Armin Raznahan

my local park is full of hundreds of snow sculptures and someone has been adding museum labels

Painting featuring a basket of plumbs on a table surface in a dark interior

Louise Moillon (c. 1610–1696) French painter in the Baroque era. One of the best still life painters of her time, she was trained by her father as she was unable to attend academies as a woman- who were thought to lack the ability required for artists #WomensArt

Dark blue hexagon, with a light blue frame. Features a brain facing the left, with the front half as a wire-frame mesh of light blue, and the back half with several polygon segments of different colours. Below is written "ggseg" in light blue.

The ggseg ecosystem finally has a proper home! 🧠

For those who don't know, ggseg is an R package ecosystem for visualizing brain atlas data. Think ggplot2, but for brains.

#rstats #neuroimaging #openscience

Not sure if this is plot-driven enough for what you are after, but I’m currently reading The Book of Ebenezer Le Page and absolutely loving it! Something tells me you’d really like it (especially the world observations and humor) if not read already.

Frances Featherstone (British Artist, born 1976)
"A Portal to another World", 2025.
Oil on Canvas, 75 × 60 cm.
Private Collection.

#art #painting #artist #BlueSkyArt

Statistical Machine Learning post doc positions, w/ Oxford BDI-Novartis Collaboration for AI in Medicine, working on building causal predictive models for MS using a massive clinical trials MRI dataset. Join us on this unique collaboration!
my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...
my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

… but the perfect year to start IV phenobarbital.

Painting with stylised lake side landscape in reds, blues and purples, with relection of hills in still water

Georgia O’Keeffe,
Lake George Reflection, 1922
#Womensart

Thats the road you walked to get to your awesomeness now ! So plenty good has come already. :-)

a young boy with braces on his teeth is looking at the camera . ALT: a young boy with braces on his teeth is looking at the camera .

You mean like Stank Face Ew ?

Yeah - sure !

🤣👌🏽
It did make me wonder though whether you could get this consistency by active inference responding to some e.g. specific low-level V1/2 micro-circuit changes from the drug

Paper accepted! 😊 "Reframing the Free Will Debate: The Universe is Not Deterministic" will appear in Synthese. Final version available here: arxiv.org/abs/2503.19672 - with Henry Potter and George Ellis

Thanks. Would love to discuss it with you! Maybe we could have a chat once you’re back from the meeting ? Not quite as nice as in person after session, but still …

Thanks so much @tollkuhn.bsky.social ! So wish i could have been there with you all as initially planned (pre travel-ban). Happy they get to hear all of your fab talks in person at least. 🤩

So, gonadal type (testes vs. ovaries) and sex chromosome complement (XY vs. XX) represent two strong candidate drivers of phenotypic sex differences in mammals. But how well can these factors explain sex differences in the brain and how much does each contribute to a given difference?

…

Gonadal and sex chromosomal contributions to sex differences in mammalian brain organization Sex differences in brain development may contribute to well-known sex differences in behavior and neuropsychiatric risk - making it important to comprehensively map and mechanistically annotate normat...

How do gonads and sex chromosomes contribute to regional sex differences in the brain? 🤔

Our new preprint summarizes >5 years of work on this question, combining structural neuroimaging and snRNAseq within a sample of >850 mice.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Thread below …

✊🏽

Thanks so much! Hope you like it when you dig in. 🙏🏽

Thanks, Kevin! We had a blast doing it.

Fractionation of sex differences in human cortical anatomy Humans show reproducible sex differences in regional cortical volume (CV), but it remains unclear how these arise from underlying sex-biases in the two biologically dissociable determinants of CV: sur...

Not causal study design like in mice (obvs), but there is also some circumstantial evidence that they could in humans too …

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

So sorry Becca. It sucks. Im right there not-ACNPing with you (except due to DHHS ban last week on ACNP travel for NIH IRP folks)

Fin (phew!). Would love to know what you all think …

5. Finally, this project touches on the controversial topic of sex differences in the brain. Although we do this in mice, our shared biology makes the findings relevant to humans – where we can’t forget the entwining of sex and gender, and the wonderful diversity that comes from that ...

4. This project was also a much-needed place of comfort, escape & action for me personally during the pandemic & now in difficult times for US science.

We need to protect science funding, support international collaboration, and make sure we support the staggeringly talented next generation ...

3. This was a true team-science effort with experts in bioinformatics (Xia Yang with truly stellar PhD student Juliana Shin @UCLA), mouse care, imaging & neuroanatomy (Haley Hrncir, Jacob Ellegood, Brian Nieman, Allan Mackenzie-Graham). This sort of work takes an international multidisc' village ...

Jason and I got re-live postdoc immersion inside the other currents of PI life – which felt like a real treat. Speaks to value of friendship and ongoing co-creation in science ...

2. I got to dig deep into the thought and creation of this with my longstanding friend and collaborator in science – Jason Lerch @oxcin.bsky.social @ox.ac.uk . All gorgeous sMRI analyses his work ...

1. We got to work with and learn from Prof Art Arnold @UCLA – a kind & whip-smart giant/pioneer in the field of sex diffs research with mile-deep knowledge. Blew my mind & something I’ll never forget (felt like getting to comp for Miles Davis). Standing on big shoulders for sure …

Being part of this project was a true thrill, privilege, and dream-come-true for so many reasons that say something broader about doing science (and doing it now) …

We think this work revises our spatial & mechanistic understanding of sex diffs in 🐭 🧠 anatomy. Given shared gonadal/chromosomal basis of sex in all mammals – these 🐭 findings matter for how we think about our own 🧠 (especially given some shared mouse-human sex diffs in regional brain anatomy) …