Malcolm Campbell

Research Technician Research Technician position available in the Grienberger lab at Brandeis University. We are a new neuroscience group studying the cellular basis of learning and memory in the mammalian brain. This is...

We’re looking for a new Research Tech! Our research tech is heading to graduate school (very exciting!), which means we’re recruiting someone new to join our team. The position involves hands-on neuroscience research in a collaborative environment.
brandeis.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/Jobs/job/Bra...

🚨🚨New Preprint Alert!🚨🚨

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Animal learning is painfully slow (at least initially). Yet, well trained animals can learn very fast, sometimes displaying few-shot inference. How does this transition occur?

Isn’t calcium likely to be more compartmentalized than voltage?

I am incredibly excited and proud to share my first preprint from my postdoc! Thank you to all of the co-authors for all your hard work!
Check out the paper for big insights into plasticity mechanisms in navigation circuits! And surprising motifs for inhibitory synaptic plasticity!

Cell Type-Specific Hormonal Signaling Configures Hypothalamic Circuits for Parenting Parenting behavior emerges from hormonally sensitive circuits, but how distinct circuit components are affected by, and contribute to, sex and state dependent changes in infant caregiving remains uncl...

New paper alert!!...🤩 Led by @blogeman.bsky.social, we identify how cell type-specific hormonal responses in the hypothalamus tunes parenting behavior in males and females 🐭🧠🍼. Highlights in thread 👇 1/6

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I am thrilled to share our latest work led by @zurisullivan.bsky.social in collaboration with @moffittlab.bsky.social ! We find that the brain encodes distinct, pathogen-specific sickness states across behavior, physiology, neural activity, and gene expression 1/6

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This is insane

Congratulations to my wonderful colleague Nao Uchida @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social now Jeff C. Tarr Professor! 👏🤩🧠🎉

Gorgeous. The trumpet player is Nils Petter Molvær, a well known jazz musician. Love the combination.

A headline: Scientists have discovered a 'third state' between life and death

"Postdoc in the job market"

Heading to San Diego for #sfn25 today! I’ll be presenting a poster on this work Monday afternoon!

looking forward to meeting neuroscientists! please stop by my poster or reach out if you’re going and want to talk motor neuro/behavior, evolution, neuroethology…or whatever else! 🧠🥳 #neuroskyence

Molecular and Cellular Cognition Society 2025 Annual Meeting Fourwaves - Molecular and Cellular Cognition Society 2025 Annual Meeting

For anyone attending the pre-SFN Molecular and Cellular Cognition Society meeting, I'll be giving a short talk there on Friday (Nov 14) at 4:20 pm

event.fourwaves.com/MCCS25/pages

I'll be presenting a poster on this at SFN on Monday morning, poster QQ5. Come say hi!
Looking forward to hearing about all the great science everyone's been doing!

How do VTA DA neurons sculpt downstream representations to reinforce actions? VERY excited about our new preprint (by Alex Pan Vazquez & @czimmerman.bsky.social )

Environmental Novelty Modulates Rapid Cortical Plasticity During Navigation In novel environments, animals quickly learn to navigate, and position-correlated spatial representations rapidly emerge in both the retrosplenial cortex (RSC) and primary visual cortex (V1). However,...

How does the brain balance learning new things without overwriting what it already knows? Our new paper tackles this long-standing stability–plasticity dilemma during active navigation. With Tony Drinnenberg from the Deisseroth Lab (@deisseroth.bsky.social)
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

🧠🌟🐭 Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity!

We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have:
(1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs)
(2) better hand dexterity
(3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN number🧵

Thanks Ben!

Ezra Klein show?

A parabrachial hub for need-state control of enduring pain - Nature Activity in a set of parabranchial neurons in the mouse brain is increased during chronic pain, predicts coping behaviour, and can be modulated by circuits activated by survival threats.

Finally out: our recent work with Nick Betley is a view into how the brain reshapes its behavior in the face of competing survival needs- and also a potential angle on treatment targets for enduring pain.

A brief rundown...

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

Had a blast writing about this new @currentbiology.bsky.social study from @leo-perrier.bsky.social, Lény Lego et al. on African striped mice

The paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

Dispatch with some context about why it's so cool: authors.elsevier.com/a/1luVG3QW8S...

#bioacoustics
#neuroskyence

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

Thanks Kameron!

Also thank you, I’m really glad you enjoyed it!

It didn’t make it into the preprint but dopamine neurons respond to D2 stim as a sign-flipped TD error, which fits nicely in that framework

Great question… my current thinking based on plasticity rules is that they learn pessimistically biased sign-flipped value from dopamine dips, as in @sromeropinto.bsky.social’s and Adam Lowet’s papers

Thanks Alex!

Thank you!

Thank you Laura!

Thanks Adrien! Yes, that’s exactly right!

Thanks Eddy!