Caswell Barry

22 years of Brain Science: what CoSyNe tells us about the evolution of Neuroscience Tracking the intellectual DNA of Computational and Systems Neuroscience through its flagship meeting

I tracked every keyword in 22 years of Cosyne abstracts to map how computational neuroscience evolved — from Bayesian brains to neural manifolds to LLMs — and where it's heading next.

Exciting news! The @yorkpsychology.bsky.social are recruiting 3 new ART (research and teaching) lecturers! One role will be prioritised for cognitive, affective and/or social neuroscience.

#neuroskyence #cognition #psychscisky #neurojobs

Really interesting from the Burgess stable — theta sweeps in entorhinal cortex show a dorsoventral gradient, with different spatial scales coordinated at different frequencies. Nice work @zilong-ji.bsky.social @neilburgess10.bsky.social 👏

biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2026.03.08.710351v1

Long wondered how grid cell activity translates to the hexadirectional fMRI signal. Almog et al. have a neat answer — it's firing *variance* rather than mean rate. Makes sense when you think about it. Worth reading if you work on grid cells or fMRI. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.03.04.709667

The text at the top reads IWD2026 Spotlight. The image is of Dr Vilaiwan Fernandes with a microscope behind her. The text at the bottom has her name and UCL Faculty of Life Sciences.

Today's Spotlight features Dr Vilaiwan Fernandes - Lister Fellow and rising leader in developmental biology. Vilaiwan's research explores how brain cells grow, connect, and organise themselves during development, helping us better understand how healthy brains are built. linktr.ee/ucllifescien...

#InternationalWomensDay — recognising the brilliant women in and around the Barry Lab. Sarah Shipley (@shipleysj.bsky.social), Zhi Liang, Lauren Bennett, and Clementine Domine (@clementinedomine.bsky.social), who's recently moved on to even bigger things. Science is lucky to have them.

Finally getting on top of new papers and god there are so many good ones. This from Lykken, Kanter, @edvardmoser.bsky.social & @m-bmoser.bsky.social is brilliant. Neuropixels showing differential phase shifts across grid modules drive place cell remapping. Elegant grid-to-place transformation story.

Nice new preprint from Giocomo and Ganguli — using Gaussian processes to look at grid cell tuning in 4D (position × velocity). Turns out position and velocity coding aren't separable in some cells. Makes you wonder how much we miss by always analysing one variable at a time

This is great from the @athenaakrami.bsky.social lab — hippocampus is required for unsupervised statistical learning, and dCA1 populations split into subspaces for sensory features vs abstract rules. Elegant optogenetic + recording approach.

https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.02.14.705916

Global high-resolution estimates of the UN Human Development Index using satellite imagery and machine learning - Nature Communications Survey-based indicators of wellbeing are often available for only large administrative units, like provinces. The authors use satellite-based machine learning models trained on such coarse data to mak...

Research exploring background demographics on cognition may find this useful. Often ignored in most psych studies.

Global high-resolution estimates of the UN Human Development Index using satellite imagery and machine learning
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

UCL200 Bicentenary Blend coffee bag, roasted by Volcano Coffee Works, Brixton

200 years of UCL, and we've finally made something you can actually consume without a grant application. The UCL200 Bicentenary Blend, roasted by Volcano Coffee Works in Brixton. This institution runs on the stuff — Bentham would have approved. ☕

Lots of great work coming out — Kim et al. show hippocampal codes have small-world structure. Multi-field neurons as “shortcuts” for search across distant states, engaged during replay. Elegant framing for cognitive map flexibility.
https://biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.07.704615v1

Well this is a pretty dark even by their usual standards

Really nice work from the Kentros lab — repeating chemogenetic manipulation of grid cells produces the same place cell remapping each time. Direct evidence that grid subfield rate changes predictably drive place field reorganisation. Love it https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.02.10.705142

Happy 200th to the godless institution in Gower Street. Still going. Still godless. @ucl.bsky.social #UCL200

Thank you!

MRC have confirmed panels will make "a reduced number of awards to applications currently being assessed" across all four research boards. We're among those with applications currently under review. Full details: ukri.org/blog/mrc-funding-update/

I understand UKRI's need to restructure, but MRC reducing awards for applications already under review feels like a retrospective rule change. Applicants invested serious time based on expected success rates. Changing the deal after submission breaks a social contract.

Disrupted hippocampal replay is associated with reduced offline map stabilization in an Alzheimer’s mouse model Alzheimer’s disease is characterized by progressive memory decline associated with hippocampal degeneration. However, the specific physiological mecha…

Memory consolidates during resting periods 💤. Place cells replay activity that occurred during exploration. @caswell.bsky.social shows that replay events are disrupted in alzheimer's mouse models linked to reduced 🗺️ stabilization. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
@currentbiology.bsky.social

What drives the sequential emergence of spatial neurons in developing rats? In our ICLR 2026 paper, we show how changes in movement statistics drive spatial tuning. Our model replicates experimental timelines and predicts novel conjunctive tuning maturation.
doi.org/10.64898/2025.12.30.696864

How the brain's 'memory replay' goes wrong in Alzheimer's disease Memory dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease may be linked to impairment in how the brain replays our recent experiences while we are resting, according to a new study in mice by UCL scientists.

How the brain's 'memory replay' goes wrong in Alzheimer's disease
@ucl press release on @caswell.bsky.social lab new study:

www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2026/ja...

Thanks!

God I need to learn to spell

Really excited by this awesome work from @abrate.bsky.social TDLR - in self supervised predictive models policy really affects representations. If you use policy extracted from rats of different ages the representations that emerge mirror those in the rats.

Also tagging the first author. @shipleysj.bsky.social

Disrupted hippocampal replay is associated with reduced offline map stabilization in an Alzheimer’s mouse model Shipley et al. show that spatial memory deficits in an Alzheimer’s mouse model are associated with place cell instability and degraded reactivations in rest. Although reactivation rates are preserved,...

So happy to finally see this out in @currentbiology.bsky.social! We found that disrupted replay structure in an AD model was linked to reduced place cell stability and more repetitive behaviour on a radial maze 🧠 @abrate.bsky.social @caswell.bsky.social #neurosky

tinyurl.com/yx52vzjd

The full preprint is available here:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Huge thanks to my supervisors @clopathlab.bsky.social and @caswell.bsky.social!

Feedback is very welcome!

How the brain's 'memory replay' goes wrong in Alzheimer's disease Memory dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease may be linked to impairment in how the brain replays our recent experiences while we are resting, according to a new study in mice by UCL scientists.

Memory dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease may be linked to impairment in how the brain replays our recent experiences while we are resting, according to a new study in mice led by Dr Sarah Shipley @shipleysj.bsky.social and Prof Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social @ucllifesciences.bsky.social

Fantastic to see this out, well done @shipleysj.bsky.social - it's a tour de force (the first AD work from our lab too).

Just flagging the excellent EMBO postdoctoral fellowships (here: www.embo.org/funding/fell...). I would imagine most PIs would be happy to host potential applicants!