Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
LightNews LightNews
banner
luscatescu.bsky.social
Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
@luscatescu.bsky.social
230 followers 450 following 66 posts
Cognitive neuroscientist; Collegiate Assistant Professor @ Virginia Tech
https://support.psyc.vt.edu/users/luscatescu
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
luscatescu.bsky.social
Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu @luscatescu.bsky.social · Jul 10
After three years in the making and one full year under review - this paper is finally seeing the light of day!
@mkronbichler.bsky.social @vcalhoun.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Using the excitation/inhibition ratio to optimize the classification of autism and schizophrenia - Translational Psychiatry
Translational Psychiatry - Using the excitation/inhibition ratio to optimize the classification of autism and schizophrenia
www.nature.com
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
sansmeeting.bsky.social
Three more days to submit to SANS 2026 in San Diego!

Not done with data collection/analyses yet? In case you missed it, we have a "Pre-Registration" category where you can submit an abstract for a study you plan to conduct!

More info here: socialaffectiveneuro.org/abstract-sub...
January 16, 2026 at 6:19 PM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
alinebompas.bsky.social
Here’s a PhD advert to join my lab in Cardiff, UK : www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
open to applicants from the United Kingdom or the European Union
DL for applications 13th of February
Please share widely!
Brain and body speed at Cardiff University on FindAPhD.com
PhD Project - Brain and body speed at Cardiff University, listed on FindAPhD.com
www.findaphd.com
January 8, 2026 at 4:25 PM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
neuromatch.bsky.social
Thinking about applying to Neuromatch Academy or Climatematch Academy?

Join a free January info session to learn what to expect and how to prepare.

Free · Online · Multiple time zones

neuromatch.io/neuromatch-a...

#ResearchTraining #GlobalEducation #STEMEducation
Graphic promoting Neuromatch Academy information sessions. Text reads: “Learn about our courses. Ask questions live. Apply with confidence.” Neuromatch Academy branding is visible.
January 8, 2026 at 5:34 PM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
tinalonsdorf.bsky.social
Bei uns ist die eine W3 Päd. Psychologie zu besetzen ! jobs.zeit.de/jobs/profess...
Professur (W3) für Pädagogische Psychologie - Universität Bielefeld
Universität Bielefeld bietet Stelle als Professur (W3) für Pädagogische Psychologie in Bielefeld - jetzt bewerben!
jobs.zeit.de
January 1, 2026 at 3:41 PM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
harmitmalik.bsky.social
Today I made a small but momentous start to work in 2026 by changing a single number.

I renamed the file “Papers to write and submit in 2025” to “Papers to write and submit in 2026”.

Stay tuned for more file updates on 1st January 2027.
January 1, 2026 at 4:26 PM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
vacancyedu.bsky.social
37 PhD Positions-Fully Funded at University of Liverpool, England

#VacancyEdu #PhD #PhDposition #PhDlife #PhdScholarship #FutureDoctor #DoctoralCandidate #Postgraduate #PhDstudents #ResearchOpportunity #PhDcommunity #PhDStudentship

vacancyedu.com/37-phd-posit...
37 PhD Positions-Fully Funded at University of Liverpool, England - Vacancy Edu
University of Liverpool, England invites online Application for number of  Fully Funded PhD Positions at various Departments. We are providing a list of Fully
vacancyedu.com
December 28, 2025 at 10:40 AM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
jobrxiv.org
Tempus is hiring for 4 new positions!

Individual job details below!👇

#ScienceJobs
Image
December 28, 2025 at 4:26 PM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
pammageddon.bsky.social
Postdoc opportunity at Notre Dame!
December 28, 2025 at 5:22 PM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
pessoabrain.bsky.social
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻
Annual reminder that the book is open access.
How do we think of the brain as a deeply interconnected system with highly distributed, non hierarchical processing.
Want to learn about the brain from a fresh perspective?
#neuroskyence
mitpress.mit.edu/978026254460...
The Entangled Brain
Popular neuroscience accounts often focus on specific mind-brain aspects like addiction, cognition, or memory, but The Entangled Brain tackles a much bigger ...
mitpress.mit.edu
December 28, 2025 at 5:56 PM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
tamarhaspel.bsky.social
This is absolutely wild, and super important.

There are zillions of studies claiming that fMRI signals indicate increased brain activity, and it looks like that's often just wrong.

