Michael Deistler

🎉 sbi participated in GSoC 2025 through @numfocus.bsky.social and it was a great success: our two students contributed major new features and substantial internal improvements: 🧵 👇

An ion channel omnimodel for standardized biophysical neuron modelling Biophysical neuron modeling is an indispensable tool in neuroscience research, with the combination of diverse ion channel kinetics and morphologies being used to explain various single-neuron propert...

“Mapping ion channel function” doi.org/10.7554/eLif... isn’t exactly a citation slayer, but it’s still one of my favourites (& my first independent project). Today we push pt 2, where we trace code origin & unite almost all channel models in a common expression. Boom! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

a man wearing a white shirt and tie smiles in front of a window ALT: a man wearing a white shirt and tie smiles in front of a window

I've been waiting some years to make this joke and now it’s real:

I conned somebody into giving me a faculty job!

I’m starting as a W1 Tenure-Track Professor at Goethe University Frankfurt in a week (lol), in the Faculty of CS and Math

and I'm recruiting PhD students 🤗

From hackathon to release: sbi v0.25 is here! 🎉

What happens when dozens of SBI researchers and practitioners collaborate for a week? New inference methods, new documentation, lots of new embedding networks, a bridge to pyro and a bridge between flow matching and score-based methods 🤯

1/7 🧵

Simulation-Based Inference: A Practical Guide A central challenge in many areas of science and engineering is to identify model parameters that are consistent with prior knowledge and empirical data. Bayesian inference offers a principled framewo...

Looky Looky! 😍🥳👏
arxiv.org/abs/2508.12939
Super fun project, I ❤️ed coauthoring w/ @sbi-devs.bsky.social.
Great lead by @deismic.bsky.social & @janboelts.bsky.social. Contribs by many talented people @jakhmack.bsky.social. 🙏 to #BenjaminKurtMiller for the kickstart! @helmholtzai.bsky.social

Thanks @francois-rozet.bsky.social! The guide for making these figures is public: github.com/mackelab/fig...

📢 I am looking for AI post-doc/research/engineer positions in Europe (Paris, London, Zurich, ...) starting 2026. My work revolves around generative modeling and AI for Science, with 4+ publications at top conferences during my PhD. If you are hiring, please reach out! If not, please repost 🔁

🎓Hiring now! 🧠 Join us at the exciting intersection of ML and Neuroscience! #AI4science
We’re looking for PhDs, Postdocs and Scientific Programmers that want to use deep learning to build, optimize and study mechanistic models of neural computations. Full details: www.mackelab.org/jobs/ 1/5

Postdoc position: Computational methods for neurodegeneration research - VIB About the labs The Verstreken Lab and the Gonçalves Lab are based in Leuven, Belgium and part of the

Exciting project in Parkinson's disease! Patrik Verstreken's lab (verstrekenlab.sites.vib.be) and my lab are looking for a postdoc to develop and apply ML methods to the analysis of exciting brain-on-chip data. Please spread the word!

More details at: jobs.vib.be/j/110908/pos...

🎉 Exciting news! We are lauching an sbi office hour!

Join the sbi developers Thursdays 09:45-10:15am CET via Zoom (link: sbi Discord's "office hours" channel).

Get guidance on contributing, explore sbi for your research, or troubleshoot issues. Come chat with us! 🤗

github.com/sbi-dev/sbi/...

We are looking to hire a Senior Scientist or #Postdoc to study brains, biophysics, and behaviour using #Drosophila as a model. Please spread the word!

www.medunigraz.at/en/job-openi...

Pull requests · sbi-dev/sbi sbi is a Python package for simulation-based inference, designed to meet the needs of both researchers and practitioners. Whether you need fine-grained control or an easy-to-use interface, sbi has ...

It's been a blast, thanks to @sbi-devs.bsky.social ! This week's hackathon was phenomenal! 🙏 😍 The sbi hackathon welcomed about 25 people in Tübingen with contributions spanning the globe , e.g. 🇺🇸🇯🇵🇧🇪🇩🇪. Wanna see, what we did? Check out the PRs👇
github.com/sbi-dev/sbi/...

sbi 0.24.0 is out! 🎉 This comes with important new features:
- 🎯 Score-based i.i.d sampling
- 🔀 Simultaneous estimation of multiple discrete and continuous parameters or data.
- 📊: mini-sbibm for quick benchmarking.

