Jaime Castrellon

Photo of a lab group smiling in front of a fountain at UCLA

We’re hiring a technician!!

We’re an inclusive team of behavioral neuroscientists trying to discover the brain circuits of learning, decision making, and habit. More info👇
wassumlab.psych.ucla.edu/join-the-lab/

Job posting:
jobs.ucla.edu/jobs/8968

Neurocomputational basis of learning when choices simultaneously affect both oneself and others Nature Communications - When learning to make choices that simultaneously affect the self and others, asymmetric encoding of information guides future social behaviors across mutually beneficial,...

📢 Thrilled to share our paper is out now in @natcomms.nature.com

Shared computations underlie how we acquire actions that are mutually beneficial, instrumentally harmful (benefits self at the expense of others), altruistic (benefit others at the expense of self), or mutually costly

🧵 rdcu.be/eL8mZ

@joann-trejo.bsky.social, @marymunson4.bsky.social and I have a commentary in @natcellbio.nature.com on recent attacks on DEI in biomedical research: "If scientific research, especially biomedical research, is meant to serve everyone, then it requires that everyone has an opportunity to participate"

Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying the distinct motivational influences of reward and punishment on cognitive control Human motivation is fundamentally shaped by one's expectations of the reward they could earn for good performance or the punishment they would avoid for poor performance. However, the extent to which ...

Thrilled to share our new preprint highlighting distinct neurocomputational mechanisms underlying how reward and punishment determine adaptive cognitive control - a massive fMRI study and collaborative team effort with the @shenhavlab.bsky.social 🧠

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

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

a man with his eyes closed is wearing a plaid shirt and a blue jacket . ALT: a man with his eyes closed is wearing a plaid shirt and a blue jacket .

So... I did some analysis of grants that did receive noncompetitive renewals.

In particular, I looked a those award where the title of the grant changed.

Warning: The results are just what I expected, but oooph...

1/4

Thanks to publicly available data collected and shared by @dvsmith.bsky.social, @dfareri.bsky.social et al. supported by @srndna.bsky.social

New preprint🔊🧓: Why do we trust our friends more? We show that people are more efficient at evaluating information when making trust decisions about friends. This is preserved across the adult life span. W/ @jjfcastrellon.bsky.social . Feedback welcome: osf.io/tkpmv_v1

How do children figure out what other people believe, especially when those beliefs are wrong?

And what kinds of mental effort does it take to get that right?

New paper out now:

GitHub - wj-mitchell/DSPAN_Details: Information and Materials Related to My NIH DSPAN F99/K00 Award Information and Materials Related to My NIH DSPAN F99/K00 Award - wj-mitchell/DSPAN_Details

I updated my NIH D-SPAN repo (github.com/wj-mitchell/...) to reflect the current state of the mechanism, which - like other diversity awards - is not good. It made my day the handful of times folks reached out to share how it helped. I'm leaving it otherwise unaltered in memoriam.

NIH freezes all research grants to Columbia University Amid negotiations with Trump, the university could risk losing nearly $700 million

Exclusive: Weeks after President Donald Trump’s administration ordered NIH to pull $250 million in biomedical research grants to Columbia University, the agency is freezing all remaining grant money owed to the university until further notice. scim.ag/4if5Rg1

An illustration of the profile of a Black woman with locks, adorned with shells and gold beads and rings. She is staring to the left and wearing an orange tank top. There is a pink glow on parts of her skin. A sagittal brain section is shown on her head. The image is against a creamy-colored background. The text reads “Black In Neuro Annual Report 2023-2024”. The artist details are on the bottom: “Cover Art by Ni-ka Ford, CMI- Enlight Visuals”

It’s here! It’s here! Our Black In Neuro Annual Report for FY23-24 (July 1, 2023 - June 30, 2024) 🎉

We would like to thank our BIN team, Daniela Franco for preparing this report, and Ni-ka Ford for the beautiful cover art 😍

static1.squarespace.com/static/5f022...

🧵 1/8

New work by Mercedes Munoz with @yarrowdunham.bsky.social @olsonista.bsky.social Kristin Pauker & May Ling Halim! White kids are above chance in ingroup biases in attitudes, resource allocation & interpersonal distance; results vary for Black, Latine, & Asian kids
online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art...

every person involved in this needs to be in prison

I’m at SAS! Come check out my poster during tomorrow’s session if you want to hear about my undergrad thesis work!

This is a fucking shitty ass day but at some point STEM faculty have to recognize that what we are seeing happen with federal funding of biomedical research through the NIH and NSF is being used and manipulated to punish and defund higher education institutions.

