Jeff Zacks

Deafening Quiet from the Scientific Establishment Leaders are underestimating the risks of not fighting back

Thoughtful essay about the importance of standing up to open.substack.com/pub/donmoyni...

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program The National Science Foundation (NSF) has finally released the solicitation for the Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) for fiscal year 2026. The new solicitation includes two significant chan...

@fabbs.org wants to hear from you about the recent NSF Graduate Research Fellowship announcement and its impacts on scientists in clinical psychology!

Current or past NSF grad fellow in Clinical Psychology? tinyurl.com/36r9znke

Current student who hoped to apply? tinyurl.com/yhbz3d5u

New eLife preprint from Tan Nguyen—Pattern-based functional MRI and computational modeling show evidence for multiple signals contributing to updating the brain's representations of events: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Baccarelli was paid $700/hour for his work on a case against Tylenol. I will charge $0/hour to tell courts, FDA, and everyone else that correlations can arise from latent variables in the absence of a direct causal relationship.

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

The @nsf has also decided that clinical psychology is not eligible for NSF.

This is a crock of 💩

Clinical psych (actually clinical science) is a RESEARCH degree. Let’s just completely not support research training in mental health then.

Bad bad bad bad decision

A neural network with episodic memory learns causal relationships between narrative events Humans reflect on past memories to make sense of an ongoing event. Past work has shown that people retrieve causally related past events during comprehension, but the exact process by which this causa...

How does the brain🧠 make causal inferences and use memories to understand narratives🎬?

We built an RNN🤖 with key-value episodic memory that learns causal relationships between events and retrieves memories like humans do!

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

w/ @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen &👇

YouTube video by What We'll Never Know Preventing Misinformation @science

Short videos highlighting the science that is not getting done due to federal science cuts:
www.youtube.com/shorts/2J_BW...
Share them!
(Thanks to Timothy Wilson and his collaborators for making these!)

New preprint from Yining Ding @liliand.bsky.social! People use semantic event knowledge and grouping to remember the temporal order of events.
osf.io/preprints/ps...

We’re Hiring: Technology Policy Fellow – FABBS Location: Washington, D.C. (hybrid) Salary: Approximately $7,000 per month Start Date: September 15, 2025 Duration: 3 months, with potential for longer Position

The Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (@fabbs.org) is searching for a short-term technology policy fellow. Great opportunity for a new PhD interested in policy, maybe before a research postdoc or faculty position:
fabbs.org/news/2025/08...

Flyer for the Black In Neuro Conference on Wednesday, September 10. The background is a soft peach with vibrant geometric patterns in mustard yellow, coral, teal, and pink at the top border. A bold orange "#BlackInNeuroRollCall" title is centered. The main text below reads: "BIN was founded five years ago and we have all made big moves since then. Record a quick video sharing where you were when BIN launched in 2020 — and where you are now. Whether it's new degrees, new cities, or new roles, we want to hear how far you’ve come! Be sure to use #BlackInNeuroRollCall and tag us @BlackInNeuro.". Black In Neuro logo appears in the bottom left corner and to the right reads "#5YearsofBIN".

It’s been 5️⃣ years of #BlackInNeuro! 🧠✨

Join the annual #BlackInNeuroRollCall on September 10th and tell us where you were in 2020, and where you are now!

New role? New city? New degree? We want to hear it!!
Post your video + use #BlackInNeuroRollCall so we can celebrate YOU!! #5YearsOfBIN

I live in rural Missouri, population 480. I travel to DC a few times a year.

The President is lying.

Tell the Supreme Court: No Stay. Hands off NIH The Supreme Court is poised to allow Trump to illegally terminate NIH grants. Let's speak out. There is not much time.

The Supreme Court is reviewing a vitally important NIH case on its shadow docket.

It is likely that the Court will back Trump, and say his (illegal) grant terminations are ok.

We must speak up now.
1/

a man in a green lantern costume is standing in a hanger with a helicopter in the background . Alt: Ryan Reynolds suiting up as Green Lantern. While better known for his role as Deadpool, Ryan will always be Green Lantern to us. Sorry not sorry, Ryan. This will haunt you forever.

