Drew Schreiner

They are going from 10 to 15 study sections (surprising) - public.csr.nih.gov/EvaluationIn...

NAL is dead

NMB is dead

ARM is dead

I know I’m a good reviewer because authors always thank me for my helpful comments.

Research Technician Research Technician position available in the Grienberger lab at Brandeis University. We are a new neuroscience group studying the cellular basis of learning and memory in the mammalian brain. This is...

We’re looking for a new Research Tech! Our research tech is heading to graduate school (very exciting!), which means we’re recruiting someone new to join our team. The position involves hands-on neuroscience research in a collaborative environment.
brandeis.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/Jobs/job/Bra...

Million dollar idea: The cowbird cake. Instead of hiding a fake baby like a King Cake, hide a small fake egg. Whoever finds it has to raise the egg to adulthood (i.e., buy the next cake)

Congrats to Mac Chamberlain, soon-to-be Dr. Mac @ UIUC.

rad as hell

Experimenting with an AI-curated neuroscience feed. It scans the entire firehose in real time, prefilters for neuro/cogsci keywords, then a local LLM scores each post for scientific substance. A ranking algorithm blends that quality score with engagement to surface the best discussion. Try it out!

😢

hey now, don't disparage their feelings...
Transmitters diffusing, transiently binding to GPCRs like ships passing in the night, causing conformational changes...

the sun rising through a leafless forest

here comes the sun

Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias Krakauer et al take the view that current neuroscience places too much emphasis on techniques and causal accounts of explanation. They argue that detailed study of behavior and its algorithmic composi...

I'd throw this into the list

I’m building a foundational reading list for our lab (systems & circuit neuroscience, compneuro, modeling, neuromodulators, population coding etc.).

I’d like to crowdsource recommendations.

Which review(s) would you consider mandatory reading for the next generation of researchers?

Two-photon calcium imaging at 24,000 lines/s, with the resonant axis spanning 4x what other systems can do. Inertia-free. Diffraction-limited. No tradeoffs. Che-Hang Yu developed a 4x angle multiplier for laser scanning. His paper is out today: opg.optica.org/optica/fullt... 1/n #fluorescenceFriday

Who do you think you are? I AM

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets The US Congress rejected sweeping cuts to science agencies. But the NIH, the NSF and NASA have had their spending slowed.

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers.

The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

Burying your head in the sand and hoping it gets better is not an option #standupforscience
www.standupforscience.net/march7

It's also worth saying that this is one of the hardest lessons I learned as a new PI: Maintenance is real! Projects are easy to start and hard to hand off. Technology that changes fast accelerates obsolescence. I think there's real value in trying ideas, letting some fail, and moving on. 1/n

In which he again fails to understand the nuance of how different ICs apply ESI status.... But understanding how NIH works has never been his goal. Which is why he says things on podcasts that don't reflect reality.

How and why does cognition vary so greatly between individuals and species? In @natrevbiodiv.nature.com, we propose the "Predatory Intelligence Hypothesis" which posits that the cognitive challenges associated with predator–prey interactions drive a cognitive co-evolutionary arms race

rdcu.be/e5KIj

Getting ready for experiments on my new in steel-ico model of birdsong

omg did you see the sequencing they're doing? It's so Last Gen

Heres what I imagine Werner Herzog will say about Pi day:

"On this Pi Day, we pretend the infinite can be domesticated by a symbol. We chant 3.14 like a prayer, but the decimals continue. Indifferent. Relentless. In the abyss between numbers, the universe is not explained. It merely continues."

Don't downplay the time cost! I've built stuff to save money and bought stuff to save time. My preference nowadays is much more on the "save time" side of the equation

The outlier is wrong when they think my application is bad; they are correct when they think it's good

variability across reviews - as frustrating as it is to experience - can be a feature rather than bug

positive correlation (~0.25) between reviewer score and number of citation percentiles

Agreed (on the lack of agreement!)
E.g., in that analysis I linked, they use citations on published abstracts as a measure of quality - useful, but are citation counts what we want to select on?

Honestly, given this lack of agreement on what constitutes "good" science...

Graphs of agreement in scoring an abstract between two reviewers, which tends to be relatively low

And just so the link to this analysis is in this thread as well - correlation between reviewers is only ~0.25 and is unaffected by blinding
ideas.repec.org/p/feb/artefa...

Also - look at the original thread I quoted here, @kawillis.bsky.social linked a bunch of other interesting analyses looking at reviewer concordance (or rather, lack thereof!)