James Howard

Check out our latest profile! Dr. Eve Marder studies the stability and flexibility of neural circuit function. Follow the link below to learn more!

www.storiesofwin.org/profiles/202...

#StoriesofWiN #WomenInNeuroscience #WomenInNeuro

All NIDA F31 diversity scholars officially losing their funding...

I barely have words.

Expected at this point but so so disappointing and unfair. We are effectively punishing some of America's best science students for telling the government they are from an underrepresented community.

One of the wilder political things in recent history is that Project 2025 publicly released a 900 page document laying out their plans to roll back 100 years of human progress and then during the campaign Republicans just said "no we're not :)" and then they won and now they're doing it all.

This is an obvious point, but cannot overstated. There is an enormous difference between deporting someone - where they get off a plane as a free citizen in their home country AND FUNNELING THEM INTO A BRUTAL PRISON FROM WHICH THEY HAVE NO CHANCE OF EVER EMERGING!!!

Hippocampal output suppresses orbitofrontal cortex schema cell formation - Nature Neuroscience Inactivation of the ventral subiculum does not change existing schema cells in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) but aids their formation during new learning. This challenges the idea that the OFC relies...

Very nice indeed from Schoenbaum lab www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ok so yeah, this has quickly become the #1 misunderstanding about the canceled grants

the grants are not “subsidies” or “entitlements” to Harvard or Princeton or whatever

they aren’t going into universities’ endowments

they are competitive contracts won by these universities to do research

Our Forms-H "reversion guide" is now ready to share! Thanks greatly to my grad student Elizabeth Marsh who drafted much of this and fantastic pre-award assoc. dir. Christine DiBlasi who reviewed it for us this morning. Strength and fortitude to everyone submitting! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

We need some better language for pushing back against what the administration is doing. They’re not “ending DEI.”

No. They're firing women and people of color in the military.
They’re forbidding whole fields of research.
They’re erasing trans people from existence.

Ohio! Come rally with us in Columbus at the Statehouse, 12-3p.

Also, stay tuned for details on a walkout in Cleveland, in case you're up that way and can't make the drive to Cbus.

Screen shot of the article

My student's diversity F31 has been pulled from study section even though it's the SAME APPLICATION as regular F31s, normally reviewed together in the same panel. Throwing out all the applications from URMs while the ones from white/privileged students get to be reviewed is blatant discrimination.

Disheartening and infuriating that these funding mechanisms can be erased so easily. How to communicate to a trainee that any of this was serious in the first place?

I want to highlight a special issue in honor of Sarah DuBrow, a brilliant scientist and dear friend who passed away in 2022.

We contributed a paper in which we disentangled the importance of temporal and causal relationships while participants recalled the non-linear narrative, Memento. 🧵 ⬇️ 1/9

The curious case of dopaminergic prediction errors and learning associative information beyond value - Nature Reviews Neuroscience Midbrain dopamine neurons are widely assumed to signal a unidimensional value-based prediction error. In this Perspective, Kahnt and Schoenbaum overview accumulating evidence that challenges this assu...

Going beyond integrating value - dopamine responses are more sophisticated:

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

Distributed midbrain responses signal the content of positive identity prediction errors Recent work across species has shown that midbrain dopamine neurons signal not only errors in the prediction of reward value but also in the predictio…

Excited to share a new paper just out in
@currentbiology.bsky.social. We show that patterns of prediction error signals in human midbrain carry reward identity information, with implications for the kinds of learning these error signals support. Check it out!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...