Tara Raam

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

woohooooo congrats Raj!!!

missing out on all the SfN fun this year, but for the very best reason 🥰🫶🏼

I am excited to share my PhD work on head-direction cells recorded in the wild, now published in @science.org, where we recorded neurons in bats flying outdoors on an island.

doi.org/10.1126/sci...

With @ray-neuro.bsky.social, Shir Maimon, Liora Las, Nachum Ulanovsky and many others

During these uncertain times, I’m very happy to see that my institution, @scripps.edu has an open tenure-track Assistant Professor position. Any field in Chemistry or Biology is welcome. I’d especially love to see fellow neuroscientists apply. Please repost!

apply.interfolio.com/174756

A parabrachial hub for need-state control of enduring pain - Nature Activity in a set of parabranchial neurons in the mouse brain is increased during chronic pain, predicts coping behaviour, and can be modulated by circuits activated by survival threats.

Finally out: our recent work with Nick Betley is a view into how the brain reshapes its behavior in the face of competing survival needs- and also a potential angle on treatment targets for enduring pain.

A brief rundown...

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

https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/MABe-mouse-behavior-detection

And we are live!

Excited to announce the 2025 Multi-Agent Behavior Challenge on cross-lab supervised action recognition in mice 🐁🐀🖱️

Running on Kaggle until December 15th, with a $50,000 prize pool going to the top five submissions!

www.kaggle.com/competitions...

✨ The Art of Open Science ✨

This beautiful crossstitch was created by Leah Blankenship, an undergraduate student at the @uoregon.bsky.social! This meticulously embroidered art uses data from our Allen Brain Reference Atlases.

#OpenScienceWeek

Can't wait to read this preprint from Misha Ahrens and team. Calcium imaging in larval zebrafish, in every cell in the body! Amazing.

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

Important initiative 👇

1. The philosophy of science sometimes gets an unearned reputation as a purely academic exercise that offers little by way of concrete tools for advancing research.

This is wrong.

And today, as we grapple with how AI is changing the nature of scientific activity, it's desperately wrong.

questions for science bsky:

how would you describe the primary longings, aspirations, and frustrations of scientists today? what cultural or conceptual shifts (as opposed to financial or material) could take place in the scientific ecosystem that would help address these frustrations?

RFK Jr. in interview with Scripps News: ‘Trusting the experts is not science’ HHS Secretary RFK Jr. sat down with Scripps News for a wide-ranging interview, discussing mRNA vaccine funding policy changes and a recent shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said."

It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy.

I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.

Aidan Bedford
"Interspecies interaction between humpback whale and bottlenose dolphins."

so great to see it out!! congrats!!!

A flexible hippocampal population code for experience relative to reward - Nature Neuroscience Sosa et al. find that hippocampal neural activity in mice encodes both environmental location and experience relative to rewards, spanning distances far from reward, through parallel and flexible popu...

It's officially published!! In my main postdoc work with @markplitt.bsky.social and @lgiocomo.bsky.social, we found that the hippocampus simultaneously encodes an animal's spatial position and its experience relative to reward in parallel population codes. 🧵

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

What they aren’t showing on Fox News

agree, bare minimum. it's insulting they require it from you after terminating your grant.

The pivot penalty in research - Nature An analysis of millions of scientific papers and patents reveals a ‘pivot penalty’ when researchers shift direction, with the impact of studies decreasing rapidly the further they move from their prev...

Fascinating new paper shows that when researchers “pivot” to new areas of work the outcome is less impactful.

#ScienceOfScience

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

Baby Is Healed With World’s First Personalized Gene-Editing Treatment

With mRNA and CRISPR this country could be entering a scientific heyday and instead we’re torching the institutions that make it all possible.

Prefrontal encoding of an internal model for emotional inference Nature - Neurons in the rodent dorsomedial prefrontal cortex encode a flexible internal model of emotion by linking directly experienced and inferred associations with aversive experiences.

I’m excited to share a new paper from the lab. The study led by Xiaowei Gu reveals how the mPFC encodes complex emotional memories, using an internal model to infer emotional associations and memories via projections to the amygdala. a🧵(1/8)

rdcu.be/el19t

Trump officials take steps toward a radically different NSF Efforts to shrink staff, budget, and focus have alarmed members of Congress

Another scoop from Jeff Mervis (@policyhound.bsky.social): NSF's ~1400 grant terminations have disproportionately affected PIs from groups underrepresented in science: women, racial & ethnic minorities, & those with disabilities. 1/3
www.science.org/content/arti...

Because we must build good things while we scream about the bad, I have started a "Data for Good" team @data-for-good-team.bsky.social that partners with organizations needing short-term data science help. We have three projects ongoing & will add more as our capacity grows.
data-for-good-team.org

finally moved on over here 🤗🌞✌🏼

Exciting news!! I’m joining the tenure-track faculty at University of Colorado Boulder this fall as an Assistant Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience!

The Sosa Lab will study how memory is shaped by cognitive and physiological demands, including during pregnancy and the postpartum period. 🧵