Carla Golden
goldenneurons.bsky.social
Carla Golden
@goldenneurons.bsky.social
Neuroscience postdoc at NYU and former Simons Society Junior Fellow. Studying how estrogen modulates dopamine and learning in rats in the Constantinople lab. She/her.
Pinned
Thrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#blueprint 1/7
Estrogen modulates reward prediction errors and reinforcement learning - Nature Neuroscience
Dopamine encoding of reward prediction errors naturally fluctuates over females’ reproductive cycles with estrogenic signaling due to reduced expression of dopamine reuptake proteins.
www.nature.com
Reposted by Carla Golden
Excited to share latest study from the lab by an amazing RA, Dylan Flink.

We solved a small (important) puzzle while in the trenches of a larger (wavy 🌊) puzzle.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🧵...
Dual cholinergic mechanisms for sculpting striatal dopamine in vivo
Striatal dopamine (DA) and acetylcholine constitute a computationally powerful neuromodulatory dyad that orchestrates action selection, motivational vigor, and reward learning. Striatal cholinergic in...
www.biorxiv.org
December 30, 2025 at 5:47 AM
Reposted by Carla Golden
Spread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p...
#MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro
Lindsay Lab - Postdoc Position
Artificial neural networks applied to psychology, neuroscience, and climate change
lindsay-lab.github.io
December 8, 2025 at 11:53 PM
Thank you for the great summary, @thetransmitter.bsky.social, and the shout-outs from scientists we admire. There is so much we don’t know about how sex hormones modulate behavior and we’ll keep exploring!
November 26, 2025 at 3:25 PM
Reposted by Carla Golden
I am recruiting graduate students for the experimental side of my lab @mcgill.ca for admission in Fall 2026!
Get in touch if you're interested in how brain circuits implement distributed computation, including dopamine-based distributed RL and probabilistic representations.
November 19, 2025 at 6:04 PM
Reposted by Carla Golden
As the Neuroscience 2025 meeting comes to a close, it's time for us to think about the future. Do you want to help us shape neuroscience research and future @sfn.org meetings? Consider nominating yourself or colleagues: www.sfn.org/about/volunt...
Call for Nominations
www.sfn.org
November 21, 2025 at 12:16 AM
Reposted by Carla Golden
1/3
New Nature Neuroscience paper on estrogen & dopamine RPEs. Female rats in high-estradiol phase (proestrus) show stronger trial-by-trial adjustment of response vigor in a RL task: they start the next trial faster after better rewards.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#RewardSignals #neuroskyence
Estrogen modulates reward prediction errors and reinforcement learning - Nature Neuroscience
Dopamine encoding of reward prediction errors naturally fluctuates over females’ reproductive cycles with estrogenic signaling due to reduced expression of dopamine reuptake proteins.
www.nature.com
November 19, 2025 at 10:29 PM
Reposted by Carla Golden
Who wore it better? Our new paper shows that rat OFC supports Bayesian inference of hidden states! With neural correlates of inferred state transitions at the level of single neurons and population-level latent factors. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
November 17, 2025 at 6:06 PM
Reposted by Carla Golden
November 12, 2025 at 2:26 PM
Thrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#blueprint 1/7
Estrogen modulates reward prediction errors and reinforcement learning - Nature Neuroscience
Dopamine encoding of reward prediction errors naturally fluctuates over females’ reproductive cycles with estrogenic signaling due to reduced expression of dopamine reuptake proteins.
www.nature.com
November 11, 2025 at 2:41 PM
Reposted by Carla Golden
Rat-mon y Cajal, our lab mascot, is a pro at our task because he went to kindergarten first. His nemesis, Le Chat GPT, just copied off everyone else’s homework.

www.nature.com/articles/s42...
June 19, 2025 at 2:35 PM
Reposted by Carla Golden
Calling all Neuroscience postdocs! 🧠 Share your research through SPiNES (Seminars from Postdocs in Neuroscience: Extramural Series) from the NYUGSoM Department of Neuroscience. Applications close 08/20/25. Apply today! 👉 nyumc.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
#Neuroscience #Postdoc #ResearchOpportunity
June 15, 2025 at 4:20 PM
Reposted by Carla Golden
During Q&A, whenever someone asks a question about our "mice."
May 22, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Reposted by Carla Golden
THIS is outrageous and scary! RFK making his own journal that appears to be associated with a medical society.There is no such thing as the Academy of Public Health! They can use this to make false claims in medicine and science, including for vaccines. These are not peer reviewed nor scientific!
April 1, 2025 at 7:43 PM
Reposted by Carla Golden
Join our brand-new lab at UConn studying flexible sensory processing in mice! We're hiring a full-time lab tech - a great fit for recent grads looking to get experience with systems and behavioral neuroscience research.

Apply here: jobs.hr.uconn.edu/cw/en-us/job...
UConn CareersSearch UConnUConn A to Z Index
jobs.hr.uconn.edu
March 7, 2025 at 8:17 PM
Reposted by Carla Golden
Please repost! We’re trying hard to sort out rumors from truth + would like to hear from anyone affected by the new federal orders + NIH pause. Patients, scientists, health equity researchers: please contact us below. We won’t share anything without your permission. www.statnews.com/2025/01/25/t...
Are you affected by the Trump administration’s pause on health communications, science meetings, and reviews?
Have you been affected by the Trump administration’s pause on communications, science meetings, and reviews? @statnews would like to hear from you.
www.statnews.com
January 26, 2025 at 5:02 PM
Reposted by Carla Golden
Question for all you blueskyers (is that the equivalent of tweeps?). Can someone point me to a book that has a brooding non-male protagonist. Brooding heros tend to be my favorite to read about - think Batman or Edmond Dantes - but thinking about it, I'm wondering if only men are written this way.
December 5, 2024 at 1:55 AM
Reposted by Carla Golden
We are recruiting a postdoc!

Have expertise in RNA biology and want to apply it to neuro and neurodev disorders? Then apply 👇🏼

📌 $73,588 💰
📌 access to postdoc housing 🏠
📌 Support for internationals 🌍
📌 Awesome view 😅

🙏 RT

labs.icahn.mssm.edu/derubeislab/...
November 23, 2024 at 4:55 AM
Reposted by Carla Golden
NIH funding generated $2.46 for every $1 funded in 2023.

Important info for scientific advocacy in the years ahead- science is a quantifiable investment, not just a cost.

H/t to @nicolecrust.bsky.social for sharing!

#AcademicSky
#PsychSciSky
#NeuroSkyence

www.fiercebiotech.com/research/rep...
Report: Every dollar of NIH research funding doubles in economic returns
Research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) generated $2.46 in economic activity for every $1 of funding in 2023, a total of $92.9 billion, according to an
www.fiercebiotech.com
November 17, 2024 at 1:33 PM
Excited to be here in this quest for simpler times!

Here’s where you can find what I’ve been working on the last five years: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Estrogenic control of reward prediction errors and reinforcement learning
Gonadal hormones act throughout the brain[1][1], and neuropsychiatric disorders vary in symptom severity over the reproductive cycle, pregnancy, and perimenopause[2][2]–[4][3]. Yet how hormones influe...
www.biorxiv.org
November 15, 2024 at 3:20 AM