Alina Tu

🔬 Exciting News! I am approaching the end of my Ph.D. journey, and this means that I am actively seeking my next position. If you have any suggestions for positions, please DM me!
See the thread for more info about me!

#OpenToWork #Neuroscience #NonAcademicJobs #AcademicJobs #PostdocPositions

Excited to be presenting my work on white matter structures supporting wayfinding in midlife adults tomorrow at #CNS2025

See me at poster B62 in the Back Bay Ballroom!

8am EST* hahaha i was jet lagged

If you know about or are interested in:
- navigation
- medial temporal lobe subregions
- hippocampal subfields and their specific functions

...find me by my poster on Sunday 3/30 8am-10am PST (or connect with me) so we can chat! ✨ (2/2)

CNS was my 1st ever conference I attended and presented at as an undergrad. I'm now in Boston for an amazing #CNS2025, and I'm ready to talk science 😎🥼

My poster: "Uncovering the neural basis that distinguishes two path integration tasks: Triangle Completion & Loop Closure" (1/2)

So the NIH grant terminations at Columbia turned out to be: -- all training grants (T series), which were all required to have extensive sections addressing diversity -- grad student and postdoc fellowships (F series) -- center and core grants (P series), including a cancer center, Alzheimer's center, diabetes center and more, and the vision core grant Michael Goldberg has been PI of for 17 years that provides shared facilities (machine shop, imaging, ...) for vision researchers -- a smattering of individual research grants, apparently targeting anything to do with covid, vaccines, or HIV, and including one study with title involving study of diverse tissues, i.e. with the verboten word diverse.

From my PhD advisor @kenmiller.bsky.social at Columbia. These are the grants that funded my PhD.

In California

NIH FUNDING:
$5.31 B

JOBS SUPPORTED:
55,949

ECONOMIC ACTIVITY SUPPORTED:
$13.55 B

KEEP IT GOING

The NIH announced it will slash billions of dollars of support to universities and research centers.

This is one of the biggest attacks on science we have ever seen. It could dismantle the biomedical research system, shut down clinical trials, and halt development of treatments.

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.

"Health disparities research" is a field of study where researchers look at how things like race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status can influence health outcomes. Now any gov't website about this says "page not found".

This is a dystopia that I did not imagine that we'd be living through.

Trump hits NIH with ‘devastating’ freezes on meetings, travel, communications, and hiring Researchers facing

“The impact of the collective executive orders and directives appears devastating.” scim.ag/40ureTO

Jan 21 2025: 27 job openings listed at NIH.

Jan 22 2025: There are no postings at this time.

Communications shutdown. Travel ban. Canceled study sections. Now a hiring freeze?

Shutting down the NIH indefinitely without stated cause is literally an act of sabotage.

Left: yesterday. Right: today.

Huge congratulations @neurobatool.bsky.social !!! 🥳🥳🥳🥳

For anyone hesitant on submitting grad apps, DO IT‼️

The worst possible outcome is “apply again next year”. But the best is that YOU GET ACCEPTED ✨

•
•
I applied to 4 grad programs and was rejected from all except one. But they still call me Dr. now 😏

ALL YOU NEED IS ONE 🙌🏾

Screenshot of the Psychonomic schedule from the mobile app for all Chrastil lab posters: 1) "Cortical thickness and gray matter volume supporting object-based and egocentric perspective transformation" by Marjan Rashidi. 2) "Local and global strategies for navigational learning" by Daisy Vargas. 3) "Reinforcement learning for spatial graph knowledge through explicit predictions during active vs passive exploration" by Taylor Le. 4) "The role of working memory ability on path integration performance" by Alina Tu. Senior author on all posters: Liz Chrastil

@chrastil.bsky.social's Spatial Neuroscience Lab posters at #psynom24 on Friday 11/22 7:45pm:

4075
4078
4081
4083

...and our posters are located among other cool and exciting spatial cognition/navigation research 🧭 😎 see y'all there!

I also noted the importance of control regions (from talking to Ashish)! It would be good to check this 🤓

I also talked to Ashish! I think it'd be helpful to see if our dataset + his models generate the same findings as the ones he presented. If the findings differ, it could suggest that task/environment differences affect the mixed results of HC-nav relationship.

Thank you so much for the kind words about the paper!

I think differences in task/environment may play a larger role than we expect. The poster I'll present tomorrow showcases 2 path integration tasks (within-subjects design) that relate to HC and EC volumes differently.

i'm so grateful for the work of the co-authors and for Liz's mentorship to make this work possible

my first paper and my first first-author paper 🥳 please feel free to reach out with questions/comments!

conveniently, #psynom24 is happening in one day. @chrastil.bsky.social and I will be attending and would love to chat with folks!

New to this app but thank you for creating this and including me!!