andy alexander

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

I hope everyone is having a good Fourth of July break. Here is how I ended up spending some of mine...

1/n

Cortical dissociation of spatial reference frames during place navigation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.25.661569v1

the president does not actually have the power to fire a university president or a museum director, but if elites simply roll over under pressure, then effectively he does

Spatial learning circuitry fluctuates in step with estrous cycle in mice Cyclic shifts in estradiol levels coincide with changes in dendritic spine density and the activity of place cells in the CA1 region of the hippocampus, a new study shows.

Very happy to see a Transmitter (@thetransmitter.bsky.social) piece on our recent work on estrous cycle modulation of hippocampal structure and function. Thanks to Sydney Wyatt (@sydneywyatt.bsky.social) for covering the work and its context:

www.thetransmitter.org/neuroendocri...

Spatial learning circuitry fluctuates in step with estrous cycle in mice Cyclic shifts in estradiol levels coincide with changes in dendritic spine density and the activity of place cells in the CA1 region of the hippocampus, a new study shows.

👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼 A summary of @michaelgoard.bsky.social and Nora Wolcott’s awesome paper in @thetransmitter.bsky.social: www.thetransmitter.org/neuroendocri...

Awesome opportunity alert. Congrats Dan!

Lecturer / Associate Professor - London, England job with University College London (UCL) | 12840324 About usThe Division of Biosciences at UCL is one of the world's foremost centres for research and teaching in the biological sciences. We have an out

🚨🚨Job Alert🚨🚨!! Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology are recruiting a new lecturer/associate professor! an amazing opportunity to join our fantastic dept! @ucl.ac.uk @ucllifesciences.bsky.social @uclnpp.bsky.social post here:
www.nature.com/naturecareer...

A flexible hippocampal population code for experience relative to reward - Nature Neuroscience Sosa et al. find that hippocampal neural activity in mice encodes both environmental location and experience relative to rewards, spanning distances far from reward, through parallel and flexible popu...

It's officially published!! In my main postdoc work with @markplitt.bsky.social and @lgiocomo.bsky.social, we found that the hippocampus simultaneously encodes an animal's spatial position and its experience relative to reward in parallel population codes. 🧵

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

Spatial reasoning via recurrent neural dynamics in mouse retrosplenial cortex - Nature Neuroscience Using a spatial reasoning task in mice, the authors show that retrosplenial cortex encodes spatial hypotheses with well-behaved recurrent dynamics, which can combine these hypotheses with incoming inf...

Mouse retrosplenial cortex encodes spatial hypotheses with well-behaved recurrent dynamics, which can combine these hypotheses with incoming information to resolve ambiguities

@jvoigts.bsky.social

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

On the off chance that you did not think that Andrew Huberman was a complete dipshit as well as as a hopelessly self-indulgent blatherer, boy do I have a podcast for you.

Awesome opportunity alert

Excited to share our upcoming workshop on neuroscience, reinforcement learning, and decision making at RLDM 2025 in Dublin, Ireland — June 11–14!

Check out the terrific speaker lineup:

🔗 sites.google.com/view/neurorl...

Co-organized with @angelaradulescu.bsky.social

@rldmdublin2025.bsky.social

Just got the notice for termination of my K00! add it to the pile of illegal contract termination, now if only our leaders gave a shit I'd be more hopeful

Congratulations to the Rising Stars in Neuroscience – Class of 2025! This is one of my favorite events each year, and this year was no exception.

Keep an eye on this incredible group of scientists—they’re doing amazing things!

people need to internalize, very quickly, that federal research grants are a hypercompetitive contracting process not charity, and that what Uncle Sam gets in return for that money is American dominance in the future

We are hiring! — Semantic memory Lab

We are hiring! PostDoc position on my ERC for wire-less electrophysiology in our 9mX5m rat HexMaze! Experience with tetrodes or silicone probes required. Contact me for questions! www.genzellab.com/we-are-hiring

Best news - strongly recommend joining Will's new group!

Hispanic PIs and those with disabilities were twice as likely to lose a grant. 3/3

Women are PIs on 58% of the canceled grants, although they are PIs on only 34% of all active NSF grants.

Similarly, Blacks are PIs on 17% of the terminated grants, although they make only 4% of the total pool. 2/3

Trump officials take steps toward a radically different NSF Efforts to shrink staff, budget, and focus have alarmed members of Congress

Another scoop from Jeff Mervis (@policyhound.bsky.social): NSF's ~1400 grant terminations have disproportionately affected PIs from groups underrepresented in science: women, racial & ethnic minorities, & those with disabilities. 1/3
www.science.org/content/arti...

The estrous cycle modulates hippocampal spine dynamics, dendritic processing, and spatial coding Histological evidence suggests that the estrous cycle exerts a powerful influence on CA1 neurons in the mammalian hippocampus. Decades have passed sin…

🚨Very excited to share a new paper from our lab in Neuron (@cp-neuron.bsky.social) on the influence of the estrous cycle on structural and functional plasticity in the hippocampus: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Thread below 🧠🧪🧵:

Join us in beautiful Santa Barbara! We're hiring a full-time junior specialist/research technician to play a central role in data collection & analysis of brain imaging studies of pregnancy & menopause.

Learn more & apply at: recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF02974

Or help us spread the word 💫

My lab has several postdoctoral fellow and software engineering positions available. Please email me if you’re interested.

Funny, that's almost exactly the entire NIH budget 🤔