WilluhnLab

Warm congratulations to The Brain Prize winners 2026, Professor David Ginty and Professor Patrik Ernfors, for their pioneering work on how the nervous system detects and processes touch and pain.

Karolinska Institutet
HHMI

#Neuroscience #BrainPrize2026

DOPAMINE 2026 Room Sharing Interested in finding fellow delegates to share hotel rooms with during Dopamine 2026? If so, please fill out the form below! Once you complete your information, you will be sent an email with inform...

🚨DOPAMINE2026 (Sevilla, Spain)

Looking for someone to share a room with?
Here’s the room-share form👇🏻

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

First preprint from the lab! Using intracellular recordings & analysis of 2-photon imaging data, we show that spiking & neuromodulatory input during experience drive a reorganization of visuomotor inputs in V1 layer 2/3 neurons, consistent with enhanced visuomotor cancellation - bioRxiv link below.

Check out our latest paper on choice between alcohol and social reward in rats

UAB is recruiting neuroscience faculty at two different levels - come join our vibrant neuroscience community!

Escalation of cocaine self-administration and drug cue-evoked dopamine 🤩

This elegant study shows that the direction of change in cue-evoked dopamine during escalation of cocaine intake crucially depends on the response contingency of cue presentation

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

SWEBAGS Webinar March 2026 – SWEBAGS Swedish Basal Ganglia Society

Join us on Friday, March 20th at 16:00 CET for our next SWEBAGS webinar:
“Striatal activity in natural behavior” with Henry Yin & Eric Yttri.
We’ll dive into how basal ganglia circuits support real-world behavior.
More info & Zoom link: swebags.ebrains.se/events/sweba...
#BasalGanglia #Neuroscience

🌟 Only 4 months to go until #FENS2026!

The global #neuroscience community will soon gather to share ideas, connect with colleagues and discover the latest advances in brain research. 🧠

📍 Barcelona, Spain
🗓️ 6–10 July 2026

Registration is open — secure your spot!
👉 fensforum.org

A neuromodulatory circuit-to-molecular pathway for reformatting aversive memories during recall Tan et al. identify a neuromodulatory circuit-to-molecular pathway in rats that updates aversive memories when they are recalled. Noradrenaline from the locus coeruleus triggers synapse-to-nuclear tra...

Excited to share our new paper:
We uncover a locus coeruleus→amygdala circuit linking β-adrenergic signaling to transcription regulation in defined amygdala cells during memory reconsolidation—+ stress or elevated noradrenergic signaling at recall can strengthen memory.
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

"Multiple demand" network cognitive control interrogation across humans and macaques. Lateral PFC more functionally heterogeneous in humans than NHPs. Very cool translational work from @markboxf.bsky.social and colleagues!
doi.org/10.64898/202...

Dual Role of LH-GABA Neurons in Encoding Alcohol Reward and Aversive Memories One of the core aspects of alcohol use disorder is continued use despite negative consequences. Individuals with an alcohol use disorder typically engage in behaviors which represent a failure to inte...

Dual Role of LH-GABA Neurons in Encoding Alcohol Reward and Aversive Memories

Private money cannot replace public funding of science Who should pay for American science? In the current political climate, many are looking to the private sector to compensate for cuts in public funding. At the Harvard School of Public Health—particula...

Who should pay for science?

Why private money cannot replace public funding of science

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Returning as #OptoGRC2026 co-chair, meet @bjmarlin.bsky.social!

She's an assistant professor at @columbiauniversity.bsky.social & is most looking forward to seeing old friends & new data.

Bianca is also a proud bug mom, welcoming her first walking stick bug babies to her collection in September 🐛

An Open-Source Restraint System for Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Rats Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a critical tool for translational neuroscience, but preclinical studies frequently rely on anesthesia, which alters neural activity and limits comparison with human...

Excited to share this in final form @sfnjournals.bsky.social: An Open-Source Restraint System for Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Rats www.eneuro.org/content/13/2... if anyone wants to try doing it, give us a call! Happy to help you get going!

