I wrote down my rules on how to Science. I hope you find it useful!

✨ Announcing a new glutamate indicator - iGluSnFR4! ✨ Launched as a pair, iGLuSnFR4s and iGluSnFR4f have high-sensitivity and fast activation/deactivation for recording synapses. More on the indicators and what they are already revealing: biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Our new paper is out in Science. What is the synaptic plasticity rule in the brain, we asked. It turns out there are multiple, even within individual neurons. Congrats Jake! science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Lots of recent papers discuss memory engrams and neural ensembles. In this review, we examine engrams as physical memory traces within neural networks, highlighting techniques for identifying these memory-encoding cells sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

The vast majority over discoveries are low hanging fruit when they are made. The key to scientific progress is progressively making more fruit low-hanging. One of the deep problems we have in science is that we reward the people who pick the fruit rather than the ones who lower

My new self-description: branch-lowering. Better than toolmaking, something I never really liked. "One of the deep problems we have in science is that we reward the people who pick the fruit rather than the ones who lower the branches."

Not a shock to anyone that being a conformist is the easiest way to succeed in science. And it will always be true for as long as our primary measure of success is accumulation of citations - and not actual scientific progress.

The peer-reviewed version of expansion in situ genome sequencing is now out in Science! The news is bittersweet – when we first revealed this last September, I never guessed it would be my final paper in academia, but a lot has changed. A few parting thoughts:

Congratulations to our Human Neural Circuitry team; bit.ly/4dEyX7Z publishes today in Science! This was the hardest challenge of my career, but one of the most rewarding, after years of rebuilding– & for myself, expanding my inpatient neuropsychiatry work to the service

"We are speaking on behalf of hundreds of NIH staff who are standing up together to say: WE DISSENT. I am so scared about doing this but I am trying to be brave for my kids because it's only gonna get harder to speak up." Thank you Dr. Jenna Norton and NIH staffers!

I saw it firsthand at the #Lindau2025 Nobel Laureates meeting--international young scientists welcomed and recruited in Germany and elsewhere. Some of the very best are leaving, and many of the best will no longer come. wsj.com/politics/polic…

I spoke with an NIH program officer yesterday who said that, given the massive 44% cut planned for NIH, they were only planning to award about 12 new grants before the end of the year, which are mainly ones in the 1st and 2nd percentile, so the 3 grants we had with good scores

Yes. Writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. Writing *is* thinking. Students, academics, and anyone else who outsources their writing to LLMs will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.

One potent gene raises risk of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other brain diseases Massive proteomics database links gene variant APOE4 to chronic inflammation. nature.com/articles/d4158…

Very proud of this new paper led by Jiannis Taxidis in Nature Neuro where we use voltage imaging, optogenetics and ephys to record and manipulate PV and SOM interneuron activity patterns during working memory performance! nature.com/articles/s4159…

My final postdoc paper from the Golshani lab is finally out! How does inhibition regulate memory-encoding pyramidal sequences? We used kHz-rate voltage imaging of mouse CA1 PV & SST cells during a working memory task with odors. nature.com/articles/s4159…