Lauren Atlas

Interested in pain and alcohol use?

If so, then a @painresforum.bsky.social webinar happening next Tuesday, 16:00 UK time is for you 👇

Damn Vinny you’re on fire! Congratulations

Monitoring gene expression in the brain with a simple blood test?

In collaboration with @jerzyszablowski.bsky.social & his lab we figured out how to do it nonhuman primates using noninvasive neuroengineering of synthetic serum markers.

nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

Excited to share our new preprint on how feedback improves pain assessment accuracy when people learn from nonverbal reactions! See @yilizhao.bsky.social thread below.

When we modeled endocannabinoids and beta-endorphins together,
we found that beta-endorphins moderated the effect of FAAH substrates.

Changes in FAAH substrates were associated with individual differences in placebo analgesia.

There was no effect of 2-AG

Check out our latest paper:

The Contribution of endocannabinoids to placebo analgesia

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

This is an ongoing collaboration with David Finn & @laurenatlas.bsky.social

Take away: beta-endorphins gate the contributions of endocannabinoids to placebo analgesia.

New paper in Nature Neuroscience! We developed personalized fMRI-based predictive models tracking ongoing spontaneous pain in chronic pain patients—trained on 6+ months of densely sampled data. A true team effort. Deeply grateful to our participants! doi.org/10.1038/s41593-026-02221-3

Wow are they fortunate to have Daphna Shohamy at the helm - selecting her was a wise move (and I do hope they appreciate her for it).

Looking for your next Director of a Fancy Thing? Pick a Daphna.

www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2023/04...

Excited to share our new preprint on how feedback improves pain assessment accuracy when people learn from nonverbal reactions! See @yilizhao.bsky.social thread below.

What NIH Staff Can’t Tell You—And Why That Matters The people who understand most clearly what is being lost at the NIH are also the people least able to say so.

What NIH Staff Can’t Tell You—And Why That Matters
open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

NEW: Another NIH institute director hasn't been renewed — the director of NIAMS (arthritis, musculoskeletal and skin diseases institute).

That leaves a whopping 15 of 27 institutes and centers without a permanent director.

🎉 Excited to share our new paper on how the brain forms first impressions, now out (open access)!

In our EEG study, we tested how the brain responds to two kinds of social information: what we see (like perceived race) and what we know (like a person’s socioeconomic status).

🧵

NIH, CDC, HHS, and all of US cancer research and public health needed and still needs protection from Russell Vought and the P2025 White House.

The defining feature of 2025 at NIH was not merely grant changes.
It was unprecedented levels of presidential interference with NIH decision-making.
1/

Modernizing the National Institutes of Health: Faster Discoveries, More Cures | The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Full Committee Hearing on February 3, 2026 at 5:00 AM

I'm on Capitol Hill watching NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya testify to the Senate HELP committee.

Thankfully I haven't been escorted out of this event (yet). Here's what I'm following. You can also watch live here:
www.help.senate.gov/hearings/mod...

There's a lot more in the article - please read.

HEAL Initiative, BRAIN initiative, Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, all now leaderless with Walter Koroshetz gone...

I want to start by saying thank you, truly, to my friends, family, and so many good people who have reached out to check on me during this hard moment in Minnesota. I love you all. I am okay. See thread....

Exclusive: key NIH review panels due to lose all members by the end of 2026 Thirteen of the agency’s advisory councils, which must review grant applications before funding is awarded, are on track to have no voting members.

🚨 New from me: Grant review at more than half of NIH's institutes could be frozen by the end of the year.

That's because crucial NIH grant-review panels are slated to be empty at those institutes by Jan 2027.

A wonky bureaucratic problem with big implications.

A short 🧵

Thank you, Ulrike! ☺️

This line graph illustrates the percentage change in agency staff levels from the previous year for nine major U.S. federal scientific and health organizations between the fiscal years 2016 and 2025. The agencies tracked include the CDC, Department of Energy, EPA, FDA, NASA, NIH, NIST, NOAA, and NSF. For the majority of the timeline between 2016 and 2023, the agencies show relatively stable fluctuations, generally staying within a range of +5% to -5% change per year. However, there is a dramatic and uniform plummet starting in the 2024–25 period. Every agency depicted shows a sharp downward trajectory, with staffing losses ranging from approximately -15% to over -25%. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows the most significant decline, dropping to roughly -26%, while the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shows the least severe but still substantial drop at approximately -15%.

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again.

www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

The NIH's MYF policy in 2025 resulted in 4000 fewer grants and fellowships that touched every area of biology and medicine; continuing it in 2026 would be disastrous for science, technology and health in the United States 🧪
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Domain-general neural effects of associative learning and expectations on pain and hedonic taste perception Predictive cues significantly influence perception through associative learning. However, it is unknown whether circuits are conserved across domains. We investigated how associative learning influenc...

Hmmm - 75 followers in the last 24 hours. Am I on some new list? Anyway hello to my followers, new and old. I used to be way more active on social media, but nowadays it's rough. Here's our most recent paper while I have your attention: www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Banned from travel to #ACNP2026 at the last minute, the NIH Institute Directors will join the meeting via remote. Koob, Volkow and Acting Director Beckel-Mitchener for NIAAA, NIDA and NIMH.

Want to learn about FMRI visualization, processing and group analysis? Join us for the next AFNI Bootcamp (Jan. 27-29, 2026) for a fun few days of theory and interactive practicals.

Details+registration for this virtual course:
afni.nimh.nih.gov/bootcamp

7/ Fig 5 🔬

Ensemble properties explain why the regions differ

Timing, response size, synchrony, and contribution to population dimensions

Bottom line: ACC emphasizes ongoing nociceptive processing, RSC transforms aversion into predictive codes 🔮🧠

✨New Corder Lab preprint 🧠⚡️
- from Dr Sophie Rogers !

Differential modulation of aversive signaling by expectation across the cingulate cortex

We image the same ACC + RSC neurons over time during noxious fear learning to ask: who encodes aversion vs who predicts it 🔮

biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

In case you need a last minute gift for a sciency colleague or yourself, the pink and purple action potentials / HRFs are somehow still in the shop! On sale too! These colors are usually first to be snagged! www.brainedglass.com

Ohhh there’s a whole list coming!

Aw I liked this before i even looked at who posted it!