Luke Sjulson

My first PhD student Elie de Oliveira just defended successfully! Check out his doctoral katana!

few outcomes, except for 99% of FDA-approved drugs, 174 recipients of 104 Nobel Prizes, training ~30K MDs and ~10K PhDs per year to enter the workforce, and a 34% reduction in age-adjusted cancer deaths since 1990 -- the largest decrease in history

Hard to get past the looming shadow of Hannibal Lecter

Okay, that sucks. Am I correct in thinking that a potential silver lining is that the NIH will be able to distribute their full budget and avoid rescission?

I am in the same boat. @jeremymberg.bsky.social can you clarify? The Bloomberg gift link doesn’t work for me. I don’t understand what it means to “fully fund” 50% or where the 5/8 number comes from

I could have saved a five hour wait and $250 copay if I had known about that

Don’t worry, I have more experience closing lacerations with Krazy Glue than the average psychiatrist

Earlier my 7yo hit her head and opened up a ~1.5 cm scalp laceration. I debated Krazy Gluing it closed, but I wasn’t sure how to deal with the hair, so I brought her to the ER. I wish I had known about the HAT trick! Next time I guess I’ll google first

www.aliem.com/trick-of-tra...

Barcoded Rabies In Situ Connectomics for high-throughput reconstruction of neural circuits Sequencing of oligonucleotide barcodes holds promise as a high-throughput approach for reconstructing synaptic connectivity at scale. Rabies viruses can act as a vehicle for barcode transmission, than...

1/ Mapping synaptic connectivity between individual neurons is extremely laborious. We developed BRISC, a new method that makes it possible to map inputs onto 100s of neurons in the same animal in a matter of weeks! Led by Alex Becalick and @antblot.bsky.social. 🧵

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

In fairness, it is July

Please repost! We're hiring a postdoc to work with me and
@salagapan.bsky.social on an exciting interdisciplinary project in human neuroscience and brain-body interactions underlying effortful behavior in health and mood disorders.

siplab.gatech.edu/postdoc_ad_2...

Synaptic plasticity of prefrontal long-range inhibition regulates cognitive flexibility While glutamatergic synaptic plasticity is believed to be a fundamental mechanism mediating learning, the behavioral significance of plasticity at cortical GABAergic synapses remains less well underst...

New work! Learning is assumed to involve synaptic plasticity, but which specific synapses change to enable higher order cognitive functions? We actually find that cognitive flexibility involves potentiation of long-range GABAergic synapses from prefrontal PV neurons: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our study is out in Nature!
Using wireless Neuropixels we recorded hippocampal activity in freely flying bats and uncovered replay and theta(less) sweeps, revealing striking differences from classic rodent models.

👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What I love about molecular biology is that people like Stahl and Watson lived to see single cell RNAseq and spatial transcriptomics. Has any other field ever achieved that much in the span of a single career?

The good news: I’m in Tam Cóc, Vietnam

The bad news: I have f*cking Swedish skin

I saw Sinners for the second time last night. It’s really, really good. Nice to see that Hollywood is still capable of doing something original

It’s actually worse than what those numbers imply because foreign MDs are so unevenly distributed across institutions. If every institution lost 1/6th of their MDs, they could probably handle that, but a lot of places will lose more than 50% of them

look at the successes of an approach and underestimate how many limitations it has

You make an excellent point. In the case of my physicist friend, a theoretical neuroscientist contacted him about a collaboration, so he spent some time learning about the problems the neuroscientist wanted help with. I view his statement as less about neuroscience and more about how non-specialists

Physics is the science of things that are easy to model.

Savage but true

didn’t have those mathematical handholds. I thought it was an interesting perspective

A condensed matter theorist friend told me once that the tools of theoretical physics are less powerful than people think, and they only worked well in his field because the problems have lots of symmetries and valid approximations to exploit. He said theoretical neuroscience was “rudderless” bc it

I haven’t gotten to that part of the podcast yet. I’ll listen to the rest; maybe I’ll change my mind!

On that, we're on the same page. I think the difference is that you are advocating for abolishing "representation" because of its semantic and functional connotations, and I am advocating for using the word but rejecting those connotations. The end goal is the same

That's fair! It's my opinion, and I agree the evidence is far from conclusive. However, it is almost impossible to prove that something is *not* behaviorally relevant, and I don't think the default assumption should be that the brain is wasting a bunch of resources encoding irrelevant information

Neuroscience methods - YouTube Nanocourse: Approaches to Study Neural Circuits This course was taught by Anita Autry, Tiago Gonçalves, and Luke Sjulson at Albert Einstein College of Medici...

Announcing two new lectures in our youtube neuroscience methods course:

Lecture 12: experimental design (by Anita Autry)
Lecture 13: neuronal population coding (in which I advocate a viewpoint that is... controversial)

Please repost to help us spread the word!

www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

I agree, the ambiguity of the term is more of a bug than a feature