Gizem Özdil

Thanks, Ben! Looking forward to being there :)

Thank you so much!! I hope everything is going well for you! :)

Big life update: I’m super excited to be joining the Kempner Institute as a Research Fellow!
If you’re curious about my research plans or just want to connect, please reach out! 😊

Please RT🙏

Reach out if you want to help understand cognition by modelling, analyzing and/or collect large scale intracortical data from 👩🐒🐁

We're a friendly, diverse group (n>25) w/ this terrace 😎 in the center of Paris! See👇 for + info about the lab

We have funding to support your application!

📽️Recordings from our
@cosynemeeting.bsky.social
#COSYNE2025 workshop on “Agent-Based Models in Neuroscience: Complex Planning, Embodiment, and Beyond" are now online: neuro-agent-models.github.io
🧠🤖

COSYNE 2025 Rajan lab posters. Friday, March 28 - Poster Session 2: 2-043: Emergent small-group foraging under variable group size, food scarcity, and sensory capabilities by Zhouyang (Hanson) Lu, Satpreet H Singh, Sonja Johnson-Yu, Aaron Walsman, Kanaka Rajan 2-058: 'Modeling rapid neuromodulation in the cortex-basal ganglia-thalamus loop' by Julia Costacurta and Yu Duan (co-first), John Assad, Kanaka Rajan and Scott Linderman (co-senior) 2-060: 'Measuring and Controlling Solution Degeneracy across Task-Trained RNNs' by Ann Huang, Satpreet Singh, Kanaka Rajan Saturday, March 29 - Poster Session 3: 3-020: 'ForageWorld: RL agents in complex foraging arenas develop internal maps for navigation and planning' by Ryan Badman, Riley Simmons-Edler, Joshua Lunger, John Vastola, William Qian, Kanaka Rajan 3-109: 'Inhibition-stabilized disordered dynamics in mouse cortex during navigational decision-making' by Siyan Zhou, Ryan Badman, Charlotte Arlt, Kanaka Rajan, Christopher Harvey

Big showing from the Rajan Lab at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social!

We have posters on everything from multi-agent social foraging to neuromodulated neural networks. Catch us in Poster Sessions 2 & 3 🧠🤖

#Cosyne2025 #NeuroAI #CompSci #neuroskyence

Sadly, I won’t be there in person this year because of visa issues :(( (yep, they’re real and they suck)... But two of my amazing co-organizers will be there: @satpreetsingh.bsky.social and @chingfang.bsky.social

Only 4 days to go until our workshop!! 🪰🐁🤖
If you're at COSYNE, don't miss out on incredible talks and inspiring panel discussions at "Agent-Based Models in Neuroscience: Complex Planning, Embodiment, and Beyond" on March 31 :)

Check out the latest schedule: neuro-agent-models.github.io

🚨 SUPER excited to announce our Cosyne workshop on Neuro Agents! 🤖🐁🪰🧠 We have an incredible lineup of speakers, check out the program! neuro-agent-models.github.io

See you in Canada! 🇨🇦

#Cosyne #Cosyne2025 #NeuroAI

Congrats!! I will be there as well, presenting another biomechanics paper ☺️

I wrote an introduction to RL for neuroscience last year that was just published in NBDT: tinyurl.com/5f58zdy3

This review aims to provide some intuition for and derivations of RL methods commonly used in systems neuroscience, ranging from TD learning through the SR to deep and distributional RL!

Thank you so much, John! I would love to hear your thoughts!

As you unwrap your holiday presents, consider how you coordinate your fingers and limbs.
@gzmozd.bsky.social identified fly brain networks for body part coordination through experiments, biomechanical modeling, connectomics, and neural network simulations ! 🤖
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

10/ Big thanks to our amazing collaborators and the incredible fly community for creating the open-source tools that made this work possible. 🙌 #Neuroscience #MotorControl #Drosophila #Connectome @neuroxepfl.bsky.social @fly-eds.bsky.social @flywire.bsky.social

Centralized brain networks underlie body part coordination during grooming Animals must coordinate multiple body parts to perform important tasks such as grooming, or locomotion. How this movement synchronization is achieved by the nervous system remains largely unknown. Her...

9/ So next time you see a fly grooming itself or you try multitasking, take a moment to appreciate the magic of coordination. Check out our preprint! 🪰🧠 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

8/ The fly’s strategy enables robustness yet flexibility, thus it may be a common blueprint for movement across species—or even for other behaviors in flies. 🐁🐱🦎

7/ Recurrent excitation: Drives non-groomed antennal pitch movements and keeps other motor networks in sync. ⚡️
Broadcast inhibition: Suppresses targeted antennal movement to prevent conflicting actions. ⛔️

6/ To understand this better, we simulated the grooming network and ran a computational neural activation screen. Two key circuit motifs emerged as the stars of this coordination process:

5/ Think of it as an elegant engineering solution: these central neurons enable flexibility, allowing any brain region to initiate or stop the behavior. 🛠️

4/ So, what orchestrates these movements? Using the fly connectome, we constructed a subnetwork for antennal grooming. In this network, we discovered that a central group of neurons links motor circuits for the neck, antennae, and forelegs. 🧠 These neurons act as a hub for coordinating body parts.

3-2/ EVEN without antennae, the coordination between head rotations and foreleg movements remains! 😱😱😱

3-1/ Or, head-immobilized flies will still move their antennae and forelegs in a fascinatingly coordinated fashion. 🤯

3/ Surprisingly, each body part operates independently of the others' sensory feedback. Even with amputated forelegs, flies still move their antennae and head! This suggests an open-loop (not feedback-based) coordination mechanism. 🤖

2/ By simulating these motions in a biomechanical model, we discovered the reason: synchronization ensures forceful and unobstructed interactions between the forelegs and antennae. This efficiency guarantees a thorough cleaning job. 💪✨

1/ In our study, we explored how flies synchronize their head, antennae, and forelegs during goal-directed antennal grooming. We found that when targeting an antenna, flies perform three distinct motor actions. But why these specific movements?

🧵 Ever seen a fly perform a full self-care ritual? 🪰 They meticulously rub their head and clean their antennae, ensuring every speck of dirt is gone. But how do they coordinate all those tiny body parts so seamlessly?👇