David Sussillo
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sussillodavid.bsky.social
David Sussillo
@sussillodavid.bsky.social
Neural reverse engineer, scientist at Meta Reality Labs, Adjunct Prof at Stanford.
Pinned
Coming March 17, 2026!
Just got my advance copy of Emergence — a memoir about growing up in group homes and somehow ending up in neuroscience and AI. It’s personal, it’s scientific, and it’s been a wild thing to write. Grateful and excited to share it soon.
2026 Internships at CTRL Labs at Meta Reality Labs

It's intern application season for summer 2026 with the CTRL Labs (Electromyogram (EMG)) team at Meta Reality Labs! 🚀

You can see our latest work covered in this Nature article.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A generic non-invasive neuromotor interface for human-computer interaction - Nature
A high-bandwidth neuromotor interface offers performant out-of-the-box generalization across people.
www.nature.com
September 5, 2025 at 8:28 PM
Reposted by David Sussillo
Terrifying insanity. What can be done to stop this?
The Trump administration will move to pull the COVID vaccine off the US market “within months,” one of RFKJr’s closest associates has told the Daily Beast. It will mark the fulfillment of one of RFKJr's passions and will expose thousands to death just as COVID is again surging.
Trump and RFK Jr. to Ban Covid-19 Vaccine ‘Within Months’
A close associate of the HHS secretary claims the U.S. government will soon pull COVID-19 mRNA jabs from the market.
www.thedailybeast.com
August 25, 2025 at 3:33 PM
Reposted by David Sussillo
(7/26) The most surprising phenomenology happens after input cessation at t≥0: neurons continue oscillating long after stimulation ends, with lifetimes exceeding any intrinsic system timescale, including the plasticity forgetting timescale, by an order of magnitude (panel iii).
August 25, 2025 at 5:17 PM
Coming March 17, 2026!
Just got my advance copy of Emergence — a memoir about growing up in group homes and somehow ending up in neuroscience and AI. It’s personal, it’s scientific, and it’s been a wild thing to write. Grateful and excited to share it soon.
August 4, 2025 at 4:21 PM
Reposted by David Sussillo
FUNDING OPPORTUNITY: Motor Learning and Neuromotor Ethics

Our Reality Labs EMG Foundational Research team is pleased to announce an RFP! The topic is on motor learning for EMG-based HCI and the related neuromotor ethics. Submissions are due September 1!

www.meta.com/blog/reality...
Request for Proposals: Motor Learning & Neuromotor Ethics | Meta Quest Blog
To foster innovation in this area, and to deepen our collaboration with academia, Reality Labs’ EMG Foundational Research team is pleased to invite faculty to submit their ideas to this request for re...
www.meta.com
July 25, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Open-sourced EMG data plus training/testing scripts to make contact with our results at 100 users for each three tasks (discrete gestures, 1D wrist navigation, and handwriting).

github.com/facebookrese...
July 23, 2025 at 4:34 PM
Explainer threads 🧵 are generous. They help science be a community, not a contest. Keep 'em coming!
Why I don't like explainer threads, a 🧵:
May 20, 2025 at 6:34 PM
Reposted by David Sussillo
It's been one year since Jim Simons passed away. He remains one of the greatest philanthropists of our time. His commitment to fundamental scientific research was truly extraordinary and remains essential for advancing humanity.
www.simonsfoundation.org/2024/05/10/s...
Simons Foundation Co-Founder, Mathematician and Investor Jim Simons Dies at 86
Simons Foundation Co-Founder, Mathematician and Investor Jim Simons Dies at 86 on Simons Foundation
www.simonsfoundation.org
May 10, 2025 at 5:37 PM
Reposted by David Sussillo
30 days to the launch of Elusive Cures! I learned so much writing it, and I want to share it.

For the next 30 days, I'll post brain & mind research breakthroughs on odd days, and highlight unmet needs on even ones. #ElusiveCures30

First breakthrough: /1

press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
Elusive Cures
A neuroscientist’s bold proposal for tackling one of the greatest challenges of our time—brain and mental illnesses
press.princeton.edu
May 11, 2025 at 11:59 AM
Reposted by David Sussillo
Calling all science advocates!! Carlos Brody+ are creating a searchable database of tangible science benefits, and they need you.

publicusaresearchbenefits.com

They are asking for suggestions - from brief to lengthy. The database is state-searchable, so all 50 states.

