Nicole Rust

Interesting. Thank you.

Terrific thread with great advice - thank you for it!

Title slide SPSP 2026 ANNUAL CONVENTION CHICAGO FEBRUARY 26-28 Global Impact: Communicating Psychology for Policy and Public Good Organizer: Andrés Gvirtz, SPSP United Nations Committee February 27, 2026

Session Goals Empowering personality and social psychologists to effectively communicate their work to public audiences and policymakers worldwide Exploring strategies to translate academic findings into actionable insights for sustainable development and global policy solutions Helping scholars discover how to leverage their expertise to inform critical discussions on the world stage

Increasing psychology's impact on policy and public good - symposium at #SPSP2026

How can researchers communicate with the public, government decision-makers, and industry? Economics tends to have large impacts on policy, psychology doesn't -how can we better reach people? 1/

We should protest. In parallel, researchers need to develop ethical lines they won’t cross in pursuit of funding. Basic research lays the foundations for all sorts of societal benefits and we’ve always been asked to make those connections. Redirecting to emphasize different ones remains ethical.

Interesting! What’s the connection between neural state space and self improvement? I bet it’s an effective analogy; I’m curious to hear more.

eg, Nearly all of brain and mind research could advance AI (we want to understand brains to build things like them). Likewise, AI is infamously energy hungry and that's a nice slice of cellular biology. When it comes to "quantum," I heard "MRI" mentioned (although I won't claim to understand it).

With this science piece, there's considerable unrest today about what NSF will fund. My understanding is that NSF on-the-ground is that what falls under the umbrellas of AI and quantum is broad. If you are submitting, consider helping them.

www.science.org/content/arti...

Understanding how the brain reflects and shapes mood requires resolving the disconnect between behavioral measures of mood that can only be made in humans (typically based on subjective reports of happiness) and detailed measures of brain activity only available in animals. To achieve this, we developed a mood model to predict behavioral fluctuations in human subjective happiness as individuals experienced wins and losses during a gambling task. Next, we investigated how this operationalization of mood was reflected behaviorally and in the brains of two monkeys engaged in the same gambling task. We found a remarkable alignment between human mood model signatures, the impact of estimated mood on monkey choice, and the persistent responses of units in monkey anterior insular cortex — including a matched timescale of integration across events. In comparison, the same signatures were only weakly reflected in lateral prefrontal cortex, suggesting that insular mood representations do not trivially follow from a signal broadcast to all higher brain areas. These results are consistent with a model in which the brain transforms experiences into mood by integrating events through a recurrently connected network of excitatory and inhibitory pools of neurons. These are among the first detailed insights into the nature of putative mood representations in the primate brain.

That includes studies of subjective experience related to perception, metacognition and such but we don't need to solve "hard problems" like qualia to make meaningful progress.

Here's one example for mood: 😊

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

Understanding emotions & mood is important for psychiatric conditions & we thus need to shape a rigorous science around human subjective experience. I'm excited about all the sense making that is happening in this space including that which (unlike the book highlighted) makes no mention of Freud.

True. But of note is that we can go a long way toward understanding many brain functions (like memory) w/out taking on the challenge of subjective experience b/c we have objective memory tests. Not so for emotions & moods, where our best measures are probes of subjective feelings. /1

Federal funding for US biomedical research is moribund.

Since October 1 2025, NIH is -80% in new grants and -70% in values (total dollars).

Labs are closing down and researchers are leaving science.

To what end?

All that said, facing the tragedies of this era with wisdom and grace is a different story. People in the US and elsewhere are fighting for their careers, and that's horrible. In those cases, I understand maximizing what the system will best receive (within ethical boundaries) and leaning into it.

As long as an individual's value functions and actions align, that's great! You-do-you. I only judge when I see a discrepancy - like an individual here a few months back that left academia following frustrations he had no time to think w/ an h-index of 80. Just slow down and think a bit more 🤷‍♀️.

