Carsen Stringer

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 …

Pleased to have this review out in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social. In it we discuss various aspects of the intersection between foraging behaviors and neuroscience, and offer some future directions: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨Big news!🚨
The lab is relocating to Lisbon, joining a great team of experimental and theoretical neuroscientists, and the Neurotechnology Warehouse, a new initiative to bridge basic and translational research.

I'll be sharing postdoc openings soon. Come join us in this new incarnation of the lab!

#geff v1 is released! 🎉 GEFF is a zarr-based Graph Exchange File Format with special support for tracking applications in Python and Java. Thank you to all the amazing developers who contributed at the Janelia 2025 Trackathon! liveimagetrackingtools.org/geff/

High-resolution in vivo kinematic tracking with customized injectable fluorescent nanoparticles Injectable fluorescent nanoparticles were used to track positions on and inside of freely moving animals at high resolution.

Our first preprint has been accepted for publication www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... !!
tldr: @ezeyulu00.bsky.social , @amartyapradhan.bsky.social , @dkoveal.bsky.social and I developed a method using injectable nanoparticles to turn mice into…constellations in motion. 🧵⤵️

Findings of Fact & Conclusions of Law – #261 in American Association of University Professors v. Rubio (D. Mass., 1:25-cv-10685) – CourtListener.com Judge William G. Young: ORDER entered. FINDINGS OF FACT AND RULINGS OF LAW, PURSUANT TO FED. R. CIV. P. 52(A)(Sonnenberg, Elizabeth) (Additional attachment(s) added on 9/30/2025: # 1 Main Document) (J...

BREAKING: WE WON!!!
💥 💥 💥

Federal Judge William G. Young ruled today in our lawsuit against the Trump administration that the policy of arresting, detaining, & deporting noncitizen students & faculty members for their pro-Palestinian advocacy violates the 1st Amendment.

Full ruling here:

Our new study featured in The Transmitter by @lauren-schneider.com! 🎉 Big thanks to @zeronoiselab.bsky.social and @computingnature.bsky.social for their comments on the work.

Mice do play with humans:
Our new study found that selective breeding makes mice more playful toward both humans and other mice.
We also found that both mice and hamsters produce distinct vocalizations depending on the species of their interaction partner.
authors.elsevier.com/a/1lsK5_3oCG...

@scadsai.bsky.social training coordinator @haesleinhuepf.bsky.social provided insights into his professional career in the podcast series “The Microscopists.”
If you want to know why he'll never ask biologists for better images again, click here:
🍍 themicroscopists.bitesizebio.com/episodes/rob...

Facial expressions in mice reveal latent cognitive variables and their neural correlates Nature Neuroscience - The face reveals more than just emotion. Cazettes, Reato and colleagues show that subtle facial movements reveal hidden cognitive states, reflecting the brain’s ongoing...

Did you know that facial expressions reveal more than meets the eye? 🤯

Our new study shows that even a mouse's face 🐭 can reflect hidden neural computations🧠. Turns out, facial expressions are more than just emotions!

We're so excited to see this paper out @natneuro.nature.com 🎉
🔗: rdcu.be/eIQzO

Adenosine 2A receptor–dependent activation of AMPK represses TH17 cell pathogenicity through epigenetic and metabolic reprogramming Epigenetic reprogramming that promotes oxidative metabolism suppresses TH17 cell pathogenicity.

One thing that comforts me in the current era is that, despite everything, really cool science continues to be published:

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

This could be a breakthrough for managing so many autoimmune diseases (still, in mice—don't get too excited).

The WB-ExM protocol described here works with.... every sample we tested! Here a 3do quail embryo (white= pan-protein; red=MF20) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Neuronal signatures of successful one-shot memory in mid-level visual cortex High-capacity, one-shot visual recognition memory challenges theories of learning and neural coding because it requires rapid, robust, and durable representations. Most studies have focused on the hip...

New preprint! How can you remember an image you saw once, even after seeing thousands of them? We find a role for humble mid-level visual cortex in high-capacity, one-shot learning. doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.22.677855 🧵🧪1/

Is visual cortex more like chatGPT or a masked autoencoder? Come to my BCCN seminar tomorrow at 10am ET on zoom (or read the paper) to find out! #neuroscience

Zoom: urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...
Paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

FixGrower: An efficient and robust curriculum for shaping fixation behavior in rodents Center-port fixation is a common prerequisite for many freely-moving rodent tasks in neuroscience and psychology. However, typical protocols for shaping this behavior are non-standardized and ineffici...

