Andrew Lynn

I would love to hear how others are dealing with the incredibly strict new security regulations for NIH data. UofL doesn’t have compliance with the new requirements and our 3rd party options are cost prohibitive.

Coming June 2025! We are excited to launch the NIH Brain Development Cohorts (NBDC) Data Hub. This new data ecosystem will host & facilitate access to data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study & the HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study.

1/13

"Did you notice anything unusual?"

"No."

"Well, something unusual appeared; where do you think it was?"

…

Our new @elife.bsky.social paper on inattentional blindness finishes this dialogue in 25,000 subjects, with implications for the relation between attention and awareness. See below!

Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast — New York Magazine ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.

It’s clear this is happening in my courses but there are no good tools to detect AI cheating. I’m not doing the extra work of trying to reimagine my curriculum.

apple.news/APIS2Hf0gQAe...

With all that is going on at NSF, it’s important for me to describe how important NSF has been for my career and the careers of my trainees over the years. This funding is so important for so many reasons.

The war on science accelerates.

Eyes on the prize: @andrewclynn.bsky.social studies how children stay focused and learn 👁️🧠📝

#academicsky #neurosky #learning #attention #neurodevelopment #adhd #autismspectrumdisorder

‘One of the darkest days’: NIH purges agency leadership amid mass layoffs In shock move, four institute directors at the US biomedical agency are removed from their posts.

Director of the Nat'l Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) was summarily dismissed yesterday. So here's your reminder that birth defects kill twice as many American kids as cancer. But there is no St. Jude's for birth defects. Only the NICHD.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

It’s insane that schatzel can make more by quitting her job than I’ll make in 10 years as a professor.

“Under the agreement, Schatzel will receive $400,000 plus unspecified deferred compensation over the next month.

She also will receive $300,000 in monthly installments starting April 15. “

Excited to share on my first post on Bluesky our new paper in NHB examine the innate and developing aspects of the wiring of the visual system. Congratulations to @emilykubota.bsky.social and the baby MRI team on this important work

Decades Ago, Columbia Refused to Pay Trump $400 Million. Note That Number. A quarter century ago, the university was looking to expand. It considered, and rejected, property owned by Donald Trump. He did not forget it.

I'm completely losing my mind www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/n...

‘My career is over’: Columbia University scientists hit hard by Trump team’s cuts The US government has begun slashing US$400 million in research grants at Columbia University over pro-Palestinian campus protests.

These cuts are ruining people’s careers. This is not efficiency - capricious changes to funding damage science for generations.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Johns Hopkins Plans Staff Layoffs After $800 Million Grant Cuts Local and international health research efforts are already winding down as the university braces for even more potential cuts.

The Trump administration has terminated $800 million in grants to Johns Hopkins University, spurring the nation’s top spender on research and development to plan layoffs and cancel health projects

list of banned keywords

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

IDENTIFYING A GRADUATE ADVISOR Questions for Potential Advisors BY PAOLA V. FIGUEROA-DELGADO Advice: Take some time to think about what is important and valuable to you (personal and professional) and let those guide the questions you should ask, as it will serve to inform what your experience will be in their lab short- and long-term. Disclosure: These are questions I asked potential advisers who I was interested in working with for my PhD because their research was very interesting to me. Thus, why these questions are framed to address information outside of research topic.

... Advisor Specific Questions ... 1. How would you define your mentorship style? 2. Do you have a time-in-lab commitment preference/requirement? What is your time-off/vacation policy? 3. What is your funding and professorship situation? 4. How many grants does the lab currently house? 5. Do you encourage your students to apply for fellowships and/or grants? 6. Do you provide constructive criticism, as well as positive feedback? 7. Do you encourage students to pursue low- and high-risk/high-reward projects? 8. How was your experience as a trainee (PhD and postdoc)? Was there anything you disliked or any take-home messages that you would like to share? 9. Do you have one-on-one meeting with your students? If so, how often? 10. Do you have an open-door policy? 11. Do you help your students prepare for qualifying exams? 12. How would you define your lab dynamics (structure, social outings, life work- life balance)?

Lab Specific Questions 1. What are your expectations for rotation students (i.e. work ethic, personality, development, background experience/knowledge)? 2. What are your expectations of new to senior graduate students? 3. Do you have rotation students lined-up for all rotation periods/sessions? 4. How many graduate students are you planning on taking/have space for this year? 5. Have your trainees previously applied and/or received fellowships/grants? 6. What if your lab meeting's structure (journal clubs, progress reports, joint meetings)? What is the duration of these meetings? Do you discuss troubleshooting? 7. How does the lab communicate (i.e. email, Slack, phone, text)? 8. Do I require any training prior to rotating/training in the lab?

💡 Choosing a grad school advisor is one of the most important decisions you'll make on your academic journey. 🧠💼

✨ Read the full article by Paola Figueroa-Delgado: cientificolatino.com/post/questio...