If confirmed, this means we've misinterpreted a lot of research.
pgmj.bsky.social Magnus Johansson @pgmj.bsky.social · Dec 28
"40 percent of MRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity"; "Since tens of thousands of fMRI studies worldwide are based on this assumption, our results could lead to opposite interpretations in many of them.”
www.tum.de/en/news-and-...
40 percent of MRI signals misinterpreted
Interpretation of numerous MRI data may be incorrect: blood flow is not a reliable indicator of brain activity.
www.tum.de
December 28, 2025 at 10:00 AM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
rssdiversity.bsky.social
🚀 The RSS presents "Statistics for Every Body: Inclusive Data Communication" on Jan 28, 2026!
📊 Learn to make your data accessible for audiences with visual & auditory impairments with experts from BBC News, ONS & more.
🔗Event details: bit.ly/Stats4Every1
#StatsSky #DataVis #RStats #InclusiveStats
An informational flyer for the Royal Statistical Society's 'Statistics for Every Body' online event. The flyer includes a summary of the inclusive data communication topic, headshots and affiliations of key speakers, and practical information like the event date (Jan 28, 2026), time (12:00-13:30), and how to register: bit.ly/Stats4Every1
December 19, 2025 at 11:31 AM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
neurograce.bsky.social
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
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
mschrimpf.bsky.social
One week left to apply to the EPFL computer science PhD program www.epfl.ch/education/ph.... It's an amazing environment to do impactful research 🧪 (with unparalleled compute)! My NeuroAI group is hiring 🧠🤖. Consider this review service by our fantastic PhD students: www.linkedin.com/posts/spnesh...
December 8, 2025 at 2:20 PM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
cnsorg.bsky.social
🚀 Neuromatch invites CNS community to online July 2026 courses
📅 Info Sessions (21 & 28 Jan): neuromatch.io/neuromatch-a...
🧠 Comp Neuro (6–24 Jul): neuromatch.io/computationa...
🤖 Deep Learning in Neuro (6–24 Jul): neuromatch.io/deep-learnin...
🧬 NeuroAI (13–24 Jul): neuromatch.io/neuroai-cour...
December 8, 2025 at 9:28 PM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
camerontellis.bsky.social
We are recruiting a lab manager/research assistant to start in early 2026! The successful candidate will conduct awake infant fMRI, meet cute babies, and join a fun team!

More details (e.g. responsibilities): soc.stanford.edu/people/#join...

Apply here: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/social-...
People – Scaffolding of Cognition Team
soc.stanford.edu
November 21, 2025 at 12:16 AM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
theresecollins.bsky.social
Master in Cognitive Science #cogsci run by Univ Paris Cite & Sorbonne U is open for application for the 2926-2027 academic year.

Tracks:
#CogPsych #linguistics #philosophy #computational #neuroscience #neuroai

Internships available in dozens of Parisian labs

100% English
Application | cog-SUP
cog-sup.fr
December 6, 2025 at 8:30 AM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
y2skot.bsky.social
The entire document is so worthy of reading by a fire or with a cat on lap, or both, pausing frequently to ponder and thought-wander a bit, then continuing on. How I do it, anyways.

Solid and compelling arguments crafted with expertise, precision, and measured passion.
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
November 21, 2025 at 7:12 AM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
rmathematicus.bsky.social
Just stumbled across this on another social media site, I love it!

onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/d...
Don’t make fun of renowned Dan Brown
Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house – and immediately he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-old man had no…
onehundredpages.wordpress.com
November 16, 2025 at 7:17 AM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
✨ This is wonderful 🎬 🍿

Librebel on Youtube reads out our position paper:

Guest, O., Suarez, … & van Rooij, I. (2025). Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJNO... @olivia.science @marentierra.bsky.social
Against the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia by Guest et. al. (2025)
YouTube video by librebel
www.youtube.com
November 8, 2025 at 12:22 AM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
annaleshinskaya.bsky.social
I am accepting graduate students for the UCI Cognitive Sciences PhD program for Fall 2026. Check out my lab website - www.relcoglab.org for our recent themes. Our funded work focuses on combinatorial reasoning, moral decision-making, and conceptual cognition in humans and large language models.
Relational Cognition Lab
www.relcoglab.org
November 5, 2025 at 8:09 AM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
asasocpsych.bsky.social
The Dept. of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte is seeking applications for an assistant or associate professor who specializes in advanced data analyses, with an open substantive specialty. Read more here: jobs.charlotte.edu/postings/64668
Assistant or Associate Professor of Sociology
The Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte is seeking applications for a tenure track position as Assistant or Associate Professor of Sociology (9 month term of appoi...
jobs.charlotte.edu
October 22, 2025 at 1:15 PM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
mpi-nl.bsky.social
We're seeking the next Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics! Lead cutting-edge research in language & cognition. Nominations (incl. self) due 19 Dec 2025.
mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/nominations-and-self-nominations-sought-position-director-max
October 3, 2025 at 7:53 AM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
alisabokulich.bsky.social
#Postdoc at Technische Universität Berlin in digital humanities & history/philosophy/sociology of science #philsci #STS. ERC project investigates digital communication within the ATLAS collaboration at CERN

Deadline: October 13, 2025
www.jobs.tu-berlin.de/en/job-posti...
#PhilJobs
Job Posting I-390/25: Research Associate - salary grade E13 TV-L Berliner Hochschulen – Job Postings at Technische Universität Berlin
Faculty I - Humanities and Educational Sciences, Institute of History and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Literature / History and Philosophy of Modern Science
www.jobs.tu-berlin.de
September 26, 2025 at 1:24 PM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
briannosek.bsky.social
Free to attend virtually: a NASEM event "Rethinking researcher assessment and incentives at U.S. academic institutions: A workshop"

October 28-29, 2025

Agenda: www.nationalacademies.org/event/45044_...

Registration: events.nationalacademies.org/45044_10-202...
Rethinking Researcher Assessment and Incentives at U.S. Academic Institutions: A Workshop
Register for this event from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
events.nationalacademies.org
September 26, 2025 at 1:44 PM
Reposted by Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
lhuntneuro.bsky.social
Looking for a PhD next year? Want to come and work on the next generation of OPM-MEG/EEG biomarkers in computational psychiatry?

Apply for our MRC iCase studentship with @mkflugge.bsky.social, collabs with @lilweb.bsky.social + industrial placement at P1Vital:
www.medsci.ox.ac.uk/study/gradua...
Development of robust, single-subject markers of predictive inference for computational psychiatry
www.medsci.ox.ac.uk
September 26, 2025 at 10:11 AM