August, 2026

It's the start of the 2026-2027 academic year, and I hope everyone had an enjoyable summer. This is the 3rd year of the Neuroscience Department. We welcome three new faculty, a new cohort of PhD students, new postdocs in many labs, and a record number of new & returning undergraduates. In May, we proudly graduated our first full class of Neuroscience majors.

This ongoing success makes me hopeful, even in these times of uncertainty for science.

It strikes me that hope and optimism are fundamental to science. As scientists, we believe that by dedicating our time, building our expertise, and thinking creatively, we will discover important truths that will enable progress and make people's lives better. Berkeley has a tremendous track record of doing just this. As always, I thank our amazing students, postdocs, staff, and faculty for their dedication to scientific discovery, learning, and community.

Dan Feldman, Neuroscience Department Chair

Our scientific, training, and educational mission

The Neuroscience Department fosters cutting-edge research into brain function, nervous system diseases, and neurotechnology. Our discoveries enable tomorrow's cures and new technologies, and answer deep questions about the human mind, cognition, and biological computation. We provide advanced scientific training for some of the country's top PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, who are from a broad set of backgrounds and who are tomorrow's scientific leaders. We offer undergraduate education in neuroscience for a wide range of students interested in science and health-related careers.

Brain section image from the Beery Lab

Faculty News - Summer 2026

New Faculty

Michael Ward joined Neuroscience and the MTx Division of MCB in July. His lab studies the molecular and cellular causes of amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and other neurodegenerative disorders. His lab will be in LKS.

We're pleased to announce that Sergey Stavisky will be joining Neuroscience on January 1, 2027. Stavisky does exciting research to develop world-leading neural prosthetics to restore speech in paralyzed patients. This work combines systems, computational, and cognitive neuroscience, as well as neural engineering and AI. His lab will be in Warren Hall.

We are excited that Chunlei Liu, a long-time UC Berkeley neuroscientist in EECS, has joined the Neuroscience Department (50-50 with EECS). The Liu lab develops MRI and signal processing techniques to study brain structure and function, as well as magnetogenetics technologies for modulation of brain activity.

In addition, the department is still completing a faculty search in Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience that began last year. And we are happy to announce a new search for an Assistant Professor in Computational Neuroscience, with applications due in October and interviews taking place in February and March. You can find the job ad here.

Research Discoveries

Neuroscience Department labs published 95 papers, so far, in 2026. New papers in the last few months include: from the Brohawn lab, structural basis of inhibition of a 2-pore potassium channel (in Structure); from the Ivry lab, effects of ageing on sensorimotor learning (in Nature Human Behavior); from the Feller lab, activity-dependent development of amacrine cell dendrites (in Cell Reports) and glial-vascular interactions in the retina (in Glia); from the Adesnik lab, inter-areal interactions probed with 2-photon holography (in Nature Neuroscience) and the role of the hippocampus in putatively conscious vision (in Current Biology); from the Dölen lab, a review of the neurobiology of psychedelics (in Annual Review of Neuroscience); from the Ji lab, new methods for adaptive optical correction for 2-photon imaging (in Nature Methods) and for large-scale 2-photon imaging with FACED (also in Nature Methods); from the Bateup lab, an isogenic stem cell collection for Parkinson's Disease research (in Nature Communications); from the Weiner lab, the metabolic organization of visual cortex in primates (in PLoS Biology); from the Yartsev lab, a new method for ultrafast imaging of neural activity (in Current Biology); from the Jagust lab, a new sulcal locus of tau pathology in Alzheimer's Disease (in Annals of Neurology).

2026 commencement. From left to right, top row: Jack Gallant, Lance Kriegsfeld, Michael Silver, Richard Ivry, Robert Knight, David Presti, Gül Dölen. Second row: Bruno Olshausen, William Jagust, Ryan Schultz, Eric Hu, Nathan Munet, Dan Feldman, keynote speaker Liqun Luo. Third row: Anne Collins, Joni Wallis, Jing-Jing Li, Natalie Bernstein, Miah Pitcher, Amanda LeBel, Robin Ball, Randy Schekman, Yvette Fisher. Fourth row: Marla Feller, Teresa Puthussery. Bottom row: Ehud Isacoff, Frédéric Theunissen; Nancy Hernandez Villegas, Corrina Fonseca Gordon, Yanabah Jaques, Maura McDonagh, Daniela Kaufer, Richard Kramer. Credit: Leleña Avila.

PhD Program News

We welcome a new cohort of PhD students:

Madeline (Maddi) Babros (Cal Poly)

Chloe Christensen (UCLA)

Aanica Gonzales (Caltech)

Lisa Ji (WashU)

Timna Kleinman (Hebrew Univ.)

Audrey Laun (UCLA)

Jennifer Lee (Davidson College)

Gabriele Quaranta (Univ. of Pisa)

Aditya Rao (UPenn)

Josephine (Joey) Robb (Northeastern)

Victoria Sinfield (Purdue)

Bethia Sun (Univ. of New South Wales)

Iris Tilton (Santa Clara Univ)

Marissa Todesco (UCSD)

Ariya Uyeno (UCSD)

Hannah Yun (Johns Hopkins)

We are also welcoming Marla Feller as the new Neuroscience PhD program director. Marla takes over from Frederic Theunissen, who served as director for the past 3 years. Marla is an award-winning mentor and teacher, and a highly successful researcher who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been active in the Neuroscience PhD program for many years. Welcome Marla, and thank you Frederic for your service!

