FarrowLab

One week left to apply for the NERF/VIB-KU Leuven Center For Brain & Disease Research international PhD Call 2026!

Learn more about the projects & teams and apply now: https://cbd.sites.vib.be/en/phdcall2026

🚨 CALL FOR APPLICATIONS 🚨

Looking for your next academic step?
Join our interdisciplinary IOB MD-PhD / PhD Program to explore the visual system and pioneer therapies for eye diseases.

⏰ Deadline: November 16, 2025 (midnight CET)

🔗 iob.ch/phd-md-phd-program

#IOB #Basel #PhDProgram #VisionScience

We have two open positions for a ML and a LLM engineer to launch a machine learning expertise unit in our center @vibai.bsky.social, see vib.ai/en/opportuni...

A colorful mosaic of abstract spots arranged in squares that are derived from retinal research data.

Webvision Has A New Home!

www.webvision.pitt.edu/2025/09/22/w...

Fantastic to see this collaborative work with Hopi Hoekstra out in Nature (tinyurl.com/3at3zvby). Lead by @felixbaier.bsky.social and @katjareinhard.bsky.social. Not possible without @bramnuttin.bsky.social , Chen Liu and @arnausd.bsky.social.

Excited to see where this work leads.

🚨Very happy that my PhD work is now out in @nature.com!

We discovered that evolution, by acting in the midbrain, shifted the threshold to escape in Peromyscus mice, to fine-tune defensive strategies in different environments

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

This was a truly collaborative effort! 🧵⬇️

The neural basis of species-specific defensive behaviour in Peromyscus mice - Nature Visual threat triggers contrasting freeze and escape defensive responses in two species of deer mice as a result of different activation thresholds downstream of the superior colliculus in the do...

Finally it's out! www.nature.com/articles/s41... How flexible are essential innate behaviours and their underlying neural circuits? @felixbaier.bsky.social & I, with Hopi Hoekstra and @farrowlab.bsky.social, addressed this by studying the #evolution of threat avoidance in Peromyscus mice.

It was joy writing this perspective with @katjareinhard.bsky.social on the importance for neuroscientists to embrace an evolutionary perspective

Systems and circuit neuroscience need an evolutionary perspective To identify fundamental neuroscientific principles that generalize across species, neuroscientists must frame their research through an evolutionary lens.

In a new essay in The Transmitter,
@farrowlab.bsky.social and katjareinhard.bsky.social‬ make the case for evolutionary thinking in systems neuroscience. Comparative approaches = deeper insight into brain function.
tinyurl.com/33sebnf7

✨ Artwork by Eoin Ryan

We map brain-wide functions of awake mice at the single-voxel scale !

Introducing PyfUS our brand new, ground-setting, open-source software for analysing brain-wide functional ultrasound imaging datasets.

Now in #Neurocomputing
@sciencedirect.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

Excited to see this out! 🎉 Congratulations to the fantastic
@nkkuhn.bsky.social for leading the way, with key contributions from Chen Li and
@boninlab.bsky.social. Thanks also to: @nerflabs.bsky.social, @fwovlaanderen.bsky.social, @viblifesciences.bsky.social, and KU Leuven.
tinyurl.com/3rfe6f2k

Preprint on how to create an equitable and healthy lab environment doi.org/10.1101/2025...! During the SAFE Labs workshop 2024 we came up with concrete action points, summarised in these guidelines for Lab Handbooks github.com/SAFE-Labs-Do...

Postdoc opportunity in the heart of Europe! Check out the flyer below.
Join our team on an international project with Anthony Holtmaat exploring synaptic plasticity and specificity in cortical and thalamocortical circuits.

The @ppjgoncalves.bsky.social lab is recruiting a PhD student via the VIB.AI International PhD Call 2025!
Join to develop machine learning tools for neuroscience, focusing on simulation-based inference & neural circuit modeling.

📍 Leuven
🗓️ Apply by June 22 → https://tinyurl.com/53nc9vnd

Ambient Light Impacts Innate Behaviors of New-World and Old-World Mice Animals encounter predators and prey under diverse lighting conditions that signal different risks and opportunities, yet how ambient illumination shapes innate approach and avoidance behaviors remain...

