Bradley Voytek’s Post

New paper in the American Physiological Society's Journal of Neurophysiology, “Development of neuronal timescales in human cortical organoids and rat hippocampus dissociated cultures”. This project was conducted by Blanca Martin-Burgos and Trevor McPherson, in collaboration with Alysson Muotri, Ryan Hammonds, and Richard Gao. We were curious about how network neuronal timescales might devleop in human induced pluripotent stem cell derived cortical organoids. The "timescale" of a neuron or neural population is a quantification of how similar a signal looks to itself, but at different delays. Intuitively, one way to think of this is by how long in time a system can "hold" the information about an input. In organoids, these timescales are very low – close to random – but eventually begin to increase. We then sought to replicate our observations in an open dataset published on the Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS) data sharing site. The replication data were totally different, single-neuron recordings from dissociated rat hippocampus cultures at different developmental timepoints. It was a fun project, with some cool future directions in understanding the development of information processing in neuronal networks. https://lnkd.in/g-s9WjD9

Congratulations to Sam Cossman, John Long, Mike Ralston, and all the folks at Qwake Technologies. It's been incredible to see this technology go from prototype during our angel investment stage to see it used live in the field. This is how to use AI to save lives. https://lnkd.in/gAB3HeDe

Congratulations to the 2024 UCSD Cognitive Science Department winners of the Robert J. Glushko Prize for Distinguished Undergraduate Research: Evalie Rehor and Ningxuan Lu, and the second place winners David Wu and Brandon Kao. This was my first year as the faculty advisor for our undergraduate honors program and I had a blast working with the 19 honors thesis students over the last two quarters. Usually the classes I teach at UC San Diego are so massive (300-500), and our undergraduate program is so huge (>2400), that I don't get to know the individual students very well. This was a nice change of pace. I joked with them that they are so much more advanced than I was at their stage — I was definitively NOT an honors student during my undergraduate. But I hoped that in the intervening 20-something years I'd learned a bit that could help. As part of our honors graduation requirement, every student has to give a ~12 minute final presentation to the faculty, staff, and family in attendance about the research they performed. In preparation, I worked with them to focus on creating, essentially, 1-2 slides per week: * What's the vibe you're going for on your opening slide? It sets the stage for what you're going to talk about. Do you want to show lots of math on a white board, or cute pictures of babies babbling language, or images of a brain imaging system? * Try and shoot for as jargon-free of an introduction as possible (the "up-goer five" challenge), explaining necessary jargon as you go. * Tell us your inspiration, to help us care about WHY you're studying what you're studying. * Ground your work in something we can all connect to in everyday life: struggles learning new technology, issues with healthcare, forgetting where you left your keys, etc. * What hurdles and challenges did you face in your research? This helps make it more personal, honest, and relatable. * (This was before they actually completed their research) What would your IDEAL results look like? If all of your core hypotheses are true, draw out the results in a simple visualization that would convince us of that fact. * What do you want everyone to take away from this? What didn't they know before your talk that they now know after. * Close by telling us what you aspire to: the Science Friday question of "if money were no object, where you take your research next?" Watching their research and communication skills mature in just our 20 weeks together was remarkable. Every single one of the 19 of them knocked it out of the park. They spoke with clarity, honesty, humor, and confidence. It was an honor to work with them, and we're lucky to have folks like Bob Glushko who see the value in supporting young, promising cognitive scientists like this.

Kenton's looking for a job! He's been working with the lab for years now. He's named as a contributor on the lab's first patent application and he'll be a coauthor on (at least) two of our papers. He's an excellent programmer, scientist, and person. I'm hoping he'll eventually do a PhD, but he wants some experience either in industry or a full-time position in a research lab. So if you're hiring in data science, neuroscience, and/or ML or adjacent fields, I'm really happy to provide a reference. Let me know!

Last week, in my lab's weekly meeting, someone joked that the best way to get a job in my lab is to write a paper saying that we're wrong. This was in response to me talking about another scientist who I offered a job to because of an excellent paper that they wrote. That paper pushed at our work on aperiodic neural activity (something my lab's known for in niche circles). Although my lab jokes about it, it definitely means that they've tapped into how I think about science. There's an excellent interview from 2006 with biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, who wrote "Team of Rivals," about Abraham Lincoln. In that interview, Goodwin says something that has stuck with me for nearly 20 years. Adding to human knowledge is one of the very few ways we can shape the world. Goodwin's interview influenced the way I think about the scientific process, so I thought I'd make my thought process a little more explicit and share her quote: "By putting his rivals in his cabinet, [Lincoln] had access to a wide range of opinions, which he realized would sharpen his own thinking... Lincoln was never certain that there was an afterlife. But he believed that you could live on if you lived in the memory of others—that your immortality came from your reputation."

Several months ago there was an email thread going around among some neuroscience professors asking for advice on lab management software to “help us get more organized and productive.” Quite a few people reached out to me after I wrote my response to tell me how helpful it was. So I figured it would be nice to share it more broadly. So if you're really interested in my lab's processes for using GitHub to manage open-source projects, scientific research, administrative tasks, and teaching, here you go! I'm super curious to hear what people think about this approach. https://lnkd.in/gCtjJi7w

It's official! The Data Science Alliance (DSA) is moving into a new space in San Diego's Liberty Station. The DSA is the non-profit I helped found, and on whose Board I serve. We're dedicated to building "a world where data helps without harm", and helping other non-profits who maybe can't afford to hire full data science teams. This place is located right on a major thoroughfare and has a huge garden for hosting events. The space is super weird, but fun. We'll also be hosting SDx – a local data science / AI hacker community – to help them thrive. I live very close to our new headquarters, so I'm particularly excited that this cool organization will now be a part of my neighborhood and community! This would not have been possible without our Executive Director, Patricia Lopez and our amazing team including Adir Mancebo Jr., Kallyn Hobmann, Leslie Joe, and Hayley Lin. And of course our founding team and Board members Taner Halicioglu, Ilkay Altintas, Ph.D., Nedim Halicioglu, Andy White, Gina Harris, and Alex Bates. It's been fun building furniture and designing the spaces with this crew.

Yesterday I had the honor of giving the keynote address at the University of California, Berkeley Cognitive Science undergraduate commencement ceremony. There were approximately 150 students, along with their family and friends, in attendance at Zellerbach Hall. Normally I don't actually write out my lectures and presentations, because I'm a fairly extemporaneous speaker. However, in this case I wrote the whole thing, which you can read here. I really wanted to make sure I got the wording right. It covers my (semi-failed) undergraduate journey at University of Southern California, the huge influence the Cognitive Science Students Association (CSSA) at UC Berkeley had on me, magic, and radioactive pee. It was an awesome experience, and I'm still having a hard time actually digesting it.

It's genuinely always a pleasure to get to talk with DJ Patil. He's someone whose career and path I've found very inspiring and I've learned so much from him. So it's a bit of a full-circle moment to have been approached to have this conversation with him.

Occasionally I find myself reading a research paper and thinking "wow this is really good." Rather than letting that thought just dissipate in my own head, I've decided to actually start reaching out and letting people know that's what I was thinking.