I feel very lucky in this regard - I will have already hired a fantastic lab manager with 10+ years NHP experience, and who seems to be willing to stay (fingers crossed) for the long haul!

Can't ask for better.

But I also need additional "hands" (beyond mine) to do the science.

My point exactly. I'm not sure how long to wait for the "right person" given that some portion of my startup expires soon-ish (3+ years).

This is fantastic advice!

For whatever reason, I feel obligated to hire someone quickly if I put out an ad - obviously not the case (given my faculty interviews...!).

It sounds like the message is to put out multiple ads and wait for the best person/fit.

I received similar advice, but not sure how I can reasonably hire people if I can't guarantee them a long(ish) term position.

My PIs have been very generous with timelines. I would like to be similarly in a position to keep good people - especially when timing for their next position is unknown.

We have to explicitly advertise for a particular position (only post-doc/tec).

I would love to just evaluate based on fit and talent, but at least at the "professional" level, I have to explicitly specify the level/experience/salary.

So, multiple calls? But no commitments to hiring?

I believe there was an update today (3/3/25)! The announcement is currently listed as "pending," scheduled to be officially posted 3/4. It lists review meetings for the DP2, Transformative Research Awards, and PBKD.

Link here: www.federalregister.gov/public-inspe...

We think that our approach can be generalized to other brain areas - allowing links from neurons to circuits to behavior.

And...our automated tool can be used right now by other cerebellar researchers!

We certainly learned lots of lessons from this paper (e.g., need for standardizing pre-processing across labs and incredibly careful data curation, necessity of pharmacological blockade for opto-tagging in cerebellum, nearly complete inability to record granule cells using conventional probes).

Thanks, Andrew!

And - another personal plug: I am setting up my lab at UW-Madison this summer (herzfeldlab.neuro.wisc.edu). I am looking for people passionate about linking circuit computations to behavior in primates! (6/6)

We hope that this work inspires others to perform similar circuit dissection analyses in other regions of the cerebellum (and beyond)! (5/6)

Along the way, we demonstrate the requisite properties of granule cell responses (a cerebellar neuron whose activity is invisible to current multi-contact electrodes). (4/6)

Using these neuron-identification tools, we characterize the input-output computations performed by the cerebellum and go on to show how (and where) the cerebellar circuit implements these computations. Long-story short, the cerebellum implements temporal and directional transformations. (3/6)

We take advantage of some new tools we developed to distinguish neuron types within the cerebellum from extracellular recordings (doi.org/10.1101/2025... & doi.org/10.1101/2024...) in a region that is crucial for the execution of smooth eye movements (the floccular complex). (2/6)