andy alexander

Still a few weeks left!

I love this piece!

It shows the many ways a connectome can be put to use, AND the many complementary modalities that are needed, beyond the connectome, to answer real questions.

And it makes me feel good about having helped to generate the thing. :)

UCSB physics professors John Martinis and Michel Devoret win 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics UCSB physics professors John Martinis and Michel Devoret win 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics

Exciting news: #UCSB physicists John Martinis and Michel Devoret have been awarded the 2025 #NobelPrize in Physics. They were lauded for work that, according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, "revealed quantum physics in action."

Full story: https://ow.ly/TH7K50X7ULp

I'm worried about getting job offers pulled by admin bc I mention how my transness informs my work. Bc they're afraid of state retribution for hiring me.

I get advice to code switch.

The farther I get from full disclosure, the less genuine it reads & becomes.

This is not a free and open society.

UCSB Campus. Meadow in the foreground with Storke Tower and mountains in the distance

Spread the word: I'm looking to recruit a PhD student for Fall 2026 to @ucsb.bsky.social! Reach out if you are applying this cycle and hoping to study infant and child social cognition, specifically expectations about friendship and/or groups. Bonus: live in paradise! And.. 1/3

thanks for speaking out @markhisted.org

Diagram showing three ways to control brain activity with a visual prosthesis. The goal is to match a desired pattern of brain responses. One method uses a simple one-to-one mapping, another uses an inverse neural network, and a third uses gradient optimization. Each method produces a stimulation pattern, which is tested in both computer simulations and in the brain of a blind participant with an implant. The figure shows that the neural network and gradient methods reproduce the target brain activity more accurately than the simple mapping.

👁️🧠 New preprint: We demonstrate the first data-driven neural control framework for a visual cortical implant in a blind human!

TL;DR Deep learning lets us synthesize efficient stimulation patterns that reliably evoke percepts, outperforming conventional calibration.

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

Also this disproportionately hurts first year students at unis on quarter systems that began their programs literally this week and haven't had as much time to work out their ideas with their new mentors in person.

Also even if the number of awards is dropping significantly why not just let them apply? If it's about paying fewer folks to review fewer submissions I suspect many would review for free. The current plan hurts their exposure to grant systems AND discourages getting their ideas out on paper.

The *three* 2nd year graduate students in our lab who waited a year to collect prelim data and were already working on drafts are unsurprisingly upset. I get things are tough but no warning is just brutal.

The GRFP announcement from NSF cuts out an entire cohort of 2nd year students from consideration, without warning. This is so deeply unfair that it warrants a formal protest from the scientific community. If someone wants to work with me to craft an open letter and solicit signatures, LMK.

Extremely disappointing decision from the NSF today to exclude second-year graduate students from eligibility for the GRFP. I and many other second-year grads purposely held off from applying in our first year to be able to do so now...

Join our Cloud HD Video Meeting Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise cloud communications.

🧬 Join us for an EvoChat on "How we define cancer matters"

Oct 1: 8am PST/11am EST/5pm CEST

Speakers: Carlo Maley, Lucie Laplane, Joel Brown & Benjamin Spada discuss universal cancer definitions across species and their clinical applications.

Zoom: ucsb.zoom.us/j/8313111375...

All welcome! 🔬

Stoked to hear this. Congrats!!!

Bet: this flavor of same-stimulus, same-task, compare-behavior, compare-physiology is the future of model testing and theory development in neuroscience.

Mouse vs. AI: A Neuroethological Benchmark for Visual Robustness and Neural Alignment Visual robustness under real-world conditions remains a critical bottleneck for modern reinforcement learning agents. In contrast, biological systems such as mice show remarkable resilience to environ...

🚨Our NeurIPS 2025 competition Mouse vs. AI is LIVE!

We combine a visual navigation task + large-scale mouse neural data to test what makes visual RL agents robust and brain-like.

Top teams: featured at NeurIPS + co-author our summary paper. Join the challenge!

