Alina Podschun

Genome-wide analysis of brain age identifies 59 associated loci and unveils relationships with mental and physical health - Nature Aging This genomic study of magnetic resonance imaging-based brain age in 56,348 people identifies 59 genetic loci, links brain aging to mental and physical health, and suggests high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes as causal factors of brain aging.

🧠 Why do some brains age faster than others?
🧬 Our new Nature Aging study of over 56,000 participants explores the genetics of the “brain age gap” — the difference between your brain’s biological and chronological age.
nature.com/articles/s43587-025-00962-7

Thread below 👇

Tau oligomers modulate synapse fate by eliciting progressive bipartite synapse dysregulation and synapse loss https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.19.677215v1

Come work with us!! Open rank faculty call!!

Come join the best lab ever!

New paper🥳

🧠 In TLE, brain changes go beyond the temporal lobe & beyond normal aging.

Our ENIGMA study (769 patients, 18 sites) found widespread gray & white matter decline, especially after 55. By Judy Chen and a terrific intl' team

Time for earlier diagnosis & deeper research
bit.ly/3HRYeQt

PhD and Postdoc Positions (m/f/d) in Human Cognitive Neuroscience of Dynamic Cognition – M/EEG, brain stimulation Job Offer from August 11, 2025

We’re hiring! 🥳fully funded PhD and postdoc positions in human cognitive neuroscience @mpicybernetics.bsky.social

M/EEG and brain stimulation methods to study timing/ prediction/ attention/ oscillations
tinyurl.com/5dku4du9

@timingresforum.bsky.social @gtc-tuebingen.bsky.social

please repost 🙏

Please repost. The Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping is looking for a Preclinical MRI physicist (9.4T and 15.2T Bruker Advance Neo). You will join a team of 14 dedicated staff in Canada's National Ultra-high field MRI platform who also operate 3T and 7T human scanners in the same facility.

Geometry of neural dynamics along the cortical attractor landscape reflects changes in attention https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.08.669432v1

Targeting intracranial electrical stimulation to network regions defined within individuals causes network-level effects https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.31.667730v1

Very pleased to say we have an Assistant Professor job opening (tenure track) in the Department of Genetics at Trinity College Dublin! 😀
www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOA399/a... - deadline is August 19th! Please repost!

Glad to see this one out - massive effort by Aaron Warren and @rolstonjohn.bsky.social - and a major milestone toward treating disorders of consciousness with DBS!
👇👇

Ireland launches global talent fund! www.researchireland.ie/funding/glob...
If you're a neuroscience professor (assistant/associate/full) and would consider relocating to the vibrant and booming city of Dublin, please get in touch!

1/11 Excited to share our @Naturestudy led by @leonooi.bsky.social @csabaorban.bsky.social @shaoshiz.bsky.social

AI performance is known to scale with logarithm of sample size (Kaplan 2020), but in many domains, sample size can be # participants or # measurements...

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience,

Generation of surrogate brain maps preserving spatial autocorrelation through random rotation of geometric eigenmodes

direct.mit.edu/imag/article...

Produces surrogates for null hypothesis testing of nonlinear effects within and correlations between brain maps

Bethesda Declaration — STAND UP FOR SCIENCE Support NIH Staff Now!

🧪 Scientists are pushing back against the gutting of US research funding. Now scientists outside of the NIH and members of the public can sign on in support of the Bethesda declaration: www.standupforscience.net/bethesda-dec...

More about the Bethesda declaration: apnews.com/article/nih-...

My conference is more cinematic than yours (at @netsciconf.bsky.social )

A graphic for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), showing a historical portrait of Marie Skłodowska-Curie overlaid with an image of four young researchers walking down a hallway. The European Commission logo is in the top left. Text reads: "Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – €404.3 million to support postdoctoral researchers”

Choose Science. Choose Europe.

A new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 call is now open.

With a budget of €404.3 million, it will support around 1,650 researchers from Europe and beyond.

Apply by 10 September → europa.eu/!fBTMgF

Stimulation mapping and whole-brain modeling reveal gradients of excitability and recurrence in cortical networks - Nature Communications How brain networks organize and interact based on their hierarchical position remains poorly understood. Momi, Wang et al find that high-order brain networks show stronger responses to stimulation and...

Absolutely incredible work by Davide Momi, John Griffiths,and a stellar team of neuroscientists with a multidimensional view of brain dynamics.

