Josh Dudman

It was a wonderful inspiration teaching an early Champalimaud course with Adam many years ago. Watching him assemble a sophisticated data acquisition rig in an afternoon and basking in his incredible joy and excitement for discoveries to come. Rest in peace Adam.

Happy birthday Tom Waits ♥️

Just to say I very much agree at least with the general perspective you are offering.

Hippocampal representations of foraging trajectories depend upon spatial context - Nature Neuroscience Model-based analysis of learning and neural activity in mice trained to find reward in both a spatial, navigational context and a relational, non-navigational context revealed dissociable contribution...

Which greatly refined a proposal in some prior work that generative models are needed to explain behavior well www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Composing trajectories for rapid inference of navigational goals Animals efficiently learn to navigate their environment. In the laboratory, naive mice explore their environment via highly structured trajectories and can learn to localize new spatial targets in as ...

I am very much in favor, we just put out a recent preprint thinking about learning to navigate from the perspective of generative models of trajectories www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Join us for Fall 2026. In our group, you can run studies from human behavior and neuroimaging, to large-scale NHP ephys, and join them up with a robust computational foundation. Bonus: you can help build the reading list.

The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine A quiet policy change means the government is making fewer bets on long-term science.

Major reductions in science funding across the board - important to have detailed data. Includes big cuts in fellowships that are a critical mechanism for developing young talent in US graduate school programs.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Jobs | Psychological & Brain Sciences Tenured/Tenure-track position in Cognitive Psychology Open Date Dec 01, 2025 Salary Range or Pay Grade The expected academic base salary range for this position is $110,000- $144,500 (Assistant Profes...

Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins is inviting applications for 3 open-rank tenured/tenure-track positions in (1) Behavioral Neuroscience, (2) Cognitive Neuroscience, and (3) Cognitive Psychology.

pbs.jhu.edu/about/jobs/

A Battle with My Blood When I was diagnosed with leukemia, my first thought was that this couldn’t be happening to me, to my family.

A touching piece by Tatiana Schlossberg www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

+1. LLMs have taught me two things about myself. More of my thought is prob search like than I appreciate. And more of my language use turns on good sounding statistical structure than I realized. “Poetics” in Weathersby’s terminology. I do hope in both cases it is less than _all_ of what I do…

Fascinating. I appreciate the detailed description. I agree modern LLMs are amazing and the work here is really interesting. The last bit: There are different ways to think, a subset resemble search imo. A few things you say above do feel like search over existing code (eg must be in numpy not Jax)

It sounds like the prompts were to do curve fitting so any repo on GitHub curve fitting with stretched exponentials could be in search, right? One could imagine the LLM making a mistake that is useful. Like curve fitting for “imaging” (data) being scored as related to “images” or “vision”

I would also imagine GitHub has many repos with Python code for fitting stretched exponentials. Seems reasonable given prompts it searches over repos and tries out programs that already exist? I don’t think “applied in neuroscience” means anything to an llm - part of its strength in a way.

Right there are papers that say nonlinearity should be a free parameter in vision tuning curves + many Wikipedia etc entries on various functional forms ; I was interested in your intuition having so thoughtfully interacted with the LLM/training. Agreed that this is often what progress is. Thanks!

Learning the Nonlinearity of Neurons from Natural Visual Stimuli Learning in neural networks is usually applied to parameters related to linear kernels and keeps the nonlinearity of the model fixed. Thus, for successful models, properties and parameters of the nonl...

I am curious whether you think of the AI scientist as being prompted well to find previous examples I n its training set (eg @kordinglab.bsky.social ‘s paper ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/doc...) vs “coming up with it” which implies more of a train of reasoning? Cool work and LLM useful either way.

To study how animals understand the physical world (and the rules that govern its dynamics), @jinyao-y.bsky.social trains rats to play fetch with robots 🐀🤖🎾

To learn more, come to our poster Tuesday morning!
[Board W11] Rats learn and use intuitive physics knowledge to solve fetch tasks.
#SfN2025

Clinical Trials Affected by Research Grant Terminations at the National Institutes of Health This cross-sectional study summarizes the number of trials with terminated grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and calculates the proportion of affected trials among those with previou...

Important new analysis identifying the scope of clinical trials disrupted because of NIH shenanigans.

> 74 thousand trial participants affected

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

1/4

Just had a fantastic visit to GA Tech a couple weeks ago. Highly recommend.

Foraging as an ethological framework for neuroscience The study of foraging is central to a renewed interest in naturalistic behavior in neuroscience. Applying a foraging framework grounded in behavioral …

Foraging as an ethological framework for neuroscience

From the amazing @lauragrima.bsky.social and colleagues - definitely looking forward to reading this!

#neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition

3 Postdoctoral Research Fellows Champalimaud Foundation (Fundação D. Anna de Sommer Champalimaud e Dr.

🚨Job alert🚨

The lab has up to *3 postdoc openings* for comp systems neuroscientists interested in describing and manipulating neural population dynamics mediating behaviour

This is part of a collaborative ARIA grant "4D precision control of cortical dynamics"

euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/383909

No notes

🌟 Apply to lead a lab at Janelia 🌟

We’re #hiring Group Leaders in our Computation & Theory research area.

🔹 5-year renewable appointment
🔹 Internal funding + generous resources
🔹 Collaboration across disciplines

📅 Apply by Nov. 4 👉 https://janelia.link/groupleader

Excited to share our new #biorxivpreprint:
“Sexual dimorphism in the complete connectome of the Drosophila male central nervous system” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We describe the #connectomics reconstruction and analysis of an entire adult #maleCNS #drosophila central nervous system. 1/10

🪰 A team of researchers has unveiled the complete connectome of a male fruit fly central nervous system—a seamless map of all the neurons in the brain and nerve cord of a single male fruit fly and the millions of connections between them.
🔗 https://hhmi.news/4o3EJnk

Male CNS Connectome A team of researchers has unveiled the complete connectome of a male fruit fly central nervous system —a seamless map of all the neurons in the brain and nerve cord of a single male fruit fly and the ...

We're very proud to be releasing the complete male fly CNS connectome!

It's the product of a huge team effort here at Janelia in partnership with the Cambridge Fly Connectomics group (@jefferis.bsky.social and colleagues), plus invaluable collaborators.

More soon...
www.janelia.org/project-team...

A small primer on the #NobelPrize awarded to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi today. This prize was for combining two separate fields of immunology research - genetic research on IPEX and immunology research of regulatory T cells (#Tregs), with enormous impact on biology/medicine

The neural control & computation lab is recruiting!

If you're interested in using large-scale neural population recordings to study how the brain learns to produce complex and flexible behaviours, please get in touch.

www.ncclab.ca

HHMI adopts Plan U journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

The Illusion of Readiness: Stress Testing Large Frontier Models on Multimodal Medical Benchmarks Large frontier models like GPT-5 now achieve top scores on medical benchmarks. But our stress tests tell a different story. Leading systems often guess correctly even when key inputs like images are r...

👀

www.arxiv.org/abs/2509.18234

Huntington's disease successfully treated for first time One of the most devastating diseases finally has a treatment that can slow its progression and transform lives, tearful doctors tell BBC.

www.bbc.com/news/article... science ftw! Amazing work described here.