New paper on bioRxiv: "Ambient Light Impacts Innate Behaviors of New-World and Old-World Mice" - together with @farrowlab.bsky.social, with data from NERF master students and two of my lab members! A study across 3 species: Mus musculus, Peromyscus maniculatus & P. polionotus doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Thus new review by Jennifer Hoy (University of Nevada) and Karl Farrow (NERF) takes a deep dive into the role of the superior colliculus.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)00052-1

Beautifully illustrated by Pia Rachedi + open access

@farrowlab.bsky.social

Big news: we are setting up a new non-profit organization to run bioRxiv and medRxiv. It's called openRxiv [no it's not a new preprint server; it's dedicated organization to oversee the servers] openrxiv.org 1/n

GrimACE: Automated, multimodal cage-side assessment of pain and well-being in mice Pain and welfare monitoring is essential for ethical animal testing, but current cage-side assessments are qualitative and subjective. Here we present the GrimACE, the first fully standardised and aut...

How much analgesia is needed to manage pain levels in mice after brain surgeries?

A single dose of meloxicam seems to be enough. Even the addition of opioids cannot provide a clear benefit. (in line with recent work from others, see cites in our preprint): www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Large Scale in vivo Acquisition, Segmentation and 3D Reconstruction of Cortical Vasculature using $$\mu $$ μ Doppler Ultrasound Imaging - Neuroinformatics The brain is composed of a dense and ramified vascular network of arteries, veins and capillaries of various sizes. One way to assess the risk of cerebrovascular pathologies is to use computational mo...

🥳🤩Last piece of work from Urban lab @nerflabs.bsky.social
@viblifesciences.bsky.social
@cbdresearch.bsky.social
in collab with Babin lab from Department of Telecommunications and Information Processing of Gent Uni 🇧🇪

Do you have ambitious plans to study the molecular mechanisms of environmental adaptation in mammalian model systems? Join EMBL Rome as an independent group leader: generous core funding & benefits, top-level students & core facilities. embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/EMBL/d...

Thrilled to announce that my lab has been awarded the Research to Prevent Blindness Career Development Award!

Now the lab has a *funded* opening for a post-doctoral fellow interested in studying neurodevelopmental disorders in the retina. More info here! www.vlasitslab.org/joinus

Our lab is looking for a postdoc interested in the development, plasticity, and control of cortical circuits (bhariokelab.com).

Please send CV and some research ideas of interest to you. We're flexible & open to new ideas in the lab's general vein!

Please repost! More details at shorturl.at/wLvZw.

Neuroscientist | Science Corporation Science Corporation is a clinical-stage medical technology company.

we're hiring a neuroscientist - looking for people with in vivo rodent physiology experience
science.xyz/careers/neur...

Principles of visual cortex excitatory microcircuit organization Synapse-specific connectivity and dynamics determine microcircuit function but are challenging to explore with classic paired recordings due to their low throughput. We therefore implemented optomapping, a ∼100-fold faster two-photon optogenetic method. In mouse primary visual cortex (V1), we optomapped 30,454 candidate inputs to reveal 1,790 excitatory inputs to pyramidal, basket, and Martinotti cells. Across these cell types, log-normal distribution of synaptic efficacies emerged as a principle.

I am delighted to highlight our recent publication in The Innovation — @theinnovation.bsky.social — titled “Principles of visual cortex excitatory microcircuit organization”, where we showcase optomapping, ie 2p optogenetic circuit mapping! www.cell.com/the-innovati...

The Neural Systems & Behavior course at @mblscience.bsky.social is now open for applications (deadline 1st Feb 2025, tinyurl.com/329nbtzp). Students often describe this 8-week training course as a life-changing and eye-opening scientific experience. Apply and join us in magical Woods Hole 💫🐙🧠🔬

Scientist position at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. We are looking for neuroscientists with interests in the molecular and cellular bases of cognition. The position is open-rank, and the successful candidate will also be appointed at U Toronto. Deadline is Feb 15th. Come join us!

Two new studies from the @boninlab.bsky.social reveal the complexity of the brain’s visual processing network and how it adapts to different states of arousal and behavior. 👁️ 🧠

Congratulations to @xuhan87.bsky.social, Karolina Socha, and the rest of the team. 🙌

nerf.be/en/news#/new...

😍Please join our team and support the #neuroethology 🧠🐦🐜🦐🐟🦑🐝🪲🕷 community with your excitement for science🧪, your creativity in transporting #research content and your academic network abilities 🤗 If you have any questions about the tasks as a member of the ISN social media team, feel free to ask me!

Last chance to apply: Application deadline is tomorrow December 18th.

What a week for the @boninlab.bsky.social!
Celebrating the publication of two papers and now the news of an FWO project grant, enabling more exciting science over the next four years. Congratulations Vincent Bonin and Asli Ayaz. 👏