A recent @natneuro.nature.com paper analyzed lesion network mapping and raised concerns about the validity of the method.
See below 👇 for our response.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A recent paper in @natureportfolio.nature.com raised concerns about the lesion network mapping method. Our team of 16 coauthors analyzed >1000 lesions and 34 symptoms and found that "The methodological foundations of lesion network mapping remain sound" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Dopamine Supports Reward Prediction to Shape Reward-Pursuit Strategy Reward predictions not only promote reward pursuit, they also shape how reward is pursed. Such predictions are supported by environmental cues that signal reward availability and probability. Such cue...

🚨📃New Wassum Lab Paper 📃🚨

Out today, Melissa Malvaez, Nick Griffin, Andrea Suarez & team discovered that dopamine can enable reward predictions to shape how we pursue reward.

Surprisingly, we find that dopamine can constrain instrumental reward seeking.

www.jneurosci.org/content/46/8...

🧵👇🏻

Vectorized instructive signals in cortical dendrites - Nature Mice learning a neurofeedback brain–computer interface task show neuron-specific teaching signals in cortical dendrites, consistent with a vectorized solution for credit assignment in the brain.

This paper on how the brain may do gradient descent is very cool: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New Series from Quanta Magazine Explores the Infinite Evolution of Math New Series from Quanta Magazine Explores the Infinite Evolution of Math on Simons Foundation

Math is always reinventing itself — a new series from @quantamagazine.bsky.social will explore how mathematicians are still renovating and rebuilding the core pillars of their field: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/new-series-from-quanta-magazine-explores-the-infinite-evolution-of-math #math

Next-generation multicolor indicators for in vivo imaging of norepinephrine - Nature Methods Improved red and green indicators for norepinephrine and their characterization are reported. These indicators allow detection of norepinephrine release in awake behaving mice in dual-color fiber phot...

The most sensitive green and red #norepinephrine #sensors engineered to date are out in #naturemethods! Deeply grateful to all our funders and contributors who made this work possible. A true team effort. @erc.europa.eu @snsf.ch doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Calling all PFC and PFC-adjacent neuroscientists--registration for the GRC Frontal Cortex - "Frontal Cortex in Function, Dysfunction, & Therapies" is open! Check out the amazing lineup of speakers for this year's program, feat. keynotes by Geoff Schoenbaum & Helen Mayberg
www.grc.org/frontal-cort...

The 1000+ mouse project: Researchers developed a ‘fundamental’ computational method, which is intended to automatically process bioluminescence imaging-derived tumour images across anatomical regions and over time.

🔗 buff.ly/KBXi5Hu

'Evolving perspectives on the molecular and neural foundations of mammalian circadian rhythms'

by Yanqin Liu, Ran Huo & Eric E. Zhang

www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

"You see what you look for, and you look for what you know."

We are proud to release FOCUS: a 100 μm deformable human subcortical atlas precisely registered to MNI space.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Are you a junior faculty member interested in spending 2-4 weeks at Princeton Psych? Please apply for our Microsabbatical program! It’s a fully funded visit for professional development and creating long-term collaborations.
psych.princeton.edu/diversity/mi...

Striatal cholinergic interneurons boost dopamine release upon receiving a reward obtained after prolonged effort 🤩

This presynaptic boost would confer increased value on rewards obtained through effort, thus explaining the continuation of this effort to obtain more

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

Study in four mammal species reveals how the brain restores consciousness An international team of researchers has shown that a specific brain region is responsible for awakening fully anesthetised macaques, providing new insight into consciousness.

An international team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge has shown that a specific brain region is responsible for awakening fully anesthetised macaques, providing new insight into #consciousness.
www.eara.eu/post/study-i...
#AnimalResearch #mice #nonhumanprimate #NHP #brain

Pavlov would have been shocked and stoked by this study!

It meticulously shows that what matters most for cue-reward learning is the duration between rewards: the longer this duration, the fewer the number of trials needed for behavioral and DA learning

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

Neuroscience has a species problem If neuroscience is serious about building general principles of brain function, cross-species dialogue must become a core organizing principle.

If neuroscience is serious about building general principles of brain function, cross-species dialogue must become a core organizing principle rather than an afterthought, writes @suthanalab.bsky.social.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/animal-model...

#eNeuro | The Single-Prolonged Stress Model Fails to Produce Behavioral or Corticosterone Alterations in Rats
https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0168-25.2025