Just in time for our 1-week SBI hackathon starting tomorrow---stay tuned for more!

ZAPBench ZAPBench evaluates how well different models can predict the activity of over 70,000 neurons in a novel larval zebrafish dataset.

⚡️ Excited to introduce ZAPBench, our #ICLR2025 spotlight: The Zebrafish Activity Prediction Benchmark measures progress in predicting neural activity within an entire vertebrate brain (70k+ neurons!)

Explore interactive visualizations, datasets, code + paper: google-research.github.io/zapbench

🧠🧪

Together with @dendritesgr.bsky.social, we’ll be hosting a tutorial on constructing and optimizing biophysical models (via Jaxley & DendroTweaks) 🚀

Join us in Florence if you like dendrites, biophysics, or optimization!

1) Some exciting science in turbulent times:

How do mice distinguish self-generated vs. object-generated looming stimuli? Our new study combines VR and neural recordings from superior colliculus (SC) 🧠🐭 to explore this question.

Check out our preprint doi.org/10.1101/2024... 🧵

🚀 Excited to share my latest paper! 📄✨ This project started at the beginning of the pandemic and took longer than expected, but that’s the beauty of science! 🧬🔬 Check it out in the following threads! #PandemicProjects

My post comes a bit late because of TAing duties in @imbizo.bsky.social🇿🇦(1/14)

🙏 Please help us improve the SBI toolbox! 🙏

In preparation for the upcoming SBI Hackathon, we’re running a user study to learn what you like, what we can improve, and how we can grow.

👉 Please share your thoughts here: forms.gle/foHK7myV2oaK...

Your input will make a big difference—thank you! 🙌

🎉 Just in time for the end of the year, we’ve released a new version of sbi!

📦 v0.23.3 comes packed with exciting features, bug fixes, and docs updates to make sbi smoother and more robust. Check it out! 👇

🔗 Full changelog: github.com/sbi-dev/sbi/...

Apropos of never ending discussions about whether ANNs are "good" models of the nervous system, here is a slide I present to masters students showing a network that is found in motor control circuits *across phyla* (that's pretty ubiquitous!) I ask them to guess what it does...

The SBI package has a public discord server now! 🌍 It is open for users or (aspiring) contributors, or for researchers interested in simulations or Bayesian inference with neural networks. See you there! 👋

Yes, I think there is a typo in the email address. It should virtual-talk-link-request@cmclab.org (with a dash after `link`). See you there!

Thanks for the invite Shervin! There might be a typo in the email address, I think it should be virtual-talk-link-request@cmclab.org

I will talk about our efforts to train biophysically detailed neuron models at the CMC Learning Club today (2pm CET). Zoom link sent upon empty email to virtual-talk-link-request@cmclab.org. Thanks a lot @neuroprinciplist.bsky.social for organizing this!

It has been almost 5 years since our first mini-hackathon to kickstart the sbi toolbox. Since then, it has seen lots of major updates, many of them driven by new contributors 🚀 We have now written an updated paper to reflect the current state of contributors & features of the toolbox. Check it out!

Awesome list! Could you add me and @jaxleyverse.bsky.social? I work on biophysical modelling of neurons and networks. Thanks a ton!

Awesome list! Could you add me and @sbi-devs.bsky.social? Thanks a lot creating this!

Thanks for creating this! Could you add me and @sbi-devs.bsky.social?

I use hydra’s submitit plugin and I am quite happy with it: hydra.cc/docs/plugins...

Alright, let's get this going! I am Michael and I build Machine Learning tools for Neuroscience @mackelab.bsky.social. In particular, I work on:

• Simulation-based inference (SBI) @sbi-devs.bsky.social
• Jaxley, a differentiable simulator for neuroscience @jaxleyverse.bsky.social