Harsha Gurnani

At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery | Quanta Magazine After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ended up disproving a 40-year-old conjecture.

Delightful story about a 17-year-old homeschooler who disproved the 40-year-old Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture. She decided to apply straight to graduate school, skipping the rest of high school and college. When she finishes, a PhD will be her first degree.

📣 We are expanding! Repost 🙏🏽

- Postdoc (funded by @simonsfoundation.org grant on synchronisation between cognitive representations and stepping)
- Project Associates
- Create your role! (Reach out if you are keen on these topics and these roles do not define you 👀🤗)

www.neuroact.in

Confused about why children in Gaza are starving? Listen to Jon Stewart's interview with the amazing ‪@peterbeinart.bsky.social‬: www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5kX...
Hoping to help? An amazing group of MIT students is getting aid to Gazan kids & university students. Donate here:
mutualaidgaza.org#donate

Congrats!! 🥳

Attractor dynamics of working memory explain a concurrent evolution of stimulus-specific and decision-consistent biases in visual estimation People exhibit biases when perceiving features of the world, shaped by both external stimuli and prior decisions. By tracking behavioral, neural, and mechanistic markers of stimulus- and decision-rela...

Excited to share that our paper is now out in Neuron @cp-neuron.bsky.social (dlvr.it/TM9zJ8).

Our perception isn't a perfect mirror of the world. It's often biased by our expectations and beliefs. How do these biases unfold over time, and what shapes their trajectory? A summary thread. (1/13)

Representational drift without synaptic plasticity Neural computations support stable behavior despite relying on many dynamically changing biological processes. One such process is representational drift (RD), in which neurons' responses change over ...

When neurons change, but behavior doesn’t: Excitability changes driving representational drift

New preprint of work with Christian Machens: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Big Tech Asked for Looser Clean Water Act Permitting. Trump Wants to Give It to Them New AI regulations suggested by the White House mirror changes to environmental permitting suggested by Meta and a lobbying group representing firms like Google and Amazon Web Services.

New AI regulations suggested by the White House mirror changes to environmental permitting suggested by Meta and a lobbying group representing firms like Google and Amazon Web Services. www.wired.com/story/big-te...

E.P.A. Is Said to Draft a Plan to End Its Ability to Fight Climate Change

The Trump administration has drafted a plan to repeal the EPA’s “endangerment finding,” which established greenhouse gases as a threat to human life. This finding serves as the basis for regulating greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, power plants, and other industrial sources. 🤬

NYU Application Support Group Matching Form Dear Prospective Neuroscience & Psychology PhD Students, We are a group of current NYU Neuroscience & Psychology PhD students who would like to help you with your PhD applications. We want to support...

Thinking of applying to US-based Ph.D. programs in neuroscience, psychology, or cognitive science? We’ve got your back! NYU’s Application Support Group is a student-led, free mentorship program offering 1-on-1 support and guidance. Apply now! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

📣 Heads-up that our amazing dept (Berkeley Psych) is anticipating hiring *two* TT Asst Profs this Fall, under the themes of (1) Social & Personality Psychology, and (2) Biological Basis of Behavior.

Official job ads coming soon...

Send qs for (1) to Iris Mauss/Serena Chen, (2) to Linda Wilbrecht

This is a season of trench warfare and we have to continue to fight because a law passed is NOT the end and I think we all know this. There will be implementation fight opportunities, there will be constant organizing and pushback. Nothing is permanent. Onwards.

People are in motion, everywhere. Some thoughts on discouragement and also on noticing…

Popping in for a minute to say that it really sucks that the murder bill passed Congress and ALSO to thank every single person who tried to stop the bill from passing. What you did matters. Finally, I wrote a few words: open.substack.com/pub/prisoncu... - I hope they might offer some encouragement.

CBP Wants New Tech to Search for Hidden Data on Seized Phones Customs and Border Protection is asking companies to pitch tools for performing deep analysis on the contents of devices seized at the US border.

