🧠 The Cai Lab will be at #SfN25!

Be sure to stop by the poster sessions to check out Hailey's work on decision-making, @zachtpennington.bsky.social's work on stress, @zoechristensonwick.bsky.social's work on seizures, Alexa's work on cocaine seeking, and Sandra's work on context representations 🤓

We're brewing up some Halloween fun in the Cai & Shuman Labs! ⚗️🎃

Just look at all the creativity everyone poured into their costumes! We have the coolest crew 👩‍🔬🧪

Interested in studying how neural circuits underlying mental health disorders are shaped by experience (e.g., stress)? Also interested in being trained by an amazing, thoughtful, and rigorous scientist? Also interested in living in a beautiful Canadian city? See below!

We're looking forward to the first annual New York Memory Hub conference later this week! Can't wait for all the talks and discussion about all things learning and memory 🧠

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🚨 New preprint! 🚨

Excited and proud (& a little nervous 😅) to share our latest work on the importance of #theta-timescale spiking during #locomotion in #learning. If you care about how organisms learn, buckle up. 🧵👇

📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
💻 code + data 🔗 below 🤩

#neuroskyence

Announcing our 9 new Fellows-to-Faculty Fellows! These awards help senior postdoctoral researchers with fresh perspectives on autism & neuroscience transition to tenure-track faculty positions: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/simons-foundation-announces-recipients-of-2025-fellows-to-faculty-awards/

Amazing! Congratulation Zoe 💪🥳this great application of #BiPOLES and a really cool paper👍

Check out new work from our lab! We developed a new way to directly control the precise timing of interneurons during behavior and found that theta phase locking is a causal mediator of seizure susceptibility in both healthy and epileptic mice.

🚨New preprint alert🚨
We used closed-loop optogenetics to causally test the importance of inhibitory spike timing in network function and found that manipulating PV+ cell theta phase locking in the dentate gyrus can shift seizure susceptibility (both ways!)

📣 We are expanding! Repost 🙏🏽

- Postdoc (funded by @simonsfoundation.org grant on synchronisation between cognitive representations and stepping)
- Project Associates
- Create your role! (Reach out if you are keen on these topics and these roles do not define you 👀🤗)

www.neuroact.in

I can't emphasize enough how incredible this community of Simons fellows is! The retreat earlier this summer was massively energizing and inspiring. Such an honor to be a part of this group. Can't wait for next year!

Photos: DeShaun Craddock and Emily Tan for Simons Foundation

This work was led by the amazing @susieyufeng.bsky.social but was a huge team effort across the Shuman and Cai Labs!

All of the data is available online and we hope other labs will be able to utilize it to answer other questions about epileptic circuits in MEC and hippocampus.

New paper out in Cell Reports! Led by @susieyufeng.bsky.social, we found that chronic epilepsy in mice drives distinct synchronization deficits in hippocampus and MEC, with early changes in HPC and late-onset changes in MEC that align with progressive memory impairment.
www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Mount Sinai Postdoctoral Fellows benefit from robust scientific support in part thru the generosity of donors. In the #FBINewsletter, LEARN ABOUT the work of Kristen Whitney, @zoechristensonwick.bsky.social & @zachtpennington.bsky.social & their benefactors🔬 reports.mountsinai.org/article/fbif...

Huge congratulations to @laurenmvetere.bsky.social et al!! This project was a massive undertaking and there's a ton to dig into here! 👏