Jibran Khokhar

Updates to the submission process for LOIs and grants requesting more than $500K in any budget periods. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

The adaptive value of stubborn goals

People have the extraordinary capacity to be captivated by the goals they choose. This often manifests as a strong reluctance to abandon goals – even in the face of high costs or better alternatives.

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

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Celebrating a wonderful #WomensBrainHealthDay by attending the Women’s Brain Health Summit!

Having a great time catching up with colleagues & friends, learning, and making new connections with like minded individuals who are passionate about health equity & funding women’s brain health research!

The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine A quiet policy change means the government is making fewer bets on long-term science.

After slow-walking critical funding for lifesaving research, the Trump administration has sabotaged the NIH grantmaking process so that researchers get LESS money on average and LESS time to use it.
 
No one is asking to fund less cancer research, but that's what's happening.

Early life stress induces social behavioral deficits and peripheral biomarker alterations in adolescence that perpetuate intergenerationally https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.27.690841v1

Hayley is one to watch out for with expertise all way from GWAS to animal/circuit studies to molecular dissection!

Dr. Hayley Thorpe explores the intersection of complex traits with mental health using translational population genetics approaches #ACNP2026

Her recent work uses new GWAS of cannabis use traits to understand cannabis use genetic & biological underpinnings: tinyurl.com/57vdj3df

What's the best part of Monday? 🤔

Getting to meet another group of fantastic @acnporg.bsky.social travel awardees 🤩

..and don't forget to say hi to these all-stars at #ACNP2026

Come here from Marlaina representing our lab!

What is that they say... the best for last? 😈
I may be biased... these are my amazing scientist friends after all! 🧠👩‍🔬

COME OUT AND SUPPORT YOUR 🇨🇦CANADIAN POSTDOCS THIS THURSDAY!
Registration link below ⬇️

@uoftmedicine.bsky.social @tc3consortium.bsky.social @westernu.ca @drjkhokhar.bsky.social

Biological Mechanisms of Sleep/Wake-Related Function Animals oscillate between sleep and wake periods characterized by foraging for food and avoiding danger, with a relatively high level of arousal during waking and by a relative absence of movement…

Specific genes and pathways are responsible for sleep and the functional outcomes of sleep Greene examines how these genes overlap with those linked to autism spectrum disorder, identifying a genetic mechanism that may connect sleep to psychiatric illness.

Current Issue Table of Contents: Biological Psychiatry

📣 Our latest Special Issue is now out! 📣

Exploring Sleep Alterations in Severe Mental Disorders: Converging Evidence From Basic, Translational, and Clinical Research was edited by Armando D’Agostino, Anna Castelnovo, Giulio Tononi, and Fabio Ferrarelli.
💤 🧠 🧬

Learn more about what's in the issue ⬇️

The UK National Mouse Genetics Network: Translating genetic findings using preclinical mouse models to better understand neurodevelopmental, neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders - Sevda T....

Brief overview of our symposium at the @britishneuro.bsky.social Festival of Neuroscience meeting earlier this year, looking at work linked to the @mrcmousenetwork.bsky.social @mrcharwell.bsky.social
#BNA2025 🧠🐭🧬

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Non-invasive ultrasonic neuromodulation of the human nucleus accumbens impacts reward sensitivity - Nature Communications This study shows that non-invasive ultrasound to the human nucleus accumbens can modulate deep brain activity and enhance reward-guided learning, offering a potential alternative to invasive neuromodu...

Glad to see the knowledge gained through lesion studies in nonhuman primates being utilized as a foundation for this work www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Putting 50 years of neuroscience on the map Navigate the rise and fall of research topics over five decades using our interactive map, which is based on a semantic analysis of nearly 350,000 abstracts.

Navigate the rise and fall of research topics over five decades using The Transmitter's interactive map, which is based on a semantic analysis of nearly 350,000 abstracts in leading neuroscience journals. Explore more: www.thetransmitter.org/publishing/p...

#neuroskyence #StateOfNeuroscience

I will be at @neuripsconf.bsky.social Dec 2-8 to present our "Brain-like Variational Inference" paper 👇

Let's connect if you enjoy first-principles thinking and brain-inspired AI 🧠 🤖

Poster info:
📅 Wed, Dec 3, 11 AM — 2 PM
📍Exhibit Hall C,D,E #500
🔗 neurips.cc/virtual/2025...

