Christine comes from Randy Bruno‘s lab at Columbia University, where she showed that deep layer neurons can receive thalamic input directly, bypassing layer 4. Christine will be working jointly with David Tank‘s lab.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has renewed its appointment of Carlos Brody as an HHMI investigator.

The lab’s research is running full steam, and this will allow us to make even faster progress. The next 5 years are going to be amazing!

The sight of sleepless, hardworking, undergrads toiling through the night has come to an end (until next year!).
Congratulations to Rina, Jo, and Kanwal on handing in their senior theses!

The Nature editors (thank you, I-han!) liked our Science paper and commissioned a News and Views piece on it, which appeared on April 11, 2013.

B.W. Brunton, M.M. Botvinick, and C.D. Brody,  Rats and Humans can Optimally Accumulate Evidence for Decision-Making Science 340:95-98 (2013).  This paper describes the “Poisson Clicks” task, a decision-making task which is particularly well-suited to detailed quantitative modeling. Using this task together with a trial-by-trial model of the behavior, Bing showed that rats, like humans, can gradually accumulate evidence for decision-making, and that the evidence accumulator of both species is optimal in the sense of being noiseless and lossless.

A story about it, including an audio podcast, was written for the Princeton University web home page, and got picked up in a variety of lay press, including the Daily Mail in Britain.

Carlos gave a plenary talk on the lab’s work on accumulation of evidence for decision-making at the 10th edition of the Computational and Systems Neuroscience meeting.

Athena comes from Mathew Diamond’s lab in Trieste, where she previously worked on developing a two-stimulus interval, 2-alternative forced-choice task in rats, first using whisker stimuli, and then using auditory stimuli.

Michael comes from Nachum Ulanovsky’s lab at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, where he previously worked on bat grid cells and on flying bat place cells.