Le Monde reporting that a French scientist traveling to Houston to attend a conference was denied entry to US after a search of his phone & computer revealed messages critical of Trump's science cuts, "which [says CPB] conveyed hatred of Trump & could be qualified as terrorism". Computer confiscated

Flyer for the Stand Up for Science rally featuring an image of a Statue of Liberty

Los Angeles people: join us 12pm March 7 for a rally for science at the Federal Building in Westwood, and please spread the word to any pro-science folks you know. @standupforscience.bsky.social @latimes.com @ktla.com @abc7.bsky.social @kcrw.com @laist.com @crooked.com @nbcla.com @foxla.bsky.social

So excited to announce Curiosity, Information Seeking & Exploration conference: 30th Sept-1st Oct @Brown University. Amazing speakers sites.google.com/view/informa... and free!

Abstract submissions open until 7th July

w/ Romy Frömer, Ohad Dan, @hayleydorfman.bsky.social, Matt Nassar. Please share!

A dual-pathway architecture for stress to disrupt agency and promote habit - Nature Adaptive decision-making often requires an understanding of our agency in a situation; however, chronic stress can disrupt agency and promote inflexible, habitual behaviour by turning off a brain path...

🚨📃New Wassum Lab Paper📃🚨

Out today, @jackiegio.bsky.social discovered brain pathways that support agency and habit and how chronic stress disrupts them to rob of us our agency and cause us to form rigid habits 🧵👇

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Free full text: rdcu.be/eaxEv

Firings are happening right now at the National Science Foundation. Essential staff are being cut.

This isn’t about the budget. If it was, they’d be going after the military (17%) or state appropriations (38%). NSF is 0.7% of the federal budget. All federal employees make up only 4% of the budget.

Thanks to all of the NIHers and their friends who reached out to me. I am still here (DM me or Signal jeremymberg.78)

I still have a very incomplete picture but based on what I have been told, the damage to NIH and to many wonderful people who work(ed) there is/was impossible for me to imagine

1/n

The damage today (actually yesterday) to the intramural program appears to especially bad.

It also appears (although I need more confirmation) that most or all of the tenure track investigators in their first 2 years in several, and perhaps all, institutes were terminated.

7/n

Get in dorks, we're going protesting!

STAND UP FOR SCIENCE WITH US ON MARCH 7TH, 2025
WASHINGTON DC AND EVERY STATE CAPITOL

Because science is for everyone!

Find us at standupforscience2025.org

#standupforscience2025 #scienceforall #sciencenotsilence

BREAKING: 22 states sue NIH over Trump administration's new 15% cap on overhead for federal research grants. Suit filed federal court in Boston contends lifesaving research 'will grind to a halt' under the policy. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

a picture of a cartoon character with the words call me on it ALT: a picture of a cartoon character with the words call me on it

F99/R00 AND K99/R00 DIVERSITY AWARD APPLICANTS

If you have applied for a F99/R00 or K99/R00 Diversity award and the study section for review is not listed on your eRA Commons page, please reach out to me.

DM me, email berg.grants.2029@gmail.com, Signal jeremymberg.78

THANK YOU

Update: They were removed from our reviewer assignments completely. I'm so sorry to all those graduate students. Anonymous to protect the identity of the NIH employee I spoke to...I am on study section next month to discuss F awards. We were just instructed to put the F31-Diversity applications on the bottom of our priority list for review because there is a chance we may not be able to review them. My heart is breaking for the grad students and their mentors that put so much work into these just for them to be disqualified and thrown out.

Just in case you thought that removing DEI criteria would mean that everyone is competing equally: NIH is removing grad students from underrepresented backgrounds from the applicant pool altogether. Their applications will not be considered. Other students, not from these backgrounds, will be.

Get in Dorks, we are going protesting.

STAND UP FOR SCIENCE. MARCH 7th 12-4pm. DC AND YOUR STATE CAPITALS.

More information to come.

Can’t believe I’m typing this but…

FUCK IT IM PLANNING A STAND UP FOR SCIENCE PROTEST IN DC.

If you want to be involved, be dm me. I’m nervous, I’ve never done this before, but we gotta be the change we want to see in the world.

The NIH 6 months ago, vs the NIH now. 🧵

Video 👇🏼 NIH 6 months ago. A hallway full of colorful posters profiling women and POC researchers.

Shared by @amritalaxshmy.bsky.social on the bird site.

🧪