I agree. I think of two questions. First, what do I care about (e.g. what am I curious about)? Second, where might I make the most valuable contribution? While domain expertise is great, once it becomes "rinse and repeat" it can begin to fall short of both (even if the system rewards it). No thanks.

Pivot Fellowship Pivot Fellowship on Simons Foundation

For established PIs wanting to pivot research topics, this is an incredible mechanism offered by the @simonsfoundation.org (I’m grateful to be a fellow). I wish there were more mechanisms like this!
www.simonsfoundation.org/simons-pivot...

Yes! While I’m pivoting (from memory to mood) atop a mountain of privilege that reduces risk, I also had no idea how it would go. I’ve encountered a lot of generosity and encouragement thus far. No one is suffering fools but my TL;DR is: so far, so good. I’m excited and grateful.

Exciting. Congrats!

A Robin Hood of this era.

Yes, she's been CEO and co-director for a few years now. That was a good choice - she's navigated them through a lot during her tenure with wisdom and grace as far as I can see. I do hope they appreciate her. 💙

Doing science is a delicate dance between conservatism and innovation. If it indulges every new idea that come along, it will waste energy and resources down countless rabbit-holes. But if it clings stubbornly to old ideas, beliefs and metaphors, it will never progress. How to tell the difference between what is worth pursuing and what is not? How to know when it really is time for a new narrative? It would have been wonderful to know what Keller had to say about that. She concluded her 2020 article by saying that the dramatic shift underway in biology's narratives meant ‘I only wish I was just starting rather than ending my career.’ We might wish that too.

What a terrific, generous piece. Thank you for writing (and sharing) this.

Éloge: Evelyn Fox Keller and the new biology - Philip Ball, 2024

Keller was wonderful, and is sorely missed (and needed!).
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The century beyond the gene - Journal of Biosciences In an increasing number of biological laboratories, the focus of research is shifting from sequence data to the functional meaning of that data. No longer content with structural mappings, there is a ...

I also agree with your premise that historians can help us wrap our heads around what's happening. When writing Elusive Cures, I drew from many historical works to wrap my head around where we've been and why. One of my favorites was this:

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Should biology put complexity first? The dictum “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler” poses a problem for biology. How simply can it be told without doing dama…

Should biology put complexity first? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... - excellent essay by @philipcball.bsky.social. I would add epistasis to polygenicity and pleiotropy as a ubiquitous and fundamental phenomenon, not some optional complication that we can try to account for afterwards

Elusive Cures A neuroscientist’s bold proposal for tackling one of the greatest challenges of our time—brain and mental illnesses

I agree! There's so much happening in this space in biology writ large; also in neuroscience specifically. Sticking to those who are emphasizing these idea in broadly accessible ways, I'd add: @pessoabrain.bsky.social (The Entangled Brain) and me (😊).

press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Wow are they fortunate to have Daphna Shohamy at the helm - selecting her was a wise move (and I do hope they appreciate her for it).

Looking for your next Director of a Fancy Thing? Pick a Daphna.

www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2023/04...

💔

Thank you! I really wish the issue of guaranteed stipend support was among the Qs they were asked.

I’m not trying to trivialize what needs to happen here - these are hugely difficult financial times for science departments and all sorts of salaries are at stake. I just don’t want to see trainees get the shaft in these next steps.

New UNC Innovation Report: 20% Commercialization Growth, $8 Billion in Startup-Driven Economic Impact in North Carolina | Innovate Carolina This week, Innovate Carolina announces the release of its fiscal year 2025 (FY25) innovation and economic impact report, which describes the significant human and economic impact made by startups, pro...

I understand that many unis are feeding part of licensing income back to research efforts, which is terrific!

innovate.unc.edu/new-unc-inno...

If a school who brings in well over $300 million a year on licensing revenue for its patents alone cannot set aside *emergency* funds to guarantee student stipends for N years for said research, I we would need to reorganize priorities. I’m grateful they do.