Merridee Lefner

Don't miss this if you are going to #SfN2025 and interested in cross-species psychedelic neuroscience research

Looking forward to hearing the talks and the discussions, and excited about presenting some of the lab's unpublished data and how we are thinking about future research

Congratulations to this year's cohort of travel awardees. The committee had an incredibly hard job with over 100 applications! We look forward to seeing you all in Spain next month. Attendees, the data blitz highlighting the awardee's work is on Day 1 at 15:10. #EBPS2025

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...

Flexible updating of reward and punishment contingencies by VTA GABA neurons In dynamic environments where stimuli predicting reward or punishment unexpectedly change, it is critical to flexibly update behavior while preserving…

New lab paper by @merridee.bsky.social identifying a novel role for VTA GABA neurons in behavioral flexibility

GABA, but not dopamine, neuron activation correlates with behavior when cues unexpectedly shift from predicting punishment to predicting reward www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Yeah dopamine encodes reward but what about when contingencies shift and behavior needs to be flexible? Turns out VTA GABA neuron activity plays a role, check it out in my first postdoctoral research article here!👇

Estrous cycle stage gates the effect of stress on reward learning Neuropsychopharmacology - Estrous cycle stage gates the effect of stress on reward learning

Ever wonder how stress and the estrous cycle affects reward learning? Well we have answers for you in our paper led by @askaneuroscientist.bsky.social published in
@npp-journal.bsky.social

And huge thanks to the NIH and NSF who supported this research.

Rapid Response Bridge Funding Program In the face of recent abrupt shifts in federal funding for education research, including large-scale terminations of National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant awards, we have developed a rap...

The Spencer Foundation is offering rapid response bridge funding for those who lost NSF research grants.

www.spencer.org/grant_types/...

NIH cancels its first and largest study centered on women The Women’s Health Initiative has produced numerous influential findings

Well the NIH has cancelled the Women's Health Initiative, the largest study of women in history

It has been running continuously since 1991 and has provided massive key knowledge about diseases in women

Unreal

www.science.org/content/arti...

Can confirm that my NSF grant "How False Beliefs Form & How to Correct Them" was cancelled today because it is "not in alignment with current NSF priorities" Shocking that understanding how people are misled by false information is now a forbidden topic. Our work will continue but at a smaller scale

Inside the Collapse at NIH Administration officials pressured NIH to avoid clear advice from the agency’s own lawyers to restart grant funding now.

The Atlantic story on the situation at NIH is sobering. We are so screwed.

www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...

National Institute of General Medical Sciences NIGMS supports basic research to understand biological processes and lay the foundation for advances in disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention.

The NIH diversity supplement pages have all been pulled down. What is a diversity supplement and why should the public care? A diversity supplement is funding to help diversify the research workforce. You may be wondering, “so what?”. Let me explain. www.nigms.nih.gov/Pages/PageNo...

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