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November 24, 2025
Fall! Football games, migrating birds on the bay, new lab members arriving, new ideas hatching, friends made, a great flock of poster tubes headed for SfN. I hope everyone has been having a good semester.
Despite all the external challenges to science, Fall 2025 has been a good one for the department. We had an enjoyable retreat at Lake Tahoe. The undergraduate major is rapidly expanding, with more students getting involved in research. The PhD program welcomed an excellent 2025 cohort. We are working to grow our faculty, with a current open search in Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Neuroscience, and other recruitments ongoing. In the meantime, research and discovery move forward (through hard work and challenges, as always). I hope everyone has a successful end of the semester and a restful winter break.
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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.
| | Ripple fields of hippocampal neurons, Widloski & Foster, Nat. Comm. 2025 | |
Faculty News - Fall 2025
This fall saw many research accomplishments by Neuroscience faculty labs. Frederic Theunissen and postdoc Julie Elie made an important advance in the neuroscience of animal communication. In a paper in Science, they demonstrate that songbirds understand the meaning of their communication calls, and that the songbird brain encodes these chirps and whistles according to these semantic categories, not just acoustic structure. This is an important finding with implications for human language. Daniela Kaufer published a major paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience on dynamic regulation of the blood brain barrier, and its critical role in brain health and disease. Doris Tsao, with postdoc Frank Lanfranchi, discovered how visual object processing occurs in tree shrews, a small highly visual mammal. In a Nature paper, they report that core computational principles for object and face processing are conserved from primates, but are hierarchically compressed into fewer cortical areas, explaining how vision can scale between large- and small-brained mammals.
Overall, Neuroscience department labs published 58 papers from August-November 2025, including many in top journals (Nature, Science, Nature Neuroscience, Cell, Neuron, Nature Communications, Nature Chemical Biology, and more). This work includes a wide range of discoveries, including how cortical networks perform sensory pattern completion (Adesnik lab), how attention modulates sensorimotor learning (Ivry lab), how sleep governs growth hormone secretion (Dan lab), and how oxytocin regulates friendship relationships (Beery and Landry labs). Other papers showed how orbitofrontal cortex and hippocampus interact during learning (Wallis lab), how resilience to stress can be recognized at the transcriptomic level in the brain (Kaufer lab), how activity shapes cell types in the retina (Feller and Shekhar labs). Our labs also reported technical improvements for NexGen 7T MRI scanning (Feinberg lab), and discovered novel mechanisms for synaptic homeostasis (Isacoff lab).
Awards and Prizes
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HWNI program faculty Teresa Puthussery won a MacArthur Foundation 'genius' award for her research on the retina, and its function in health and retinal neurodegenerative disease. Congratulations, Teresa!
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Congratulations to Hillel Adesnik, who won a Weill Neurohub Investigators Program award for development of all-optical physiology to study cerebral cortex.
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Helen Bateup, Rich Ivry, and Rich Kramer won Weill Neurohub Next Great Ideas awards for studies to develop novel molecular markers of neural activity, to test non-invasive brain stimulation therapies to enhance motor function in stroke patients, and to study inhibitory synapses on axon initial segments. Congratulations!
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Fall Events
In September, the department was part of the American Brain Tumor Association's BT5K fundraiser run-and-walk event. Over 20 undergraduates and several faculty participated. There was great spirit and energy, and the overall event raised almost $100,000 for brain tumor research and patient support. Thanks to everyone who attended, and to undergrad Ashita Gulati (bottom row, 2nd from right) for organizing the volunteers!
The annual Berkeley Neuroscience Retreat took place at Lake Tahoe, with 2 days of talks, posters, discussion, and socializing. We heard exciting science from graduate students, postdocs, and faculty, plus two outstanding keynote speakers, Carla Shatz (Stanford) and Erich Jarvis (Rockefeller). Thanks to Michael Yartsev as faculty organizer, Peony Yu as the lead staff organizer, Year 2 students for moderating sessions, and Year 1 students for running the talent show. And thanks to everyone for attending.
