Rachel Ross, MD, PhD

Top of the photo in white text reads: "NEUROLOGICAL ISSUES LIKE CTE DON'T JUST AFFECT NFL PLAYERS." Below that is a photo of two NFL players clashing helmets. Below that is a news clipping reading: "How possible NIH cuts could threaten future treatment for neurological disease". Below that in bold white text reads: "SAVE LIVES. REMOVE RFK JR.". Below that in white text is a link reading: "standupforscience.net/impeach-rfkjr".

Setting back neurological studies for years doesn't make America healthy. Use this link to help us #RemoveRFKJr standupforscience.net/impeach-rfkjr

Please @schumer.senate.gov and all the senate democrats

This is the correct answer!!!

Im sorry! I lost my voice early and failed social time. I’m on Eleuthera for mini vaca though - can we do a hang in eastern Queens / western Long Island?

Hahah yeah, the blue tones are all slightly different

Loving this whole data and computation packed final panel of #acnp2026 on sex differences and similarities in the organization of the brain helmed by @elvisha.bsky.social, @bogglerapture.bsky.social, Jason Lerch, and @tollkuhn.bsky.social

Btw just to note, it is uncanny that we all have these nearly-the-same glasses from different years of the same brand as NONE of us have met others with the same color combo/style in the wild.

Who wore it better @ahmarilab.bsky.social fashions of #acnp2026 fancy glasses version @jungheelee.bsky.social , Barbara Rothbaum, Karen Neirenberg, and me

Congratulations to Bill Carlezon on a very successful year of presiding over the ACNP and cheers to Deanna Barch for the coming year’s stewardship! #acnp2026

Exceptional presentation by the experts on the interaction between sex and gender in biology, in our society, and what we all can do in support and to help combat the misinformation flying around. Special thanks to Kale Edmison, PhD putting this resource kit together drive.google.com/drive/folder...

Next, Gary Aston-Jones of Rutgers posits orexin signal through its receptor HCRT1R in a VTA projecting pathway is a link between binge intake of illicit (cocaine) and naturalistic (HFD) appetitive substances.

Kicking off the appetite and addiction session @borglandlab.bsky.social shows high fat diet disinhibits OFC and impairs outcome devaluation, which is associated with astrocyte hypertrophy and inflammatory cytokine expression #acnp2026

@brenda-curtis.bsky.social

Gorgeous distinguished lectures from @goldenneuron.bsky.social and NIH Brenda Curtis on the use of machine learning models in animal and human phenotyping to create open source, scalable, effective resources to understand the brain and behavior for health and disease #acnp2026

Remarkably, Yuefeng Huang, a post doc in Rita Goldstein’s lab at Sinai, started by sharing that SUD is understudied in women compared to men, though it’s well known that risks and tolerance are v different. They’ve designed a cue-reactivity task to capture the sex differences more effectively.

Moving to humans, Anna Konova of Rutgers implicates neurocognitive mechanisms underlying opioid use risk increase in females through estradiol fluctuation, which scales with striatal reward error signals

A graph showing a linear decline in the number of NIH award from ~10000 to ~2500 as a function of increasing percentage of grants multi-year funded.

I have been modeling the impact of multi-year funding.

Based on fairly reasonable assumptions, 50% multi-year funding, the number of new and competing awards is anticipated to drop to approximately 6000 compared to 10,000 had there been no multi-year funding above the historical background rate.

Next fantastic talk by Erin Calipari showing incredible novel function of estradiol to potentiate dopamine release by direct action on nicotinic receptor, leading to observable functional differences between male and females, and females at different life stage #perimenopause #acnp2026

Outstanding #acnp2026 day 2 start with @nicolagrissom.bsky.social reminding us of the principle that sex differences in neural mechanisms may drive behavior similarity. Leaning into the ambiguity of hidden markov models and showing that females exploit more; males explore more in a set shift task

Noted binarizing of gender identity pins, not consistent with prior meetings options or the spectrum of #LGBTQIA2S+ gender identity. 🤨🤨🤨 #acnp2026

Here we go #acnp2026 bahamania

Dear academic internet friends, I’m working on an R01 on our novel early life model of food insecurity, which the federal govt no longer recognizes (as of ~1 week ago cancelling the annual report). Should I re-write my 3 line public health narrative (bonkers) to de-center that topic?

This. Read the article by @tressiemcphd.bsky.social it is wide angle, big picture, thought-provoking, critical reading for anyone who’s still trying to “understand” what’s happening all around us (in the US). www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/o...

It’s not just that video is too slow. It is that. It’s also not my own understanding happening. I also truly believe that the mind and life I want to have does not happen through watching but does through reading. Wild that this is even a little bit provocative but I suspect that mostly just online

People get so angry about this, I’ve found that interesting. There is definitely some resistance to the idea of reading, not just the act of doing it.

But yeah I am not watching a video, ever, if I can help it.

This wknd, WSJ reported the Dept of Ag is ending its annual report on household food security. Started in the 1990s to help state and local officials distribute food assistance. Last year’s report found that 18 million U.S. households experienced food insecurity during 2023.

It is SO insanely cool. Clinically we don’t expect to see changes in “intelligence scales” in adulthood. But hello primary cilia - let’s figure you out!

I highly recommend reading the discussion that one reviewer called “highly significant, as it suggests MC4R agonists may hold therapeutic potential…for metabolic control…and neuropsychiatric well being” (thank you to reviewer 2). Cheers to more depth in the interface between these fields!

I’m proud of this work for two reasons. 1. This was Katie’s first research as a med student, and she dove deep to produce this very thoughtful manuscript 2. This puts a clinical correlate for my lab’s work out there - pharmacologically targeting the melanocortin 4 receptor affects cognitive function

Frontiers | Case Report: Improvement in cognitive functioning following setmelanotide initiation in a patient with Bardet-Biedl syndrome Bardet-Biedl syndrome (BBS) is a rare genetic condition that results from mutations in a variety of genes crucial for ciliary transport. Consequently, patien...

Humble case report from prior Ross lab member Katie Kuk, who is now a psych intern, on the PREVIOUSLY UNHEARD OF improvement in cognitive function in a patient with a rare developmental disorder after starting a med to treat obesity. www.frontiersin.org/journals/end...