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jquinnlee.bsky.social
Navigation & memory researcher CIHR Postdoctoral Fellow @ McGill University Incoming Assistant Professor @ University of Alberta (starting July 2025) Accepting graduate student applications to start Fall 2025: https://sites.psych.ualberta.ca/NMSLab
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Position open for Director of Research Innovation & Operations at Concordia as part of the Abundant Intelligences (www.indigenous-ai.net/abundant/) project, which seeks to reshape AI with indigenous insights: www.kbrs.ca/Career/17387... Please share!!! 🧪 #MLSky

Very pleased to share our recent work, in which we use LLMs for automated discovery of interpretable models of animal behavior 🪰🐀🕵️‍♀️ that take the form of Python programs 🐍 See below for a summary of key results by @pcastr.bsky.social!

It's finally out! Visual experience orthogonalizes visual cortical responses Training in a visual task changes V1 tuning curves in odd ways. This effect is explained by a simple convex transformation. It orthogonalizes the population, making it easier to decode. 10.1016/j.celrep.2025.115235

American science and medicine has been thrown into chaos and uncertainty over the past week. Here are some stories to get up to speed. 1/12

Eleanor Maguire, who died 4 January at age 54, pioneered the famous London taxi-driver study and naturalistic approaches for studying spatial and episodic memory in people. By @callimcflurry.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/memory/remem...

Stellar new work lead by the inimitable James Whittington in Neuron that develops a new theory unifying episodic and working memory and explains diverse hippocampal and prefrontal data: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... w/Will Dorrell, @behrenstimb.bsky.social Mohamedy El Gaby

New brief report now out in Hippocampus! We used functional molecular imaging to ask if activity sparsity in the hippocampus (dorsal to ventral DG, CA3 and CA1) depends on memory task performed. Turns out the pattern is identical across tasks! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... #NeuroSky 🧠🧪

Our latest preprint has landed www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Fantastic work from @laurenb29.bsky.social and Will de Cothi showing how many of the cell types associated with subiculum (e.g. boundary vector cells, corner cells) can be understood as successor features. TLDR: SUB not CA1 is the SR

Wicked new pre-print from @atkeinath.bsky.social More evidence for a unifying predictive framework of cognitive mapping in the mouse brain! Also first time I have seen reliable between subject differences in maps over protracted time. Nicely done!!

The Dept. of Computing Science at the University of Alberta is hiring! The new hires in AI will be nominated for a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. We have 3 TT positions: AI/ML/DL Theory: apps.ualberta.ca/careers/post... AI + SWE: apps.ualberta.ca/careers/post... Systems: apps.ualberta.ca/careers/post...

What are the brain’s “real” tuning curves? Our new preprint "SIMPL: Scalable and hassle-free optimisation of neural representations from behaviour” argues that existing techniques for latent variable discovery are lacking. We suggest a much simpl-er way to do things. 1/21🧵

How can biology teach us to design better AI?🤔 Our new paper, w Mike @drmichaellevin.bsky.social "Bio-inspired AI: Integrating Biological Complexity," explores how biological principles like adaptability, context-dependence, and hierarchical processing can inspire the next generation of AI. 🧵👇1/n

Want to be part of the NeuroAI community CSHL ? Applications are open for outstanding graduate students in Artificial Intelligence to spend the summer at CSHL as NeuroAI Interns. Deadline: Dec 10th, 2024. Please spread the word! www.schooljobs.com/careers/cshl... @cshlaboratory.bsky.social

Psyched that my postdoc work w @markbrandonlab.bsky.social + @atkeinath.bsky.social is now in Neuron! TL/DR: remapping in CA1 has a representational structure that is reliable across brains, and we use this representation to test models of cognitive maps. #NeuroSky #NeuroAI 🧪🧠 tinyurl.com/4juhmad8

Huge congrats to @karyna-mi.bsky.social for her paper published today in Science! She found that the hippocampus is really important for a key strategy we use to make decisions called hidden state inference! 🧪 🧠https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq5874 1/7

Our new paper in @natureportfolio.bsky.social shows entorhinal grid cells adapt their representations to a new environment in one-shot and derives a model that fuses landmarks & motion to *predict* the detailed grid rep *before* the mouse enters the new environment! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Registration for #COSYNE2025 is now open! www.cosyne.org/registration #neuroscience #NeuroAI

I am recruiting graduate students for my lab @mcgillu.bsky.social for admission in Fall 2025! Get in touch if you're interested in how brain circuits implement distributed computation, including dopamine-based distributed RL and probabilistic representations.

I am and have been fascinated with how memories are formed and stored. A big challenge, not unique to memory, is synthesizing concepts across scales of anaylsis - from molecules to computation. Here I try to distill how we can move forward in understanding memories. Thanks to all the contributors!

One more time!! Presenting my final postdoc project with @markbrandonlab at U29 from 8–12 this morning! Come say hi!! #SfN24

I am thrilled to share that I have accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta in the Department of Psychology to start next summer, and will be accepting graduate student applications (due December 1st)! @Psych_UAlberta sites.psych.ualberta.ca/NMSLab/

New short but sweet paper on a topic I love - sparse representation in the hippocampus! Using functional molecular imaging, we found that activity sparsity is highly conserved across memory tasks. Feedback is welcome! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

uleth.peopleadmin.ca/postings/7749

Pleased to share some major updates on my post-doc work w Mark Brandon, Alexandra Keinath, and Erica Cianfarano. TL/DR - We show: 1) cognitive remapping in HPC is very reliable across animals; 2) We directly test models of cognitive mapping with these data. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...