We also welcome Irlanda Gonzalez as new graduate program manager. And very happy to continue to have Peony Yu as graduate program advisor. We thank Leleña Avila for her outstanding service to the Neuroscience PhD program, and congratulate her on her new position overseeing graduate and undergraduate student services for MCB, IB, and Neuro.

Join the Slack!

New lab members, please join the Neuro Department Slack. We have channels for #job-ads, #announcements, and #postdocs for Neuro activities. To join, please email neuroscience@berkeley.edu (for members of department labs only).

Get our emails!

Not getting department emails and seminar announcements? You need to get on your lab email listserv, which is maintained by each lab. The department sends its events emails to the collection of lab email lists. Ask your lab manager or PI to get you listed!

Left: Adaptive optics using NEAP improves spine imaging in vivo, from Kang et al., Nat. Methods 2026. Right: Circuit model for somatostatin interneuron role in surround suppression in visual cortex, from Hendricks et al., Neuron 2026.

Postdoctoral Researchers

The department will continue its programs for postdocs this year, including the Neuroscience Postdoc Departmental Seminars, the Neuroscience Academic Job Workshop Series, and our postdoc mentorship programs. Alex Huth and Daniela Kaufer are our faculty liaisons for postdoc programs. We will be hosting a postdoc welcome event in September, where you can learn about these programs. Both new and current postdocs are invited (as well as Project Scientists and related titles). Please look for an announcement on the #postdocs Slack channel.

Two Neuroscience Postdoc Departmental Seminars have been scheduled: Mark Plitt (Fisher lab) on Sep 3, and Rachana Deven Somaiya (Feller lab) on Mar 18. These are in the usual Thursday 3:30 - 4:30 pm seminar slot, with a reception preceding. Please plan on attending!

Right: Spatial masks for tau analysis, from Maboudian et al., Ann. Neurol. 2026.

Neuroscience Undergraduates

The Neuroscience major is burgeoning, with 404 current majors, i.e. 200 new majors entering per year. This shows the great enthusiasm for the subject and for our courses, and I want to thank our faculty, lecturers, undergraduate staff, and graduate student instructors creating such popular offerings. In May, our first large graduating class (80 students) received their degrees at the Neuroscience commencement ceremony, as did 11 PhD students. Six undergraduates received recognition and prizes at commencement, including the Departmental Citation which went to Aaron Obasuyi, for his outstanding academic achievement, laboratory research, and impressive volunteer work including teaching biology to incarcerated individuals at San Quentin prison.

To respond to the increasing major size, we are adding more capacity to NEU 110: Scientific Logic and Communication. We now offer our majors a choice of 3 undergraduate lab courses (having added NEU 172L: Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience Lab last year), and plans are underway for adding a fourth lab class.

The Gunther Stent Undergraduate Neuroscience Research Scholars program is entering its third year. Congratulations to Konish Bhattacharya (Feller lab), Kiana Hinkson (Dölen lab), and Jake Wirtjes (Weiner lab) who were named Stent Research Scholars. These students will receive a stipend for performing research in their faculty mentor's labs, and will present their work at the Spring undergraduate poster session.

Model for dopamine release in response to electrical stimulation, from Mun et al., PNAS 2026

Community

The Neuroscience Department is committed to promoting broad participation in science, supporting our graduate students, and creating a climate of inclusion and belonging for everyone in the Neuroscience community at Berkeley. We remind everyone of our Principles of Community, which applies to all department members. This includes pillars of:

Support

Our collective goal is to create an environment that is safe and nurturing for all community members. Each of us has a responsibility to support the safety and professional development of members of the department.

Respect

All students, staff, postdocs and faculty should treat one another with respect and civility, at all times.

Inclusion

All students, staff, postdocs and faculty should recognize each other’s contributions and we should treat one another fairly and without bias. Together we strive to establish and maintain a supportive and inclusive culture that embraces differences.

If you have concerns about the research or training climate, please reach out to me (Dan Feldman), our Equity Committee Chairs (Lance Kriegsfeld and Annaliese Beery), the graduate program advisers (Irlanda Gonzalez and Peony Yu), the Neuroscience undergraduate program staff, or to campus resources outside the department, which can be found here.

In May, we held a Graduate Student and Faculty Bridging Event on the topic of the mentor-mentee relationship, which was designed for graduate students and faculty to share perspectives about being a mentor and mentee. This was very successful, and we plan to hold a similar event, on evolving themes, once per year.

For 2026-2027, we are launching a new type of mentorship training through the campus Mentorship Reimagined program. Training sessions will be offered for faculty, and for postdocs & graduate students (who are also mentors for undergrads and others). Please keep an eye out for the registration notice!

If you are looking for a fun and impactful outreach event related to neurological disease, consider participating in the Northern California Breakthrough for Brain Tumors 5K (BT5K), a run/walk fundraising event for the American Brain Tumor Association. The ABTA is a nationwide nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting brain tumor research, education, and resources for patients and their families. You can learn more about the ABTA here. The Neuroscience Department is a local partner for the BT5K and will have a booth at the event. The BT5K takes place on Saturday, Aug 29, at Lake Merritt in Oakland. One of our Neuro majors, Zara Najmi, is the coordinator for the Berkeley tent. Last year, we had two dozen undergrads and several faculty who participated. To sign up to run or walk, please visit this link (note: this costs money, because it is a fundraiser for ABTA, the discounted student rate is $28).