Please spread the word!
Searchable database of tangible benefits that federally-funded research gave us.
A crowd-sourced site. Health and Well-being. National Security. Prosperity.
publicusaresearchbenefits.com
May 6, 2025 at 12:55 PM
Come see Nishal’s poster today at #cosyne2025 (Session 2, 2-051)!

We’ve added a per-trial inferred bias to LFADS, boosting interpretability by turning multistable dynamics into contextual ones. Less murky, more meaningful with many practical applications such as denoising data.
March 28, 2025 at 4:04 PM
Reposted by David Sussillo
Are you an ambitious scientist or engineer?
Do you want to do hard engineering that will transform lives and advance science?
Come join us to build next-generation neurotechnology at Integral.
March 28, 2025 at 5:33 AM
Reposted by David Sussillo
How can we make progress in developing a general model of neural computation rather than a series of disjointed models tied to specific experimental circumstances, ask Eva Dyer and @tyrellturing.bsky.social in the latest entry in our NeuroAI series.

www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/acce...
Accepting “bitter lesson” and embracing brain’s complexity
To gain insight into complex neural data, we must move toward a data-driven regime, employing large models trained on vast amounts of data. Experts weigh in.
www.thetransmitter.org
March 26, 2025 at 4:12 PM
Reposted by David Sussillo
1/7 Our paper on individual variability in decision-making is finally out in @nature.com! Inspired by the classic work by Mante and Sussillo, we trained many rats to solve context-dependent decision-making, and we found that different brains use different neural mechanisms to solve the same task!
Individual variability of neural computations underlying flexible decisions - Nature
Behavioural experiments to study decision-making in response to context-dependent accumulation of evidence provide testable models that are consistent with the heterogeneity in neural signatures among...
www.nature.com
March 21, 2025 at 1:29 PM
We're hiring!

Join Meta Reality Lab's EMG Wristband foundational research team! ⚡️

We're seeking research scientists with systems neuro/ML/AI/BCI/EE backgrounds, with skills on a spectrum from modeling to experimental expertise, as well as generalists who excel in both areas.
February 3, 2025 at 9:43 PM
Grace's critique is spot on. Perhaps one function of dynamics is to switch from representation to representation?
I know it doesn't matter, but I am so confused by this idea floating around that a dynamical systems approach is somehow without representations. It is not how I nor many other computational neuroscientists I know would think of these things. www.cambridge.org/core/books/r...
January 21, 2025 at 1:13 AM
Reposted by David Sussillo
Hey #neuroskyence check out the line-up for the first annual #SPAN2025 meeting. Our neuro representation is strong💪: @russpoldrack.bsky.social ! @sussillodavid.bsky.social ! @theamygdaloid.bsky.social ! Tali Sharot! @jenbussell.bsky.social ! Many more—check it out, be sure to submit your abstracts!
We've just added some additional speakers to SPAN2025! Be sure to submit an abstract by February 1st and join us at WashU May 1-3 🥳 philandneuro.com
January 19, 2025 at 7:55 PM
Imagine all the amazing science one could do if these EMG recordings were paired up with multi electrode recordings in motor cortex.

(Speaking as an academic neuroscientist, not a Meta scientist).
1/

We just open-sourced two large wrist electromyography (EMG) datasets - one towards typing without a keyboard and the other for predicting hand poses - with baselines.

We believe these will help advance research into making high bandwidth non-invasive neuromotor interfaces a reality!
Advancing Neuromotor Interfaces by Open Sourcing Surface Electromyography (sEMG) Datasets for Pose Estimation and Surface Typing
We’re releasing emg2qwerty and emg2pose—two large datasets and benchmarks for sEMG-based typing and pose estimation, as part of the NeurIPS 2024 Datasets and Benchmarks track.
ai.meta.com
December 6, 2024 at 10:45 PM