🚨ATTENTION CDC AND ALLIES!🚨 Our genes/jeans are GREEN tomorrow
To see our strength and build community, we ask that you wear something 💚green💚 to work on WEDNESDAY (tomorrow) to show solidarity and readiness to defend public health. Spread the word! #courageiscontagious #spreadthecolor #wearthecolor

New review paper with Maverick Smith on improving memory for stuff people actually want to remember:
doi.org/10.1177/0963...

STEM EDUCATION Appropriations, 2025 ............................................................................. $1,172,000,000 Committee recommendation ................................................................. 1,000,000,000

New update today (on Senate version, House version is worse):

👎 Though overall NSF budget would remain flat, STEM education would still see a 15% cut:

$1,172 --> $1,000 million

From a bill report out today after the bill passed in committee yesterday: www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/do...

Subcommittee Markup of Fiscal Year 2026 Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Bill

Another (small) update today:

The analogous subcommittee in the House will now meet next Tuesday, July 15, also about NSF/NASA/NOAA budgets (link below).

House has recently been more hawkish on $ than Senate, so will be interesting. Here's who to call: appropriations.house.gov/subcommittee...

Agree. But my lab is so good at making fun of me that I don't think AI will put them out of a job just yet.

Brenda Milner just turned 107. Happy birthday!
On my very first day as a PI at the MNI, she was right in front of me in the cafeteria line.
She was already nearly 100, and still coming to work.
What a legend.

Postdoc Fellows The CTCN funds a cohort of outstanding Postdoctoral Fellows to work at the interface between theoretical and experimental labs and help forge new collaborations. Application deadline August 1st, 20…

The Center for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience at WashU is recruiting postdoctoral fellows. The Center offers a unique opportunity to craft a transdisciplinary research program with an unusual degree of independence.

ctcn.wustl.edu/postdoc-fell...

Marc Coutanche: The president and DOGE repeat the Soviet's big mistake America went to the moon. The USSR starved. The difference was that America promoted science over politics. Getting to the moon remains one of the greatest...

Thoughtful column by @marccoutanche.bsky.social about parallels between the current federal challenges to science and the history of Soviet science:
www.post-gazette.com/opinion/gues...

FABBS Responds to Proposed ‘Schedule F’ Rule – FABBS The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) recently proposed a new rule which claims to “increase career employment accountability.” FABBS previously reported on

There's one day left to submit a comment on the Trump administration's proposal to reclassify career civil service employees--including at NSF and NIH--as "at-will" political appointees. Read the @fabbs.org comment here and submit your own: fabbs.org/news/2025/06...

Florida Board Rejects Ono for UF Job The Florida Board of Governors decided against confirming Santa Ono as president of the University of Florida in a contentious vote focused on diversity, equity and inclusion.

I too was troubled by Ono's abrupt about face. That degree of moral flexibility seems an unfortunate characteristic for an institutional leader. Inside Higher Ed found your comment apt as well: www.insidehighered.com/news/governa...

OECS thematic collections.

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind.

Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

Thanks @davideagleman.bsky.social for bringing me on Inner Cosmos to talk about the cognitive neuroscience of movies!

Three Great Documentaries to Stream

Chad Freidrichs' documentary, The Cinema Within, got a very nice review in the @nytimes.com:
www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/m...

🚨 A new rule would let career scientists like NSF/NIH program officers be replaced by political appointees

Already 14,000+ public comments, deadline is Friday

📣 Comments can be short. Courts consider them—and scientists with NSF/NIH experience are especially impactful

Speak up! shorturl.at/WKuBj

Thoughtful comment by @lkfazio.bsky.social about how to pivot.

In this op-ed, Alondra Nelson provides dramatic new facts about the current federal science crisis and gives a cogent argument for transparent administration of federally mandated science and information institutions and for protecting congressionally mandated procedures:

Bears repeating that Congress has not passed a budget or any other legislation that has asked the NSF to do this downsizing, they're dismantling the agency in anticipation of cuts that as of yet have no basis in law

Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions Changes seen as a response to presidential directives on what research to fund

It’s hard to look my oldest in the eye & tell him his generation can’t have the nearly as many opportunities we had to discover & advance science. www.science.org/content/arti...