SCOOP: The CBP asking tech companies to pitch digital forensics tools that are designed to process and analyze text messages, pictures, videos, and contacts from seized phones, laptops, and other devices at the United States border, according to documents reviewed by WIRED.

Ontogeny of the vagal gut-brain axis Gut-brain communication is a key component of homeostasis which regulates behaviors such as appetite and reward. Intestinal entero-endocrine cells (EECs) translate nutrient intake into signals which a...

First Bluesky post! I'm excited to share a preprint from my postdoctoral work where we 1) define the developmental mechanisms guiding formation of a vagal gut-brain circuit and 2) discover that this circuit regulates much more than just appetite. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Have also been putting together some resources for sustained action:
concrete-actions-2025.github.io/concrete-act...

bsky.app/profile/hars...

Our work, out at Cell, shows that the brain’s dopamine signals teach each individual a unique learning trajectory. Collaborative experiment-theory effort, led by Sam Liebana in the lab. The first experiment my lab started just shy of 6y ago & v excited to see it out: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Yet again, a whole article about the president planning to withhold appropriated funds and stop paying contracts without ever mentioning that this is blatantly illegal.

This isn't just some political move; these are grounds for lawsuits and impeachment. Every article needs to frame it that way.

Special Application Deadline for Students Accepted or Studying in the United States

For students in USA who are affected by the current situation:

OIST Graduate School is accepting special applications right now.

Deadline June 15, 2025

www.oist.jp/admissions/s...

New #NeuroAI #compneurosky preprint! To better understand how target-directed learning works in the brain, we sought to engineer an artificial neural network capable of solving complex image classification tasks that comprises only experimentally-supported biological building blocks. (1/15)

Apparently existing foreign students at Harvard *MUST* transfer according to the Trump administration.

My Harvard neuroscience/connectomics peeps: If this impacts any of you (faculty/students), get in touch with me and we can chat about how I can help you.

A vector calculus for neural computation in the cerebellum Null space theory predicts that neurons generate spikes not only to produce behavior but also to prevent the undesirable effect of other neurons on behavior. In this work, we show that this competitiv...

Neuronal computation in the cerebellum via a vector calculus.

Work of Mohammad Amin Fakharian, Alden Shoup, Paul Hage, and Hisham Elseweifi

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Judge Blocks Trump Administration From Dismantling Education Department

Breaking News: A federal judge blocked President Trump’s attempt to dismantle the Education Department and ordered officials to reinstate thousands of fired employees.

Compositional pretraining improves computational efficiency and matches animal behaviour on complex tasks - Nature Machine Intelligence Hocker et al. demonstrate a method for training recurrent neural networks, which they call ‘kindergarten curriculum learning’, involving pretraining on simple cognitive tasks to improve learning effic...

David Hocker’s paper about compositional pretraining for RNNs that efficiently produces animal-like behaviors! Modeling cognitive tasks in RNNs requires thinking about latent abilities that animals bring to an experiment. Funded by NIH/CRCNS. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

During Q&A, whenever someone asks a question about our "mice."

NEW: Under Trump, the National Science Foundation is awarding grants at the slowest pace in decades. We took a detailed look at every area of science affected by the funding lag. Here's a gift link: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

House Republicans just passed Trump’s Tax Scam (the GOP’s Medicaid-slashing, billionaire-enriching megabill) in a 215-214 vote. The bill got even worse overnight, but the most important thing to know right now is this:

This fight isn’t over, and this bill can still be stopped. 🧵

Call your rep via Congress switchboard (202) 224-3121. Ask them to vote NO on this atrocious bill.
Or 5calls.org/issue/medica...

Bringing this to Bsky bc @steverattner.bsky.social hasn't posted it yet and it's so critical. The entirety of the cuts to Medicaid and food benefits are to pay for tax cuts for people earning more than half a million a year.

Call Congress: 202-224-3121

Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades The lag in funding extends far beyond D.E.I. initiatives, affecting almost every area of science: chemistry, computing, engineering, materials and more.

The reductions in funding touch virtually every area of science and seem certain to harm American competitiveness.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...