function and found that manipulating PV+ cell theta phase locking in the dentate gyrus can shift seizure susceptibility (both ways!)

Check out new work from our lab! We developed a new way to directly control the precise timing of interneurons during behavior and found that theta phase locking is a causal mediator of seizure susceptibility in both healthy and epileptic mice.

Check out our latest paper today in Nature: “Goal specific hippocampal inhibition gates learning” www.nature.com/articles/s41...
By Nuri Jeong, Xiao Zheng, Abby Paulson, Steph Prince and colleagues.

Human neural dynamics of real-world and imagined navigation - Nature Human Behaviour Seeber et al. studied brain recordings from implanted electrodes in freely moving humans. Neural dynamics encoded actual and imagined routes similarly, demonstrating parallels between navigational, im...

🚨 New lab paper!🚨

A dream study of mine for nearly 20 yrs not possible until now thanks to NIH 🧠 funding & 1st-author lead @seeber.bsky.social

We tracked hippocampal activity as people walked memory-guided paths & imagined them again. Did brain patterns reappear?🧵👇

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

Left–right-alternating theta sweeps in entorhinal–hippocampal maps of space - Nature A study in rats proposes a mechanism for how the brain maps the surrounding environment, including places it has never seen, by alternating left and right forward sweeps in successive theta cycles.

Grid cells have a geometry in time. Thanks to @azvollan.bsky.social l & @rjgardner.bsky.social for this heroic discovery. @ercresearch.bsky.social
#KiloNeurons @m-bmoser.bsky.social @kavlintnu.bsky.social @nature.com
@kavlifoundation.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This work was led by the amazing @susieyufeng.bsky.social but was a huge team effort across the Shuman and Cai Labs!

All of the data is available online and we hope other labs will be able to utilize it to answer other questions about epileptic circuits in MEC and hippocampus.

Altogether, this work suggest that the induction of epilepsy drives a progressive disease state with circuit dysfunction that accumulates and shifts from the hippocampus to medial entorhinal cortex as cognitive impairment progresses.

In particular, the MEC cell type that was most impaired were "Trough-locked" cells in layer 3, which were recently characterized as predictive grid cells (doi.org/10.1126/scie...). Their dysfunction suggests this cell type may be uniquely vulnerable in epilepsy and contribute to memory deficits.

By 8 weeks after pilocarpine, the synchronization within MEC and between MEC and hippocampus became impaired. These deficits aligned with the onset of severe memory impairments, suggesting that changes in MEC may underlie progressive memory impairment in epilepsy.

To investigate the circuits that drive this progressive memory impairment we recorded HPC and MEC simultaneously as epileptic and control mice explored a virtual linear track. We found early changes in theta power, coherence, and interneuron phase locking only in hippocampus, while MEC was intact.

First we found that memory deficits after pilocarpine were progressive, with minor early deficits (within 3 weeks) and more severe deficits 8 weeks after pilocarpine. Yet there were no changes in seizures or cell death across these time points suggesting altered neural activity drives these effects.

Screenshot of article entitled "Distinct changes to hippocampal and medial entorhinal circuits emerge across the progression of cognitive deficits in epilepsy" by Yu Feng, Keziah S. Diego, Zhe Dong, ..., Nadia N. Khan, Denise J. Cai, and Tristan Shuman. In brief: Feng et al. demonstrate that memory deficits in temporal lobe epilepsy involve multiple discrete mechanisms with distinct time courses. In epileptic mice, early-onset memory deficits are associated with disrupted hippocampal synchronization, while more severe, lateonset impairments are associated with disrupted synchrony of medial entorhinal cortex circuits.

New paper out in Cell Reports! Led by @susieyufeng.bsky.social, we found that chronic epilepsy in mice drives distinct synchronization deficits in hippocampus and MEC, with early changes in HPC and late-onset changes in MEC that align with progressive memory impairment.
www.cell.com/cell-reports...