This work gives us a WHOLE BRAIN map of excitability.

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

Neural manifolds: Latest buzzword or pathway to understand the brain? When you cut away the misconceptions, neural manifolds present a conceptually appropriate level at which systems neuroscientists can study the brain.

Many apparent disagreements over the utility of neural manifolds come from a lack of clarity on what the term really encompasses, argues @mattperich.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/neural-dynam...

Under Pressure, Psychology Accreditation Board Suspends Diversity Standards As the Trump administration threatens to strip accrediting bodies of their power, many are scrambling to purge diversity requirements.

Extremely disappointing & cowardly. The American Psychological Association is rescinding diversity requirements. Not due to any actual mandate from the federal government, but only because it may *someday* face pressure from the government www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/h...

did you enjoy creating it? did you have fun? does it make you happy thinking about it and sharing it? then that's it. you did it. you found the secret sauce. "was that a waste of time?" of course not, fuckface. expressing yourself creatively is always worthwhile. you're doing great

Your dignity honors the bravery of the Ukrainian people.

Be strong, be brave, be fearless.
You are never alone, dear President Zelenskyy.

We will continue working with you for a just and lasting peace.

Gender imbalance in citations most pronounced in high-impact neuroscience journals https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.19.638905v1

#WomeninSTEM accelerate science and make our work possible. Today, we join other science organizations around the world by recognizing the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. #WomenInScienceDay

Geometric influences on the regional organization of the mammalian brain The mammalian brain is comprised of anatomically and functionally distinct regions. Substantial work over the past century has pursued the generation of ever-more accurate maps of regional boundaries,...

For my first-ever bluesky post, I'm really excited to share our new preprint "Geometric influences on the regional organization of the mammalian brain" with @alexfornito.bsky.social and a superstar 17-person team! (1/n)

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

radiata-ai/brain-structure · Datasets at Hugging Face We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

Here's a new open dataset of ~4000 processed brain structural MRIs from across the lifespan:
huggingface.co/datasets/rad...

Get it in three lines of code:
pip install datasets
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("radiata-ai/brain-structure", trust_remote_code=True)

Weird that we have to say this, but the government doesn’t get to decide what gender a person is.

Brains minimize energy consumption while maximizing computation. In humans, this trade-off is reconciled towards complex behaviors & hence relatively high energy use

Review & synthesis with @sharnajamadar.bsky.social @annabhlr.bsky.social & Hamish Deery

tinyurl.com/47c9n65w
osf.io/preprints/os...

Gender inequality remains a significant social issue, disproportionately impacting cisgender and heterosexual women as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual plus individuals. This meta-analysis aims to investigate the relationship between gender essentialism—a belief that views gender as biologically determined and immutable—and system-justifying beliefs (SJB) that sustain and legitimize existing social order. A four-level meta-analysis of 51 studies was conducted, comprising 118 samples and 327 effect sizes, with a total of 29,252 participants (sample sizes ranging from 21 to 2,803, 40% cisgender men, mean age of 29.52 years). Results revealed a moderately strong, significant, and positive association between gender essentialism and SJB, Zr = 0.391, SE = 0.029, t(326) = 13.499, p < .0001, 95% confidence interval (CI) [0.334, 0.448]. This relationship was not significantly moderated by the participant’s group status (majority vs. minority) but was influenced by the type of SJB considered and the target of gender essentialism. Specifically, gender essentialist beliefs were more strongly related to justifications of gender asymmetry (e.g., sexism, heterosexism) than to general hierarchical attitudes (e.g., social dominance orientation). Additionally, this association was stronger for essentialism of marginalized individuals (e.g., transgender individuals and people with diverse gender identities) compared to relatively privileged groups (e.g., cisgender and heterosexual people). These findings suggest that gender essentialism may help both majority and minority groups to rationalize existing inequalities. This highlights the need for future research to focus on the social construction of gender to mitigate its impact on marginalized groups and reduce the reinforcement of social inequalities

Gender Essentialism and System Justification

New meta-analysis "highlights a connection between gender essentialism - the belief that gender is biologically fixed and unchangeable - and the perception that current gender inequalities are justified."

doi.org/10.1037/sgd0...

#SocialPsyc #Psychology

Human brain dynamics are shaped by rare long-range connections over and above cortical geometry.

Some new results to inform this debate.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...