The Neuroscience Seminar Series was very active this fall, with many excellent speakers and broad attendance. The pre-seminar coffee/cookie reception has been attracting ~30 people each week. Please join on your way over to the seminar!
| | Scenes from the 3rd year student data slam at the Neuroscience retreat. | |
PhD Program News
This is a challenging time for Neuroscience PhD programs across the country, many of which are shrinking due to the pullback in federal research funding. We are lucky at Berkeley to have some flexibility due to our graduate endowment and the generosity of donors who support graduate education, because they know this is the engine of current and future scientific discovery. As a result, we will be able to maintain a normal class size for the immediate future. We remain committed, as always, to provide rigorous scientific training to prepare students for their future research and research-related careers.
Congratulations to Odilia Lu (Lammel lab), who won the NINDS Early-Career Rigor Champions Prize from NIH, which recognizes early-career scientists who have promoted or enhanced research rigor practices. Congrats to Dario Tommasini (Shekhar lab), who won a NIH F31 Predoctoral Fellowship to characterize the molecular, structural, and functional conservation of retinal inhibitory neurons across species.
PhD student papers this fall included Lexi Black (Beery lab) on oxytocin signaling in friendship bonds in voles, Erin Aisenberg and Atehsa Sahagun on the discovery of GRPR-expressing neurons in the nucleus accumbens that regulate motivation, Celia Ford and Zuzanna Balewski on orbitofrontal-hippocampal interactions in memory, Laura Craciun on the origin of seizures in Pitt-Hopkins syndrome, Kate Henn on improved voltage-sensitive dyes for imaging neural activity, Yanabah Jaques on transcriptomic profiling of stress and resilience in the brain, and Julia Bleier on molecular dynamics of G-protein coupled receptors. Congratulations to all! If your paper is not cited here, submit your accomplishments next time (link at end of newsletter).
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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).
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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: Cording et al., eLife 2025. Right: King et al., Imaging Neuroscience 2025 | |
Postdoctoral Researchers
The department has programs for postdocs, including the Neuroscience Academic Job Search Workshop Series, the Neuroscience Postdoc Departmental Seminars, and our postdoc mentorship program which pairs postdocs with a faculty member outside their own lab. The sign-up request for the 2025-2026 postdoc mentorship program was just sent out.
We are currently looking for postdocs who would like to get involved with the Academic Job Search Workshop series -- if you are interested, please contact faculty Daniela Kaufer or Alex Huth. Postdocs are strongly encouraged to attend the Neuroscience Seminar Series each Thursday, and to meet others at the pre-seminar receptions.
Congratulations to Dan Silverman (Dan lab), whose recent paper on neural mechanisms for homeostatic sleep pressure (Silverman et al., Sci. Adv. 2025) won the Publication of the Year Award from The International Society to Advance Alzheimer’s Research. Congrats to Julie Elie (Theunissen lab) for her paper (Elie et al., Science 2025) on semantic representation in the songbird brain. Congrats to Xiaolin Huang (Dan lab) for receiving the 2025 Parkinson’s Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. Congrats to Masaya Harada (Lammel lab) for receiving a postdoc fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, to study neural circuits for defense behaviors in mice. And congratulations to several postdocs in Neuroscience department labs who won Weill Neurohub postdoctoral fellowships this fall: Pierre-Marie Garderes (Feldman lab) to study information transmission across cortical columns and areas, Roya Huang (Brohawn lab) to study how nodes of Ranvier develop and regenerate, and Gerick Lee (Hamilton lab) to study how speech processing develops in the brain.
Tell us about your papers and accomplishments, using the submission link at end of the newsletter. And postdocs, please Join the Slack #postdocs channel!
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Neuroscience Undergraduates
The Neuroscience Department commencement ceremony will take place on Thursday, May 21, from 7-9 PM, in Zellerbach Auditorium. This will be a combined ceremony for both undergraduate and graduate students. Please mark your calendars! All graduating students and faculty are invited to attend. More information including ticket information for families will come in early spring.