Whitepaper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.14446

Sosa Lab

The Sosa Lab website is now live!
www.sosaneurolab.com

We will be seeking a postdoctoral researcher to join the growing team! If you are a rodent neuroscientist and interested in doing systems neuro work in the mountains 🏔️, please check out the "Join" page.

Exciting opportunity here - if you have a dataset and want IBL staff to run pipelines, develop visualizations or websites, work on QC, etc - or if you want to work on the IBL dataset in a way that needs staff support - then this is for you! Check it out.

Fantastic opportunity:

Join @neuripsconf.bsky.social 's workshop @neurreps.bsky.social 's scientific committee as a reviewer.

Send me your OpenReview email if you'd like to contribute!

And now for an update on my office window. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Jeremy Wray is kind of a god though...

Our new paper, “A neural compass in the human brain during naturalistic human navigation” is out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social! First-author @zhenganglu.bsky.social led the charge, with Josh Julian and collaborator @gkaguirre.com.

www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

My favorite one yet

Excited to share this profile + interview with Dr. Emily Jacobs! Amazing work on human precision brain imaging across hormonal fluctuations, and such an inspiring story! I had such a great time interviewing her!

Epic collage of Bionic Vision Lab activities. From top to bottom, left to right: A) Up-to-date group picture B) BVL at Dr. Beyeler's Plous Award celebration (2025) C) BVL at The Eye & The Chip (2023) D/F) Dr. Aiwen Xu and Justin Kasowski getting hooded at the UCSB commencement ceremony E) BVL logo cake created by Tori LeVier G) Dr. Beyeler with symposium speakers at Optica FVM (2023) H, I, M, N) Students presenting conference posters/talks J) Participant scanning a food item (ominous pizza study) K) Galen Pogoncheff in VR L) Argus II user drawing a phosphene O) Prof. Beyeler demoing BionicVisionXR P) First lab hike (ca. 2021) Q) Statue for winner of the Mac'n'Cheese competition (ca. 2022) R) BVL at Club Vision S) Students drifting off into the sunset on a floating couch after a hard day's work

Excited to share that I’ve been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at UCSB!

Grateful to my mentors, students, and funders who shaped this journey and to @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social for giving the Bionic Vision Lab a home!

Full post: www.linkedin.com/posts/michae...

The NIH’s 2024 budget of just under $37B generated $95B in economic activity in 2024 alone. 99.4% of new pharmaceuticals approved from 2010-2019 came from NIH-funded research. I’m hard pressed to think of anything that generates as much direct economic benefit as our NIH did before they destroyed it

Hippocampal representations drift in stable multisensory environments - Nature Tracking of individual place cells in mouse CA1 shows that representational drift is not influenced by changes in environment or behaviour, and is lower for more excitable place cells.

I’m excited to share my final co-first author paper from my postdoc in Dan Dombeck's lab!

We explored how behavior, senses, and neurons influence how much information in the brain changes over time.

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

#science #research #neuroscience #hippocampus #placecells

Mathematical Methods in Computational Neuroscience Summer school in Eresfjord, Norway (July 8th - 26th, 2024)

The Mathematical Methods in Computational Neuroscience summer school is wrapping up another successful season, equipping early-career researchers with cutting-edge tools to model and analyze neural networks.

Join us next year in beautiful Norway!

Learn more: bit.ly/44JNxYU

#KavliNeuro #CompNeuro

Graph showing NIH funding for new and competitive renewal grants for fiscal year 2025 compared to fiscal year 2024. The fiscal year 2025 curve is substantially below the fiscal year 2024 curve.

Update on funding curves and late non-competitive renewals.

First, funding curves for new and competitive renewals.

1/n

An illustration of a mouse on a ball looking at a field of grass displayed on monitors.

Can your AI beat a mouse?

Mice still outperform our best computing machines in some ways. One way is robust visual processing.

10 years ago I decided to work on HARD behavior driven by COMPLEX visual processing. And that risk is paying off now. #neuroAI 1/n