Ben Saunders

In Late, Obscure Notice, DHS Turbocharges Trump’s Voter Purge Database, Evading Privacy Protections Read more here.

🚨BREAKING: The Department of Homeland Security quietly formalized sweeping changes to a federal immigration database, turning it into a national “voter verification” tool that appears to sidestep federal privacy protections and will make it easier to remove large numbers of voters from the rolls.

Nothing like a good cry over my morning coffee as Wei heads out 💔. The US is crazy to not do everything possible to keep and treasure people like her. I know she will do wonderful things where ever she lands - this is our loss

ATTN: Two faculty positions are available in my department (neuroscience) at the University of Minnesota. This is a general search with no topic focus. November 20th application deadline.

Apply here: hr.umn.edu/jobs/Find-Job
Assistant Prof job code: 364920
Associate/Full Prof job code: 364921

List of poster presentations for Saunders lab at SFN conference in November 2025.

If you're heading to #SfN25 in a couple weeks, pop in early to the posters on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning to see a bunch of cool unpublished work from the lab.

Congrats!! Really cool

Stoked to see our study out in final form! Big kudos to @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social for driving this along for the past 5 years.

Lieber Institute For Brain Development - Staff Scientist I, Translational Neuroscience A little about us:The Lieber Institute for Brain Development (LIBD) was established in 2010 to plot a new course in biomedical research that would change the lives of individuals affected with develop...

We are hiring for a PhD-level Staff Scientist to join our teams in the Translational Neuroscience Division @lieberinstitute.bsky.social. This is an exciting opportunity to work at the intersection of human 🧠 neuroanatomy and molecular neuroscience

recruiting.paylocity.com/recruiting/j...

direct relief is legit, and because they work in the region already, they can scale up more easily. please donate if you can

Designing allosteric modulators to change GPCR G protein subtype selectivity - Nature Studies of the G-protein-coupled receptor NTSR1 show that the G protein selectivity of this receptor can be modified by small molecules, enabling the design of drugs that work by switching receptor su...

Excited to share that my co–first author paper has been accepted in @nature.com 🎉

We show that small molecules binding at the GPCR-transducer interface can predictably switch G protein selectivity - paving the way for structure-guided, pathway-selective drug design.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Super exciting, congrats everyone!!!

Designing allosteric modulators to change GPCR G protein subtype selectivity - Nature Studies of the G-protein-coupled receptor NTSR1 show that the G protein selectivity of this receptor can be modified by small molecules, enabling the design of drugs that work by switching receptor su...

Now online @nature.com!

Want to change the consequences of receptor activation?

Small molecules binding the GPCR-transducer interface change G protein subtype preference in predictable ways, enabling rational drug design 💥

So many new possibilities! 🧪🧠🟦

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧵👇

I froze some, going to see how it holds up for later in winter

I know I love it

Phd recruitment flyer for the University of Minnesota Neuroscience graduate program. Visit neuroscience.umn.edu for more information

ATTN neuroscience PhD prospectives! University of Minnesota Graduate Program in Neuroscience www.neuroscience.umn.edu is hosting a virtual open house event on Oct 30th, register here: forms.gle/wz7e3UVdsyNi...

Also say hi at upcoming grad fairs. Learn about the program & meet students & faculty!

Dirt and roots of a tomatillo plant

One of my tomatillo plants went off this year - 5 feet tall and around 150 tomatillos. Look at the amazing root system it grew.

They can't pass a budget but they did ensure that my health insurance premiums as an NC state employee rose 300% (literally)

That’s the other thing that baffles me about AI and creative writing, actually.

The work IS the joy for me. I don’t want to be able to snap my fingers and have a completed “product.” I want to be transformed by the process. I’m an author but I do this because I enjoy the rigor of being a writer.

Dismantling the Institutional Review Board (IRB), that oversees all human subjects research, is bad. Really bad.

😍 Boston, you are beautiful. #NoKings

Minneapolis is showing up and showing out. #NoKings

Cat sleeping on a blanket in the sun

Martin is fall maxing

Out today at Neuron, our experiments show that frontal cortical representation of economic variables is jointly determined by spatial organization and downstream
connectivity of neurons, revealing a structured, multi-scale code for economic variables. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Yeah very interested in context of aberrant sensory and attentional processing

Actually very interested in this and just published a paper I think adds context. bsky.app/profile/bens...

But like I think the broad idea makes sense and is cool. But it’s likely a subset of dopamine neurons and doesn’t obviate non motor learning effects from past studies.

Dopamine dynamics during stimulus-reward learning in mice can be explained by performance rather than learning - Nature Communications VTA dopamine activity control movement-related performance, not reward prediction errors. Here, authors show that behavioral changes during Pavlovian learning explain DA activity regardless of reward ...

Seeing lots of reactions to this compelling paper - showing VTA dopamine is linked to cue and outcome induced behavioral reactions: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
I have some thoughts…

There are some factual errors as well unfortunately. For example, we did do laser omissions to show conditioned CR and DA response when stim was absent. Also explored in our follow up Current Bio paper last year. And TH cre rats don’t have the ectopic expression as the mice.

Great thread Phil

Mini thread on main take homes from the paper! bsky.app/profile/bens...