Robyn St. Laurent

Liftoff: New lab alerts Learn about early-career scientists starting their own labs.

In this month’s “Liftoff,” ‪ @agonru.bsky.social talks about the importance of taking care of the little things, and Andrew Kesner says that the real key to success lies in your collaborator community.

By @franciscorr25.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/liftoff-new-...

Untangling the multifaceted VTA responses to stress Stress has profound impacts on the ventral tegmental area (VTA). However, the complex and opposing effects of stress on the VTA have limited our abili…

New from @dralexharris.bsky.social, Ula Skupio, and myself in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social: a long in the works review trying to untangle what stress is doing in the VTA, and what the piles of confusing data might teach us about what the VTA is doing at all.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

U.S. researchers are speaking up for science in local newspapers Through two grassroots efforts, more than 80 op eds have been published in news outlets across the country

U.S. researchers are speaking up for science in local newspapers | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

Sex‐Specific Adaptations to VTA Circuits Following Subchronic Stress Subchronic variable stress, a paradigm shown to have divergent behavioral effects in males and females, induces shared and distinct physiological adaptations in the VTA. While both males and females ...

New work from my lab looking at how dopamine neurons are affected by stress and males and females! This paper comes to you through three rounds of major building construction, a pandemic, six months that we could not get TTX, some animal facility shenanigans and now is here on your internet!

Yay Abby! Resiliency Queen!

Current situation at Harvard Medical School for NIH grants view.u.hms.harvard.edu?qs=3ed8c01b9...

Summer Research Program in Neuroscience & Computation For undergrads interested in exploring the brain and learning how to code No prior experience necessary! June - August 2025 UCSF Mission Bay campus 25-30 hours/week commitment Learn more & apply: http://tiny.cc/ucsfcompneuro/ Students from backgrounds historically underrepresented in STEM are encouraged to apply!

New opportunity for Bay Area undergrads to gain computational neuroscience exposure and training!

I’m teaming up with @neuronush.bsky.social to offer this to students in our communities 💕🧠🧪

Please share with any students who might be interested!

Tiny.cc/ucsfcompneuro

BREAKING: Reports that Trump would try to cut NIH's budget by 40% have come true.

The request released moments ago would:
- Cut $18 BILLION to NIH's $47b budget
- Eliminate NIMHD, NCCIH, FIC
- Collapse ICs into five 'focus areas'

There's also a long screed about NIH's deficiencies.

Exclusive: NSF stops awarding new grants and funding existing ones US science funder also plans to screen grant applications for compliance with ‘agency priorities’.

🔔BREAKING🔔

The NSF has frozen all research grant awards—cutting off life-saving science midstream and demanding ideological screenings for future funding.

This is censorship disguised as oversight.

Here’s how you can help us spread the word ➡️🧵(1/3):
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

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.

As someone who has spent the last 25 years studying sex differences in brain function and behavior and the last 10 advocating (loudly) for SABV and working to help my colleagues implement the policy into their work, this is utterly heartbreaking.

Very creative, San Francisco! 8647 ✊

Check out the latest -From Our Neurons To Yours- podcast episode! I discuss my work using large speech and language systems as "model species" to understand how the human brain processes language 🧠

This is awesome Christine! Gladstone does an awesome job with their summer PUMAS program and I bet they’d be willing to share materials from their workshops.

A multi-institutional investigation of psilocybin's effects on mouse behavior Studies reporting novel therapeutic effects of psychedelic drugs are rapidly emerging. However, the reproducibility and reliability of these findings could remain uncertain for years. Here, we impleme...

A much-needed joint effort from five labs to see which behavioral effects of psilocybin in mice are reliable, and which may be spurious 🐁🍄

@theborislab.bsky.social @mazenkheirbek.bsky.social @indigenerd.bsky.social Vikaas Sohal and Stephan Lammel 👏

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

I may be tired and a little hoarse, but as I said again and again on the Senate floor, this is a moment where we cannot afford to be silent, when we must speak up.

📣 Across the U.S., cuts to federal funding for health research are projected to cause losses of $16B and 68,500 jobs. How will YOUR area be impacted?

Excited to share SCIMaP, a website that our team has created to communicate the impact of funding cuts. #PsychSciSky #MedicalSky

scienceimpacts.org

I was delighted to have an editorial in my hometown paper on the administration's threat to the NIH and what it means for the health and welfare of my peeps. For the good it may do, I urge you to also write one @sciencehomecoming.bsky.social

Bonus: It's cathartic to write a scream into the void.

Congrats Uma!!

a dog is sitting on top of a bed with the words `` i go to bed now night '' written on it . Alt: a dog is sitting on top of a bed with the words `` i go to bed now night '' written on it .

submitted my 4th grant application of 2025 ✅✅✅✅

On Thursday it had a notice about scheduled maintenance for Mar 8-9

Agree! From my n=1 experience in writing this, it has reached many more people than I expected and some people mentioned to me that they had no idea how widespread the effects of science funding are!

Robyn St. Laurent: Why science funding matters more than you think Cutting funding to NIH and and NSF does more than take away career paths for our upcoming generations; it threatens the well-being of people.

From Newmarket, NH, 🫎 to Stanford, neuroscientist Robyn St. Laurent researches OCD & addiction to develop new treatments. ‘The opportunities I had shouldn’t be the exception; they should be the foundation for the next generation.’ 🧪🏠
@robynstlaurent.bsky.social
www.seacoastonline.com/story/opinio...

Robyn St. Laurent: Why science funding matters more than you think Cutting funding to NIH and and NSF does more than take away career paths for our upcoming generations; it threatens the well-being of people.

I wrote an opinion column for the local newspaper in southern NH where I am from. Thanks to @sciencehomecoming.bsky.social for the inspiration! Please consider doing this in your hometown! #SciAdvocate 🧪👩‍🔬

www.seacoastonline.com/story/opinio...

SfN joins 600 organizations & more than 3,500 people across the country in @researchamerica.bsky.social's coalition letter urging Congress to protect vital NIH funding.

Read the full letter: bit.ly/3XhgFCJ

#NeuroSky #NeuroAdvocate

Graduate Reductions Across Biomedical Sciences (2025)

I created a brief spreadsheet of reductions I've heard of so far. Any additions you know of (especially if you have the links/receipts) would be great: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Join us! Science Homecoming helps scientists reconnect with communities by writing about the importance of science funding in their hometown newspapers. We’ve mapped every small newspaper in the U.S. and provide resources to get you started. Help science get back home 🧪🔬🧬 🏠

sciencehomecoming.com

🔗 Contact your representatives using SfN’s Action Alert Center: bit.ly/413khdN

#NeuroSky

Today a reporter reached out to me after seeing posts I made on Bluesky about what’s going on at NIH.

Keep typing, keep talking, keep shouting, because your voice goes beyond the void.

It’s overwhelming but here are a few simple things that you can do today as an individual: call your govt reps, educate yourself on which programs at your institution are at risk, support your affected colleagues, vocalize your support of DEI, refuse to normalize the restrictions as they roll in