Carla Golden

Congratulations, Margaret and Ben!!

Thank you for the great summary, @thetransmitter.bsky.social, and the shout-outs from scientists we admire. There is so much we don’t know about how sex hormones modulate behavior and we’ll keep exploring!

I am recruiting graduate students for the experimental side of my lab @mcgill.ca for admission in Fall 2026!
Get in touch if you're interested in how brain circuits implement distributed computation, including dopamine-based distributed RL and probabilistic representations.

As the Neuroscience 2025 meeting comes to a close, it's time for us to think about the future. Do you want to help us shape neuroscience research and future @sfn.org meetings? Consider nominating yourself or colleagues: www.sfn.org/about/volunt...

Thank you, Mel!!

We LOVED this commentary! I might borrow that football 🏈 example in future talks…

1/3
New Nature Neuroscience paper on estrogen & dopamine RPEs. Female rats in high-estradiol phase (proestrus) show stronger trial-by-trial adjustment of response vigor in a RL task: they start the next trial faster after better rewards.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#RewardSignals #neuroskyence

Who wore it better? Our new paper shows that rat OFC supports Bayesian inference of hidden states! With neural correlates of inferred state transitions at the level of single neurons and population-level latent factors. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Preach. I am finding The Best Model Fit and the perfect has become the enemy of the good.

Check out our posters at #SfN25 this Saturday!

@aqperkins.bsky.social @adiraj95.bsky.social @goldenneurons.bsky.social

Thank you, Arif!!

Thanks, Kavya!!

Thank you, Orna!

Thanks, Kurt!! ☺️

Such a great question! I’d love to know the answer to that.

Thank you, Mark!!

Thanks, Ben!!

Many thanks to our coauthors, the undergraduate students and technicians who contributed to this work, and support from the NIH and @simonsfoundation.org.

#blueprint 7/7

Altogether, this suggests that estradiol, by way of its receptors in the ventral tegmental area, modulates learning!

#blueprint 6/7

Lastly, knocking down expression of estrogen receptors in the ventral tegmental area, where dopamine transporter expression could be regulated by estradiol, suppressed learning.

#blueprint 5/7

Next, mass spectrometry revealed that dopamine transporters in the nucleus accumbens core are reduced around the time estradiol peaks, allowing for greater phasic dopamine encoding of reward prediction errors.

#blueprint 4/7

First, we found that with more estradiol, trial initiation times are more sensitive to changing reward rates. We then found that this enhanced learning about reward rate could be explained by stronger reward prediction errors in the nucleus accumbens core.

#blueprint 3/7

Take a journey with us from serum estradiol to its relationship to striatal protein expression to how that modulates dopamine dynamics, which in turn enhances learning about reward rates – all tied together with a descriptive computational model!

#blueprint 2/7

Estrogen modulates reward prediction errors and reinforcement learning - Nature Neuroscience Dopamine encoding of reward prediction errors naturally fluctuates over females’ reproductive cycles with estrogenic signaling due to reduced expression of dopamine reuptake proteins.

Thrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#blueprint 1/7

Rat-mon y Cajal, our lab mascot, is a pro at our task because he went to kindergarten first. His nemesis, Le Chat GPT, just copied off everyone else’s homework.

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Calling all Neuroscience postdocs! 🧠 Share your research through SPiNES (Seminars from Postdocs in Neuroscience: Extramural Series) from the NYUGSoM Department of Neuroscience. Applications close 08/20/25. Apply today! 👉 nyumc.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
#Neuroscience #Postdoc #ResearchOpportunity

I mean, we have a city rat czar. What other animal deserves this much attention.

During Q&A, whenever someone asks a question about our "mice."

THIS is outrageous and scary! RFK making his own journal that appears to be associated with a medical society.There is no such thing as the Academy of Public Health! They can use this to make false claims in medicine and science, including for vaccines. These are not peer reviewed nor scientific!

Join our brand-new lab at UConn studying flexible sensory processing in mice! We're hiring a full-time lab tech - a great fit for recent grads looking to get experience with systems and behavioral neuroscience research.

Apply here: jobs.hr.uconn.edu/cw/en-us/job...