Andrew MacAskill

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

🚨Amazing opportunity: position available for a new associate/full professor at the FIL @imagingneuroucl.bsky.social @uclbrainscience.bsky.social! Do you have a neuroimaging-focused research program? Get applying! 🚨

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Questionable incentives Why is the CEO of the world’s largest demining organisation defending banned landmines?

The story — written by journalist @emmaanne.bsky.social — raises tough questions about the perverse incentives at play in mine action.

Emma reached out @thehalotrust.bsky.social for comment. They declined.

Read the full story: spoileralerts.substack.com/p/questionab...

Similar to posts before - doing this in a 'many lines of evidence' approach too is probably ideal - no one golden expt. Just a series of thought out experiments designed to test the limits of a theory, each adding weight to the next.

saying this out loud makes me feel old...

Was thinking of a way to say something similar as eloquently as this! I think it needs travel in both directions - actively trying to find testable hypotheses that support (and don't support) a theory is key

Yep we use this one - there was another but it got bought by millipore and discontinued.... Zzz

its almost as if we live near each other isnt it 😅

Depending on what your 'standard' is - Columbia rd flower market followed by hackney city farm is always a nice Sunday time!

a picture of UCL in the sunshine (which is always as it never rains in London)

apply! its a fantastic, collaborative and energetic department investigating physiology and neuroscience across scales - based in beautiful UCL in London

Obviously expertise in research areas that fall within our strategic priorities of engineering biology and artificial intelligence are also particularly encouraged

Expertise at the cellular and molecular levels are particularly encouraged. We are interested in applications from outstanding researchers in modalities such as targeted protein degraders, protein-protein interaction disruptors, therapeutic antibodies, or de novo protein design.

Lecturer / Associate Professor - London, England job with University College London (UCL) | 12840324 About usThe Division of Biosciences at UCL is one of the world's foremost centres for research and teaching in the biological sciences. We have an out

🚨🚨Job Alert🚨🚨!! Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology are recruiting a new lecturer/associate professor! an amazing opportunity to join our fantastic dept! @ucl.ac.uk @ucllifesciences.bsky.social @uclnpp.bsky.social post here:
www.nature.com/naturecareer...

Millions across US turn out for ‘No Kings’ protests against Donald Trump Protesters demonstrate at about 2,000 sites nationwide on day US president holds military parade in Washington

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

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...

This is a nice paper which applies and refines some of the ideas we put forward in our Psych Review paper. Our model combined multiple Successor Representations which it switches between based on uncertainty. Jess's model adds reward outcomes to this process and captures splitter cells and more!

How does in-context learning emerge in attention models during gradient descent training?

Sharing our new Spotlight paper @icmlconf.bsky.social: Training Dynamics of In-Context Learning in Linear Attention
arxiv.org/abs/2501.16265

Led by Yedi Zhang with @aaditya6284.bsky.social and Peter Latham

Really interesting stuff here!! Looking forward to digging in

Memory by a thousand rules: Automated discovery of functional multi-type plasticity rules reveals variety & degeneracy at the heart of learning Synaptic plasticity is the basis of learning and memory, but the link between synaptic changes and neural function remains elusive. Here, we used automated search algorithms to obtain thousands of str...

We just pushed “Memory by a 1000 rules” onto bioRxiv, where we use clever #ML to find #plasticity quadruplets (EE, EI, IE, II) that learn basic stability in spiking nets. Why is it cool? We find 1000s!! of solutions, and they don’t just stabilise. They #memorise! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Finishing your undergraduate and interested in neuroscience research?

The Neuroscience streams of our Biosciences MRes degree provide a unique opportunity to conduct a year-long research project in any UCL neuro lab, plus taught modules to prepare you for a PhD.

🧪🧠📈

www.ucl.ac.uk/biosciences/...

Lots of cool experimental predictions here - stay tuned for some experiments that test them!

Congrats to the fantastic Jess P for her new paper! She compared how feature Vs outcome focussed agents learn to solve contextual inference problems. She found that you need a balance of both to learn these tasks - and that this mix recapitulates pfc and hippocampal activity in rodent tasks!

Congrats Josh! Really cool!

Systems consolidation reorganizes hippocampal engram circuitry Nature - A study shows that loss of memory precision associated with systems consolidation can be explained by neurogenesis-dependent reorganization of engram circuitry within the hippocampus over...

Sharing a new paper from the lab. This paper, led by Sangyoon Ko, represents a merging of two longstanding research themes in the lab-- adult neurogenesis and systems consolidation.

rdcu.be/el18q

A short thread follows for those interested.

1/n

*** Come join us !! We are recruiting !! ***
How does the brain generate beliefs that go beyond direct experience? How do these mechanisms go awry in psychosis?

The Barron lab tinyurl.com/bdf4drjf @MRCBNDU @NDCNOxford are recruiting a new postdoc tinyurl.com/ut4vbwt4 to work in mouse models

i will corrupt you yet...

Reward-based prosocial choices in mice https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.21.639526v1

Well it is a very small glass...

Ht bsky.app/profile/mkon...

🥺

Amazing! Looking forward to reading properly! Congrats!

BBSRC / MRC responsive mode is exactly this?