The Neuroscience major now has 200 declared undergraduate majors, and our courses are bustling. We are offering 24 undergraduate lecture and lab courses. We are adding an extra offering of NEU 110 Scientific Explanation and Communication, in Spring 2026 to meet demand. We anticipate that 100 majors will graduate in Spring 2026.
In August, three undergraduates were named 2025 Gunther Stent Neuroscience Research Scholars, who receive a $7500 stipend to conduct research in a Neuroscience faculty lab. Marlene Ketelaar is working in the Isacoff lab to study the molecular mechanisms for retrograde signaling and synaptic homeostasis. Gautam Naik is doing research in the Beery lab to identify the neurobiological mechanisms underlying prosocial consolation behavior by animals toward a sick peer. Sandra Ong is working in the Bateup lab to study the role of astrocytes in generating hyperexcitability and seizures in a mouse model of Tuberous Sclerosis complex, a neurodevelopmental disorder. Congratulations to them, and to all our undergraduates who are involved in research. Also congratulations to Rhea Wanchoo, a Neuroscience major, who was selected to present her undergraduate research at the 2026 Yale Undergraduate Research Conference.
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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 welcome and support all Neuroscience Department members, recognizing that we come from many different backgrounds and life experiences, which enrich the scientific effort.
This Fall, we have been increasing our efforts related to climate and belonging in the department. The PhD student advocacy committee (co-leads: Makenzie Wilkinson, Haidyn Bulen, Skylar Brooks) ran a valuable discussion at the retreat, where we discussed last year's climate survey, identified priority areas, and outlined a multi-pronged climate action plan. We have been putting the plan into action this fall. This includes regular annual communication about our Principles of Community, and sending all department members a list of community and climate resources, which include our Equity Committee and multiple faculty and staff contacts. We have augmented our regular state-of-the-program discussion meetings with PhD students. To increase transparency, we have added information about department governance on the Neuroscience Department website, and now have graduate student representation on another key governing committee (the CAH committee). To promote healthy mentor-mentee relationships, we are implementing mentorship discussions between PhD students and faculty when students rotate and join labs, and will continue and expand faculty mentor training. For postdocs, we will continue and expand the postdoc mentorship program. To strengthen inclusion and belonging, we are encouraging student and faculty participation in the iBio event each fall, and are planning a 'bridging' event within the department for faculty and graduate students to share perspectives. To smooth student preparation for the qualifying exam, we are developing a 'Demystifying Quals' training.
If you have concerns about the research or training climate, please do not hesitate to reach out to me (Dan Feldman), our Equity Committee chairs (Lance Kriegsfeld and Markita Landry), the graduate program advisors (Leleña Avila and Peony Yu), the Neuroscience undergraduate staff advisers, or to campus resources outside the department, which can be found here.
| | Poster session at the retreat. | |
Upcoming Events
Every Thursday afternoon, the department has an event (seminars and social hours) in the Neuroscience lobby in 132 Barker Hall. Seminars are at 3:30pm, preceded by a coffee/cookie reception at 3:15. Social events at 4:00pm. The schedule can be found on the events calendar.
Please join for the Neuroscience Department Holiday Social and Potluck, This will take place on Thursday, Dec 11, from 2-4 PM. The department will provide much of the food and beverages, and we are also welcoming people to bring a dish or drink. If you want to bring a favorite dish to share -- savory, sweet, or festive -- it is completely optional but welcome.
All members of Neuroscience Department labs are welcome to area-level research meetings, which are generally monthly. For details and contact information, see the Department Areas web page. These events are:
- Hardly Strictly Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience. On hold for fall, will start in Spring.
- Systems-Behavioral Neuroscience Club. First Weds of the month.
- Cognitive Neuro Colloquium. Alternate Mondays.
- Computational Neuroscience Meeting. Once a month on a Friday, dates TBA.
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