Michael Goard

The official website of the Nobel Prize - NobelPrize.org The Nobel Prize rewards science, humanism and peace efforts. This is one of the central concepts in the will of Alfred Nobel, and it also permeates the outreach activities that have been developed for...

Six of the nine Nobel Prize winners this year work in the U.S.
Three of the six were born outside the U.S., which is the pattern most years. No country has benefited more from welcoming immigrants from around the world.
www.nobelprize.org

That's the one with cornflakes and whiskey, right? Good stuff!

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

With the power of the people behind it, the California legislature just passed the Menopause Care Equity Act. This is history in the making—finally addressing a health gap that touches millions of women. Now, it’s down to one signature. @governor.ca.gov, the pen is in your hand. 🖊️

The sad thing was that it almost always worked.

🧠✨ Women in Neuroscience History: The Pioneers Who Changed Everything

Incredible stories of 11 women who revolutionized brain science, often against impossible odds. Meet trailblazers of sleep research, memory science, neuroplasticity, and neurosurgery — from Maria Manasseina to May-Britt Moser 🧠

Thrilled to share that our work is now published in Science! ✨

We found a preference for visual objects in the mouse spatial navigation system where they dynamically refine head-direction coding. In short, objects boost our inner compass! 🧭

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

🧵1/

Following up: searching for the distribution of estrogen receptors in the brain, I realized the Allen Brain Atlas is male only. How is it possible that something this fundamental is still missing?

I still get chills

Meet Mike
*30+ years severe depression
*first hospitalized @ 13y
*20 meds
*3 rounds of ECT
*2 near-fatal suicide attempts

Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE

see videos, read paper, follow thread
doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Dr. Emily Jacobs — Stories of WiN studies how hormonal fluctuations influence the brain

Our latest profile just dropped! Dr. Emily Jacobs (‪@emilyjacobs.bsky.social‬) studies how hormonal fluctuations influence the brain. Follow the link below to listen to the full interview!

www.storiesofwin.org/profiles/202...

#WomenInNeuroscience #StoriesOfWiN

Excited to announce that my lab has moved to UC Berkeley Dept of Neuroscience and Dept of Statistics! I will be continuing to collaborate with colleagues and students in TX at UT Austin and Baylor College of Medicine, and will start new collabs in the Bay. Will be taking new grad students this fall!

It seems like neuroscience PI pairs have consistently outboxed their weight class, not sure why we discourage it so much.

Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End America’s run as the premiere techno-superpower may be over.

www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

A student in my lab recently received an NOA for an F31 (submitted August '24), so they are still going through, perhaps a bit more slowly than usual. I suspect a 9% score would very likely be funded - fingers crossed and congrats to your student either way.

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

She loved it. Grade-wise it was a bit too easy for her (she’s on 5.11/5.12 these days), but the routes were really interesting and having the river valley below is incredible

Climbing in Squamish

Climbing in Squamish

Climbing in Squamish

Climbing in Squamish

Took a break from worrying about funding to do some climbing in Squamish! (Elowen’s first multi-pitch)

A new study led by @timothysit.bsky.social reveals that different layers of mouse V1 integrate visual and non-visual signals differently.

Activity is dominated by vision (or spontaneous fluctuations) in L2/3 and by movement in L5. This leads to different geometries.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We also tried some other GC8 variants I can tell you about if you are interested, though I believe the Thy1-GC8 you asked about never finished development.

Yes, we used the TIGRE2-GCaMP8s line (037719), crossed with CaMKIIa-Cre. Although the GC8s sensor is great, we found the Tg mice had high neuorpil and low somatic expression in L2/3, not ideal for cortical imaging (never tried hippocampus) - we went back to GC6 as our workhorse Tg line.

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

NIH, NSF and NASA budgets decreases substantially in FY26. https://joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/the-white-house-vision-for-dismantling

The FY26 budget will devastate our innovation driven economy. A summary in 3 parts...

Part 1 - The White House vision for dismantling science, as described in one simple plot, means slashing budgets of NIH, NASA, NSF & going back 25 years (or more).

joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/the-white-...

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...

A two-photon view of the living brain in action. Single snapshot. Large field-of-view.

Riddle: When is an "optical invariant" is not so invariant? How can you get a larger field-of-view for free? No change in resolution or scan speed. No more stitching needed! For #MicroscopyMonday here's a new preprint to check out. 1/9

Inferring internal states across mice and monkeys using facial features - Nature Communications Here, the authors created a virtual reality task for monkeys and mice to explore if internal states like attention are similar across species. Their facial expressions during the task were similar, su...

Now out in @natcomms.nature.com‬: Mice and monkeys spontaneously shift through comparable cognitive states - and it's written all over their faces! (1/7)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Graphs showing 25 years of budgets for the National Institute of Health, NASA, and the NSF. In all cases, the proposed budget for next year is far, far below any year of the previous quarter century.

There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd.
It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.

Opinion | We’re international students at Harvard. We’re afraid to write this. But we have to speak up. Three student leaders on Trump’s attempts to throw them out of the country.

We’re international students at Harvard. We’re afraid to write this. But we have to speak up. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Huge congrats, Will! Can't wait to see the work from your lab!

The estrous cycle modulates hippocampal spine dynamics, dendritic processing, and spatial coding In this study, Wolcott et al. explore estrous-cycle modulation of hippocampal neuron structure and function. Using longitudinal two-photon imaging across the estrous cycle, they find significant modulation at the synaptic, cellular, and population levels.

Online now:

And a huge congrats to bluesky-less lead author and soon-to-be PhD Nora Wolcott. Nora was the driving force behind this project, and it couldn’t have happened without her. She’s moving to Harvard soon to start her postdoc with Bob Datta, can’t wait to see what she does next!