The title and authors of the manuscript are displayed alongside the bioRxiv lab logo and the Shuman lab logo, which features three blue overlapping oscillations. The title is: “Medial entorhinal-hippocampal desynchronization parallels the emergence of memory impairment in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease pathology.” The author list is: Lauren M Vetere, Angelina M Galas, Nick Vaughan, Yu Feng, Zoé Christenson Wick, Paul A Philipsberg, Olga Liobimova, Antonio Fernandez-Ruiz, and Denise J Cai.

Interested in how neural communication breaks down in a model of Alzheimer's pathology?

In a new preprint, we found desynchronization in medial entorhinal–hippocampal circuits that coincided with the onset of spatial memory deficits in 3xTg mice. (1/6)

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

New preprint from the lab!

@laurenmvetere.bsky.social found disrupted MEC-hippocampal synchronization that paralleled the emergence of memory deficits in the 3xTg mouse model of AD pathology!

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Lauren stands in front of a screen showing the first slide of her thesis defense, titled "Entorhinal-hippocampal desynchronization in a mouse model of Alzheimer's Disease Pathology."

Lauren's PI Tristan Shuman places a celebratory flower crown on her head while she makes a comically huge grin.

Did 2024 feel LONG to anyone else? A little 2024 recap from me: I defended my PhD and submitted a first author paper describing my thesis work! Look out for a preprint very soon. (1/6)

Hey #ACNP2024!!! I’ve been inspired by y’all to start a new thread to capture the amazing #FashionsOfACNP!

Please add on🙏🏼💃🏻🕺

First up: the one and only @jaredwyoung.bsky.social!
The shoes. The kilt. The vest. Perfection 🧑‍🍳😘

Study Suggests New Experiences Can Refresh Memories of Past Events, with Implications for Understanding PTSD Your memories of life experiences are encoded in collections of neurons in the brain that were active at the time the event took place. Later, those same patterns of neural activity are replayed in…

Thank you to NIH Director Dr. Bertagnolli for sharing our recent work in her latest blog post! I’m so proud of the team and first author @joezaki.bsky.social for all their hard work on these exciting new findings examining stress & memory-linking 🧠

Read here 👇
directorsblog.nih.gov/2024/12/05/s...

SO EXCITED to share our latest work demonstrating that the anterior hypothalamic nucleus (AHN) regulates stress vulnerability!!!

This is going to be a great conference! Excited to join!

It's beautiful! Excited to get this in vivo!

A thread on NIH Reorganization and the Scientific Management Review Board (SMRB)

Disclosure: I was involved with the SMRB since its inception and have very strong feelings about how it was used, misused, and abandoned. My passion on these issues will undoubtably show through.

1/n

Nature paper article with title and abstract

🌟 Cai Lab Nature (@natureportfolio.bsky.social) paper alert! In work led by Joe Zaki, we find that rest periods after learning not only stabilize new memories BUT ALSO integrate new memories with older ones from days past! (1/10)

Read it here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Stress disrupts engram ensembles in lateral amygdala to generalize threat memory in mice Stress induces aversive memory overgeneralization, a hallmark of many psychiatric disorders. Memories are encoded by a sparse ensemble of neurons acti…

xcited to share our new results! We (huge team effort led by post-doc extraordinaire Sylvie Lesuis) examined the effects of acute stress on threat memory generalization and engram ensemble architecture.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Now Hiring! Tenure-Track Faculty in Computational and/or Systems Neuroscience, in the Nash Family Department of Neuroscience and the Friedman Brain Institute at Mount Sinai.

Come work with us at Mount Sinai! We have an open search for tenure-track faculty in the Department of Neuroscience focusing on Computational and Systems Neuroscience. Feel free to reach out to me with questions.

neuroscience.mssm.edu/docs/Faculty...

Initial review will begin next week!

go.bsky.app/LdtUYZS

I created a starter pack for the growing community of hippocampus physiologists that have joined the great migration. Also included the physiology-adjacent.

Tell me who I haven’t found yet

Open faculty search at Mount Sinai in Computational and/or Systems Neuroscience. Deadline is November 15th, 2024

neuroscience.mssm.edu/pdf/faculty-...

And of course a HUGE thank you to the incredible team that made this work happen! In particular, thanks to the amazing Susie Feng, who brought this huge effort together.