🛑 Attention researchers who train freely-moving rodents!

Jess Breda and I developed a protocol for training center-port nose fixation 61% faster than a previous curriculum while keeping violation rates low.

Preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Does predictive coding work in SPACE or in TIME? Most neuroscientists assume TIME, i.e. neurons predict their future sensory inputs. We show that in visual cortex predictive coding actually works across SPACE, just like the original Rao+Ballard theory #neuroscience
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Transcriptomic diversity of amygdalar subdivisions across humans and nonhuman primates Specialized cell types and links to psychiatric disorders are revealed by genetic mapping of primate amygdala neurons.

A spatially resolved transcriptomic atlas of the primate amygdala (human, macaque, and baboon) now out in Science Advances (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...). The amygdala contains 32 types of neurons with many neuron types specific to particular subdivisions.

Lots of updates from the preprint!

In another exciting development our new preprint is online:
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

This is the work of my brilliant graduate student Katerina Kourkoulou in collaboration with Maggie Liu and Arnold Mathijssen. Here is a video of the subject of our study:

New paper with @mujianing.bsky.social & @prestonlab.bsky.social! We propose a simple model for human memory of narratives: we uniformly sample incoming information at a constant rate. This explains behavioral data much better than variable-rate sampling triggered by event segmentation or surprisal.

Differential kinematic coding in sensorimotor striatum across behavioral domains reflects different contributions to movement - Nature Neuroscience Hardcastle and Marshall et al. show that striatal function is domain specific, required for task-related but not spontaneously expressed movements. This functional distinction is reflected in starkly ...

Excited to announce that my first postdoc paper is now online!

Links:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
rdcu.be/eAcN7

In it, we examine the perennial question: what changes in the brain when learning a new motor skill?

Read more below to find out 👇

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...

Wanna know about *internal* reinforcement learning? We'll show you seemingly random switches during perceptual multistability is a form informational foraging, is task-modulated & how RL explain them all! Poster B71, Wed 2-5pm, talk to @neuroprinciplist.bsky.social 2025.ccneuro.org/poster/?id=8...

Looking forward to attending #CCN2025 for the first time and presenting the first steps of my postdoc project! If you’re interested in how learning the temporal structure of the environment affects foraging decisions and how we’re testing this in a naturalistic experiment come by poster B90, Wed.

‘A million calls an hour’: Israel relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians Revealed: The Israeli military undertook an ambitious project to store a giant trove of Palestinians’ phone calls on Microsoft’s servers in Europe

Because I am angry I will share this again. One of the reasons that Israel is able to target individuals so precisely is that it collects every phone call in Gaza and stores the recordings in Microsoft Azure, then uses AI to analyze and pick targets.

Prominent Al Jazeera journalist killed in Israeli airstrike on Gaza Anas al-Sharif, known for frontline coverage, died with three colleagues in an attack outside al-Shifa hospital

Beyond outrageous: The IDF has confirmed killing noted Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif, and three of his colleagues, inside a tent for journalists outside Al-Shifa hospital.
Call your reps and insist on a halt to US support of these war crimes.
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

Summary figure for study of psilocybin's effect on cortical network connectivity.

New preprint + thread 🧵

#Psychedelics induce the formation of new synapses, but where do they connect?

Our rabies tracing study reveals that #psilocybin shifts connectivity across specific cortical networks.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

1/12

🚨 New preprint + thread 🧵
We've gone back to studying motoneuron control principles and their applications & here's paper #1:

A proof-of-concept study showing that people with tetraplegic spinal cord injury can control up to 2DoF from a single intramuscular implant

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Episode 11 - In which @erinweisbart.bsky.social and I talk about just how much we love ilastik (@ilastik-team.bsky.social) and how it's great for so many problems! Also, that you should use a small brush.

The Neuroscience Dept at American University is hiring for a tenure-track position at the Assistant level with expertise in Computational Neuroscience. Apply by Sep 15:
american.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/AU/job/Main-...
#FacultyJobs #AcademicJob #Neuroscience #CompNeuro #AI #ComputationalPsychiatry

Every reputable expert I know considers mRNA vaccine technology to be one of the most revolutionary advances in medicine in our lifetimes. Its inventors won the Nobel Prize in 2023. Shutting it down now is pointless self-harm to humanity.