Introducing PowerLMM.js!

A new tool for power analysis of longitudinal linear mixed-effects models (LMMs) – with support for missing data, plus non-inferiority and equivalence tests.

powerlmmjs.rpsychologist.com

Would really appreciate your feedback as I refine this app! Details below 🧵👇

Middle childhood is a time of major biological change (puberty) and contextual change (elementary to middle school)--could this be an important timepoint for understanding important changes in the individual and perhaps an intervention point? Find out here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/SSWWK7...

Any chance I can get you to send me this article? My university is a mess with regard to journal subscriptions and I can’t access it for some reason.

New paper out today in PNAS 🎉 demonstrating:
1) an association between social disadvantage & child brain function can be observed as early as birth
2) these alterations are brain-wide, but most pronounced in functional networks & subcortex later linked to childhood adversity

doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

#Neuroimaging crowd, hear me out! 👀
Did you ever want to add #EyeTracking to your #fMRI study but found it too much hassle? Got existing data you’d love to add eye tracking to?

Consider trying out *MR-based eye tracking* (i.e. inferring gaze from eye voxels)!

Here is a 🧵 with a few options!👇 1/9

Infants’ Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large‐Scale, Multi‐Lab, Coordinated Replication Study Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluatio...

wow onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... (a huge replication study of a highly-cited phenomenon in infant development that found said phenomenon does not replicate)

𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗜𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗺𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗟𝗲𝘀𝗹𝗶𝗲 𝗨𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗿𝗹𝗲𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗝𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝗖𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗡𝗲𝘂𝗿𝗼𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲
Beautiful set of articles (mine excepted), paying tribute to Leslie's pioneering career.
And thanks to JOCN for doing this for the community.
#neuroscience
direct.mit.edu/jocn/collect...

Aiming to 'radicalize Main Street,' Christian nationalists set sights on tiny Jackson County, Tennessee Christian nationalists have set their sights on a remote Tennessee county, hoping to attract like-minded people from across the country as part of their efforts to “radicalize Main Street.”

They want to go back to an America before the civil rights movement "ruined everything." They want to kick out legal immigrants even if they became U.S. citizens decades ago. And they want to put women back where they think they belong. www.newschannel5.com/news/newscha...

Do we need another starter pack? I'm erring on the side of yes.
go.bsky.app/GVMZMcB

On today's edition of "Sh*t I wish I knew 8 years ago"

Simple "isolate" function from blml package to get within- and between-person centered versions of a list of variables.

H/t to kzee.github.io/Centering_De...

#Rstats #AcademicSky

The basic principle is that reviewers are tired, they're rushed, they're reading your and 10 other grants on top of their normal workload.

Anything you can do to make it easy for them will help.

Here's a list of my suggestions.

As a grant reviewer, what do you really wish people would do/not do?

Not big things, like find a significant question/innovative method/be consistent with aims

Little things, like bold each acronym the first time it’s used.

Add your pet peeves ⬇️
#HiddenCurriculum #Research

Rarely categorical, always high-dimensional: how the neural code changes along the cortical hierarchy The brain is highly structured both at anatomical and functional levels. However, within individual brain areas, neurons often exhibit very diverse and seemingly disorganized responses. A more careful analysis shows that these neurons can sometimes be grouped together into specialized subpopulations (categorical representations). Organization can also be found at the level of the representational geometry in the activity space, typically in the form of low-dimensional structures. It is still unclear how the geometry in the activity space and the structure of the response profiles of individual neurons are related. Here, we systematically analyzed the geometric and selectivity structure of the neural population from 40+ cortical regions in mice performing a decision-making task (IBL public Brainwide Map data set). We used a reduced-rank regression approach to quantify the selectivity profiles of single neurons and multiple measures of dimensionality to characterize the representational geometry of task variables. We then related these measures within single areas to the position of each area in the sensory-cognitive cortical hierarchy. Our findings reveal that only a few regions (in primary sensory areas) are categorical. When multiple brain areas are considered, we observe clustering that reflects the brain’s large-scale organization. The representational geometry of task variables also changed along the cortical hierarchy, with higher dimensionality in cognitive regions. These trends were explained by analytical computations linking the maximum dimensionality of representational geometry to the clustering of selectivity at the single neuron level. Finally, we computed the shattering dimensionality (SD), a measure of the linear separability of neural activity vectors; remarkably, the SD remained near maximal across all regions, suggesting that the observed variability in the selectivity profiles allows neural populations to maintain high computational flexibility. These results provide a new mathematical and empirical perspective on selectivity and representation geometry in the cortical neural code. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

Rarely categorical, always high-dimensional: how the neural code changes along the cortical hierarchy
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#neuiroscience

VertexWiseR: A package for simplified vertex-wise analyses of whole-brain and hippocampal surfaces in R direct.mit.edu/imag/article... (I'm selfishly interested in this... so posting it here as a personal reminder... also it looks cool for #Freesurfer analyses in R)