James Antony

Trump freezes $200 million in UCLA science and medical research funding, citing antisemitism The Trump administration has frozen roughly $200 million in National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and other federal agency-funded research at UCLA, citing allegations the school d...

Suspension of all grants to UCLA www.latimes.com/california/s...

What's cool about looking back at the history of college protests is that 19 year old students have been right about every single American war, and the esteemed Harvard educated opinion writers at the New York Times have been wrong about every single American war.

Happy to announce that my lab @ Yale Psychology (actcompthink.org) will be accepting PhD applications this year (for start in Fall '26)!

Come for the fun experiments on human learning, memory, & skilled behavior, stay for the best 🍕 in the US.

Please reach out if you have any questions!

Opinion | Columbia’s Administrators Are Fooling Themselves

"this deal is unlikely to end the attacks. The federal government, and this administration, is simply too powerful and too arbitrary to be credibly bargained with."

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/o...

Feds Axed Grants Across Red, Blue States, Report Finds The Center for American Progress says the Trump administration has targeted for termination more than 4,000 grants across over 600 institutions. Adjusting for statewide enrollment, South Dakota is hit...

The assault on higher education is not just about coastal elite schools. "Federal agencies terminated or were attempting to terminate more than 4,000 grants across over 600 institutions. These grants are worth between $6.9 billion and $8.2 billion combined." www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

Subcommittee Markup of the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act | United States Senate Committee on Appropriations United States Senate Committee on Appropriations

🧪 BREAKING (good news): Senate subcommittee says NO! to Trump's proposed slashes to NASA & NSF funding.

Today, the subcommittee said to keep NASA + NSF funding at $33.9 billion, the same as in FY24.

See 7:15 below. Full Senate appropriations committee meets tomorrow about it.

🧵 1/3

🚨This is the most exciting step of my scientific career🚨

25 yrs ago I started a life long interest in navigation, maps & brains

I've collected data from >4 m people in 195 nations in SeaHeroQuest

In 3 weeks we set off on an ocean voyage to study the amazing spatial skills of Marshallese sailors:

Summary Table of the massive defunding of biomedical research in the United States
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Our new paper with @chrismlangdon is just out in @natureneuro.bsky.social! We show that high-dimensional RNNs use low-dimensional circuit mechanisms for cognitive tasks and identify a latent inhibitory mechanism for context-dependent decisions in PFC data.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Terry Moran worked at ABC for 28 years. Now, for calling Stephen Miller “hateful,” (which he 💯 is per his own family), ABC fired him to appease an authoritarian hypocrite who ran on “free speech.” This will have a chilling effect on all journalists. Fourth Estate fails. Authoritarianism advances.

map of the united states black with dots of protests in places both big and small

ngl this map of scheduled protests for this weekend is *wild*

I am in downtown Los Angeles right now and it is completely surreal to hear that Trump is sending Marines here. We are listening to mariachi music. People have dogs. There are teenagers here. It is utterly and completely peaceful. Please tell your friends.

NSF, NASA and NIH budgets per year, inflation adjusted from 2000-2025 along with the proposed cuts. NSF includes research component only. Massive cuts across all sectors, well below support spanning 25 years.

How bad will it be? Catastrophic.

Proposed cuts to #NSF, #NIH, and #NASA will set the US R&D landscape back 25 yrs+, cause economic and job loss now, and undermine innovations to come.

But, this is the WH's *proposed* budget.

Speak up now before it is too late.

(inflation adjusted $-s below)

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

The worst happened. We were DOGE’d. Our NSF funding is gone.

So now there’s nothing stopping me from sharing Expert Voices Together, a crisis response system for US-based researchers and journalists facing harassment.

It's a true passion project. 🧵 1/

expertvoicestogether.org

Join us in beautiful Santa Barbara! We're hiring a full-time junior specialist/research technician to play a central role in data collection & analysis of brain imaging studies of pregnancy & menopause.

Learn more & apply at: recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF02974

Or help us spread the word 💫

It's 2015. President Barack Obama has accepted a "sky palace" jumbo jet from the Qatari government, which he'll own after he leaves office. "Everybody relax," he says in an interview with the New York Times. Everyone does. The networks then televise the military parade in his honor on his birthday.

Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions Changes seen as a response to presidential directives on what research to fund

“NSF watchers fear that a smaller, restructured agency could be more vulnerable to pressure from the White House to fund research that suits its ideological bent.” www.science.org/content/arti...

Despite everything going on, I may have funds to hire a postdoc this year 😬🤞🧑‍🔬 Open to a wide variety of possible projects in social and cognitive neuroscience. Get in touch if you are interested! Reposts appreciated.

new pope!

*crowd goes wild*

American pope!

*crowd boos*

woke for an American!

*crowd goes wild*

bad on protecting abusive priests!

*crowd boos*

hates JD Vance!

*crowd goes wild*

Time to catch up on the past week’s news about science and medicine in the US. Whew. 1/10

Another DOGE attack 'absolutely pummeled' education research Education sector accounts for 40 percent of National Science Foundation cuts

Attending AERA (large ed research conf) was wild as NSF STEM ed grants were being axed on Friday.

The #overhead at AERA was like...

"[Person] is going to be cut from the lab because we lost all of our funding"

Even still, finding that community was essential. See @jillbarshay.bsky.social story:

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

a cartoon of homer simpson holding a card ALT: a cartoon of homer simpson holding a card

A new evolving outrage…

Damaging of the NIH Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network

Not surprising that an administration that rose to power on the spread of bullshit and propaganda is terminating the funding of researchers studying these phenomena. We are just receiving word about funding cancellations re: existing grants to members of our team and our colleagues.

I was just cc-ed on an email where a Nobel prize winner and green card holder who's spent a lot of time in the US says he cannot risk coming back at this point for a visit. And I cannot blame him for this decision. We are witnessing absolute mad king behavior.

It is important now more than ever for scientists to share their work with the general public. I am pleased to have contributed to investNScience’s campaign which they are currently running across numerous social media platforms. It is a great initiative that makes science more relevant to everyone.

Jeremiah Cohen standing in front of a giant green neuron.

THIS IS ONE NEURON! Jaw dropping.

It distributes a particular neurotransmitter (norepinephrine) across the mouse brain; it’s a locus coeruleus neuron.

@jeremiahycohen.bsky.social and colleagues at the @alleninstitute.bsky.social are using new biotech to see things never seen before.

Trump administration contends it has no duty to return illegally deported man to US The administration’s position suggests officials do not view the Supreme Court’s order as compelling them to seek Abrego Garcia’s return.

The Trump administration is saying that they can deny due process to anyone they want and deport them to dangerous foreign prisons.

This isn’t even Project 2025.
This is Nazi Germany 1933.

The Attack on International Students New surveillance and punishment systems are a warning to us all

New, from me: Marco Rubio used to boast that he was banned from China, calling it a totalitarian state.

Now he combines a) new surveillance capabilities to monitor and punish international students, with b) little accountability or due process. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-attack...