Zhiwen Ye
zhiwenneuron.bsky.social
Zhiwen Ye
@zhiwenneuron.bsky.social
postdoc at Steinmetz lab. Discovering brain with quantitative approach. Neural dynamics, sensorimotor system, brain states, traveling waves

Website: www.yezhiwen.com
Reposted by Zhiwen Ye
If you're (1) into nhp neurophysiology and/or biological motor control, (2) a foreign big shot and (3) interested in moving here, please reach out -- this new program looks extremely attractive (min. $8M over 8y)! www.uwo.ca/research/can...
Canada-Impact-Plus - Research - Western University
www.uwo.ca
December 18, 2025 at 9:15 PM
Reposted by Zhiwen Ye
Bichan Wu (@bichanw.bsky.social) & I wrote a tutorial paper on Reduced Rank Regression (RRR) — the statistical method underlying "communication subspaces" from Semedo et al 2019 — aimed at neuroscientists.

arxiv.org/abs/2512.12467
Reduced rank regression for neural communication: a tutorial for neuroscientists
Reduced rank regression (RRR) is a statistical method for finding a low-dimensional linear mapping between a set of high-dimensional inputs and outputs. In recent years, RRR has found numerous applica...
arxiv.org
December 17, 2025 at 2:06 AM
Reposted by Zhiwen Ye
This is HUGE! (Read it!!). I'll be cheering Doris and Astera Neuro on the entire way. Doris is a genius, both in the scope of her vision and in making things happen (that combination is rare). SO EXCITING! I can't wait to see what Astera Neuro discovers.

astera.org/neuroscienti...
Neuroscientist Doris Tsao joins Astera to lead its new neuroscience program - Astera
The Astera Institute is excited to launch a major new neuroscience research effort led by Dr. Doris Tsao, who will be joining as Chief Scientist for Astera Neuro. We seek to understand one of the deep...
astera.org
December 10, 2025 at 6:41 PM
Reposted by Zhiwen Ye
Today we honour the memory of Adam Kampff, whose passing leaves an immense void in our community.

We are profoundly grateful to Adam. The best way to honour him is to continue innovating, collaborating, and sharing generously, as he taught us. Thank you, Adam Kampff.
December 9, 2025 at 10:06 PM
Reposted by Zhiwen Ye
🧠📢 New preprint alert

Large-scale ephys is exploding but spike sorting remains the computational bottleneck. A 2-hr, 6-probe Neuropixels 2.0 Quad Base session can take over a week to sort on a single machine. Here's a better solution. 🧵

#neuroskyence #compneurosky
December 5, 2025 at 8:42 PM
Reposted by Zhiwen Ye
New paper: Working memory readout varies with frontal theta rhythms. A theta traveling wave swept across the frontal cortex like radar, modulating performance of a working memory task. Because cognition is rhythmic.
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...
#neuroscience @picowerinstitute.bsky.social
Working memory readout varies with frontal theta rhythms
Han et al. show that frontal theta oscillations rhythmically control access to working memory. The theta rhythm sweeps across the mental image, shaping behavior by coordinating spikes and beta oscilla...
www.cell.com
October 20, 2025 at 3:06 PM
Reposted by Zhiwen Ye
1/N What are the organizational principles underlying crossmodal cortical connections?
We address this in this new preprint, led by @alexegeaweiss.bsky.social & ‪@bturner-bridger.bsky.social‬ in collab w/ ‪@petrznam.bsky.social‬ @crick.ac.uk
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
August 1, 2025 at 10:10 AM
Reposted by Zhiwen Ye
In the old days, you'd occasionally run into somebody totally normal who had one utterly insane belief, like a co-worker who just causally says he thinks the sun is alive. Social media is like if we extracted all of those individual bits of madness, cooked them into a stew and ate it for every meal.
September 19, 2025 at 9:23 PM
Reposted by Zhiwen Ye
🚨Our preprint is online!🚨

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning?

Read on to find out more! 🧵
September 19, 2025 at 1:05 PM
Reposted by Zhiwen Ye
🎉 "High-dimensional neuronal activity from low-dimensional latent dynamics: a solvable model" will be presented as an oral at #NeurIPS2025 🎉

Feeling very grateful that reviewers and chairs appreciated concise mathematical explanations, in this age of big models.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
1/2
September 19, 2025 at 8:01 AM
Reposted by Zhiwen Ye
Rotational neural dynamics seem to be popping up more and more.
Compositional neural dynamics during reaching
doi.org/10.1101/2025...
#neuroscience
Compositional neural dynamics during reaching
The complex mechanics of the arm make the neural control of reaching inherently posture dependent. Because previous reaching studies confound reach direction with final posture, it remains unknown how...
doi.org
September 16, 2025 at 5:33 PM
Reposted by Zhiwen Ye
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/
Simons Foundation Announces Recipients of 2025 Fellows-to-Faculty Awards
The Simons Foundation is pleased to announce the 2025 class of Fellows-to-Faculty Fellows.
www.simonsfoundation.org
September 16, 2025 at 7:26 PM
Reposted by Zhiwen Ye
What happens when we learn a new shortcut between places we thought were unconnected? Hannah found that the hippocampus rapidly adjusts its representations of environments to join them into a connected map - excited to share this final paper from her PhD work with me and @mariamaly.bsky.social !
September 16, 2025 at 7:42 PM
Reposted by Zhiwen Ye
Job post alert!👩‍🔬 Postdoctoral fellow in CompNeuro/ML in the Artificial and Biological Computation lab at NYU (csavin.wixsite.com/savinlab).
Exciting opening in the Data and Theory team in the new Simons Collaboration in Ecological Neuroscience!
www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/04/24/s...
#neuroskyence
Simons Foundation Launches Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience
Simons Foundation Launches Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience on Simons Foundation
www.simonsfoundation.org
September 15, 2025 at 9:28 PM
Reposted by Zhiwen Ye
Episode #32 in #TheoreticalNeurosciencePodcast: On IIT and adversarial testing of consciousness theories – with Christof Koch

theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn32

Christof, a developer of the IIT theory for consciousness, explains IIT and recent testing against the GNWT theory.
September 13, 2025 at 7:04 AM
Reposted by Zhiwen Ye
Amidst everything, the lab's first preprint is out! It's just a methods paper, no scientific results (yet!), but it's still great to see it all pulled together. We hope that these open-source behavioral tools will be useful for others!
A Semi-Automated, Parallelized, and Flexible Spatial Navigation Task for Rats https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.22.666070v1
July 25, 2025 at 9:39 PM
Reposted by Zhiwen Ye
Ok, reinforcement learning fans: RL is great, but what do we do when there's no obvious reward from the environment? What about perfecting a golf swing or a foxtrot or a musical performance? We may have an answer. A tale of 🐦 🎶 + 🧠. 🧵1/ #bioacoustics #prattle 💬 #neuroai #compneuro
July 24, 2025 at 2:29 PM