🧵[1/4]

🧠🤖🧠📈

Inflammatory profiles of transdiagnostic symptom dimensions in healthy females Psychiatric disorders are increasingly conceptualised as heterogeneous categories with transdiagnostic underlying mechanisms that cut across multiple …

Defining psychiatric disorders is often 'fuzzy' - e.g., compulsivity is a symptom in substance addictions, OCD, hoarding disorder, et al., - which impedes diagnostics and treatment. Our newly published work examines these shared ('transdiagnostic') symptoms... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

What would Francis Crick make of this?

I really enjoyed being part of this conversation on consciousness with @anilseth.bsky.social @stevefleming.bsky.social @cosmicskeptic.bsky.social, hosted by @profbriancox.bsky.social. Listen now!

Reversible modulation of a deep white matter surgical target for depression with low-intensity focused ultrasound Neuropsychopharmacology - Reversible modulation of a deep white matter surgical target for depression with low-intensity focused ultrasound

In this study, low-intensity focused ultrasound disrupted functional connectivity along targeted tracts, ⬆️ positive affect & ⬇️ cardiac-sympathovagal balance in patients w/ MDD, offering a tool for probing & treating mood-related 🧠 networks

How are preprints perceived and evaluated in the life sciences from a PI's perspective? Check our my podcast episode through the @asapbio.bsky.social Fellow's program, where I interviewed @leonardomorsut.bsky.social about his perspective on the topic! My key takeaways: 1/6

Advance the Culture of Peer Review with Preprints!
A few tips for funders, departments & institutions!
✨ Consider preprints and their reviews in evaluations for funding, hiring, promotion, etc.
✨ Allocate funding and support for preprint review services.

Have you voted for our video in the #IHDCYHTalks competition yet? Voting closes November 30!

forms.office.com/Pages/Respon...

Barriers to Recovery: Overcoming obstacles to alcohol recovery in the UK - Institute of Alcohol Studies Alcohol-related harm continues to escalate in the United Kingdom (UK), with 2023 marking the highest number of alcohol-specific deaths recorded in England, and only 22% of those in need accessing spec...

Alcohol is everywhere - marketing, 24/7 availability, and social norms make recovery harder than it should be.

Our new report 'Barriers to Recovery' outlines these obstacles and how we can change them.

#LetsTalkAddiction

www.ias.org.uk/report/barri...

Yikes! Take a look at the “Controversy” section on the Wikipedia page for Scientific Reports. The supposedly “peer-reviewed,” open-access mega-journal from Nature Portfolio has been dogged by serious issues for years. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scienti...

Hey @springernature.com, how did this paper not receive a desk rejection? www.nature.com/articles/s41... It’s clearly AI-generated (see Fig. 1).

Was the peer review also done by AI? The PubPeer thread raises serious concerns: pubpeer.com/publications... #NoHumanInTheLoop ?

Building compositional tasks with shared neural subspaces - Nature The brain can flexibly perform multiple tasks by compositionally combining task-relevant neural representations.

Nature research paper: Building compositional tasks with shared neural subspaces

go.nature.com/4ocRj3n

Text says: This section provides a comprehensive description of the methodology employed in this study to develop an explainable XAI framework for ASD diagnosis and parental support. The proposed framework integrates the TabPFNMix regressor, a state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) model for tabular data, with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) to ensure both high predictive accuracy and interpretability. The methodology is structured into five subsections: (1) Dataset Description, (2) TabPFNMix Overview, (3) SHAP for Explainability, (4) Framework Design, and (5) Evaluation Metrics. Figure 1 shows the overall methodology. Informed consent was obtained from all participants involved in the study, and, where applicable, consent was obtained from legal guardians for minor participants as approved by the IRB. And then Figure 1 is shown with lots of AI errors on the image.

An absolutely totally fine this can be published in a science journal image that purports to show how the study was carried out but instead is just AI slop.

Uhh,,, Figure 1 shows you... what exactly? Trying to understand Medical fryrmbial, runctitional features and mum's legs going through concrete.

This whole article is a bit of a disaster. And it's very difficult to find other published work for the author. Strange! 🧪

(via @smutclyde.bsky.social)

Hello @springernature.com - you’ve just published another bit of nonsense in Scientific Reports 🙁

#bebold #wxn #top100 | Denise Belsham Let the celebrations begin! 🎉 What a room to be part of - so many amazing, bold and powerful women. 🌟 Congratulations to all the winners - another full day of fun tomorrow. 🥂 Thanks to Women's Executi...

www.linkedin.com/posts/denise...

Very cool! Thanks for the mention @thetransmitter.bsky.social