Dan Feldman, Neuroscience Department Chair

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.

Neuroscience PhD commencement 2025. Top row: Bob Knight, Ben Parker, Brooke Staveland, Samira Maboudian, Lucia Rodriguez, Kaeli Vandemark, Sonali Mali. Second row: Bill Jagust, Chris Kymn, Leana King, Karina Bistrong, Emily Meschke, Gül Dölen, Kevin Weiner, Dan Feldman. Bottom left: Jack Gallant, Marla Feller.

The Value of University-based Research in Biology & Neuroscience

I want to reflect a moment on the value of university-based research in biology and neuroscience. Over the past 30 years, research in university faculty labs has fueled tremendous advances in health. For a tiny sliver of examples, consider the development of highly effective immunotherapies for cancer (pioneered by Jim Allison when he was at Berkeley); CRISPR-based therapy for sickle-cell anemia and an increasing set of genetic disorders (Jennifer Doudna and the IGI at Berkeley); transformative B-cell therapies for multiple sclerosis (Stephen Hauser at UCSF); and biosynthesis of the antimalarial drug artemisinin that is the basis of cost-effective drug production (Jay Keasling at Berkeley). In Neuroscience, consider ASO-based therapies for spinomuscular atrophy and Duchenne muscular dystrophy; deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's Disease; amyloid-reducing therapies in Alzheimer's; tPA-based intravenous therapy for acute ischemic stroke; cochlear implants for deafness; and many more. We would not have these advances without early NIH-funded basic science in individual faculty labs.

Beyond cures, biology research at universities gave us PCR, cloning, and gene editing, which are the basis for much of the $550B U.S. biotech industry; improvements in crop yield and disease resistance that help feed millions; and synthetic biology that drives innovation in fuels, foods, drug production, and fertilizer. Basic discoveries in neuroscience and artificial neural networks drove today's machine learning and artificial intelligence. Equally importantly, neuroscience research drives important societal debates, including how to understand and address addiction, how legal judgments in criminal cases should be informed by knowledge of brain development, and how society can better understand and appreciate neurodiversity. 



Our own faculty, trainees, and students are key contributors to these scientific and intellectual efforts. They are smart and dedicated people, from across the country and around the world, and from many different communities and backgrounds, which brings incredible strength and a breadth of perspective. They have admirably chosen a career path in research and teaching despite years of study, long hours, and not-great pay. Their motivation is to address important problems, make discoveries, educate the next generation, and advance scientific knowledge for the public good. Our country needs more of this, not less. 

-- Dan Feldman

We had several great scientific events this spring. In April, Cornelia Bargmann from Rockefeller University gave the inaugural Dr. Carla Shatz & Dr. Corey Goodman Lectureship in Neuroscience, on "Organizing behavior across timescales". In May, we had two days of excellent talks in our Spring Thesis Symposium by our graduating PhD students. In June, we held a very successful all-day symposium, Hardly Strictly Synapses, featuring outstanding invited speakers including Nobel Prize winner Tom Südhof.

Faculty News - Spring 2025

Two new faculty will be joining Neuroscience on July 1. These are Alex Huth, who uses computational methods and fMRI to understand how the brain processes language and represents meaning, and Liberty Hamilton, who uses intracranial recordings and EEG to understand speech processing in the brain and its development. Huth and Hamilton are moving from UT Austin, and will have laboratories in Warren Hall.

Awards, prizes, and other faculty news

• Helen Bateup was awarded the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award, in recognition of sustained excellence in undergraduate and graduate teaching.
• Markita Landry wins a Guggenheim Fellowship for new research on naturally occurring plant compounds as potential treatments for nervous system disorders.
• Michael Yartsev wins the Richard Lounsbery award from the National Academy of Sciences, for contributions to systems neuroscience.
• Yang Dan was elected as Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
• Gerald Westheimer, who just turned 101, remains active as a Professor of the Graduate School. Gerald published 2 papers this year: one on the optical basis of defocus degradation in the eye, and one on Kant's philosophy of object perception (PMID: 40491363)
• We bid farewell to Yang Dan, who is leaving Berkeley to join the Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation (SMART) as a senior principal investigator. Yang was faculty at Berkeley for 28 years, with many impressive discoveries on cortical function, learning, and neural circuit control of sleep. She will be missed!

PhD Program News

Congratulations to our Spring 2025 Neuroscience PhD graduates Chris Kymn, Emily Meschke, Ben Parker, Samira Maboudian, Leana King, Brooke Staveland, Sonali Mali, Lucia Rodriguez, Kaeli Vandemark, and Karina Bistrong, plus Biophysics PhD Logan Thomas! Most of this group entered in 2019 or 2020, during the pandemic, and overcame challenges for strong success. We wish them the best in their next steps.

Neuro PhD students first-author papers this spring include: Krisha Aghi and Ryan Schultz on synaptic release dynamics (Aghi, Shulz et al., Curr. Biol. 2025), Hayley Bounds on functional interactions in recurrent networks (Bounds & Adesnik, Neuron 2025), Sonali Mali on the discovery of mechanosensitive epidermal cells in Drosophila (Yoshino, Mali, eLife 2025), Madeline Klinger on fiber sensors for neurotransmitters (Klinger et al., Langmuir 2025), Dariya Bakshinskaya on neuromodulation of glutamate release (Bakshinskaya et al., PNAS 2025), Amanda Tose on neurotensin in obesity (Gazit Shimoni, Tose, et al., Nature 2025), Marisa Denkinger on blood-brain barrier and Alzheimer's biomarkers in aging (Denkinger et al., Neurobiol. Aging 2025), Dario Tommasini on evolution of vertebrate photoreceptors (Tommasini et al., Curr. Biol. 2025), and Jing-Jing Li on learning of hierarchical decision policies (Li and Collins, Cognition 2025). In addition, may students had middle author papers, and preprints on bioRxiv or arXiv. 

Congratulations to Sonali Mali for winning the Schmidt Science Fellowship, which she will use to study immunology in her postdoctoral training, and to Chris Kymn, who won the Alan Bearden Book Award at commencement.

Image: Staveland et al., bioRxiv 2025

Join the Slack!

New lab members, please join the Neuro Department Slack. We have channels for #job-ads, #announcements, and #postdocs for postdoc 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: Gazit Shimoni, Tose et al., Nature 2025. Right: Mali et al., eLife 2025

Postdoctoral Researchers

Postdocs, please see the postdocs page on the department website for events and resources.

Congrats to Boaz Styr (Yartsev lab), who won the 2025 Warren Alpert Distinguished Scholar Fellowship to study the role of motor cortex in the control of flight in bats. Congrats to Deepa Ramamurthy (Feldman lab) for her new position as Assistant Professor in Psychology at UC Riverside. Dan Silverman (Dan lab) published a paper on locus ceruleus neurons and sleep pressure (PMID: 39823324). Caitlin Mallory (Foster lab) published a paper on the temporal organization of hippocampal replay (39883781). Neta Gazit Shimoni published a paper on neural circuit mechanism for hedonic feeding and obesity (40140571).

Thanks to Rachana Somaiya, Caitlin Mallory, Krishna Kasuba, Neta Shimoni, and Boaz Styr for being organizers for the Neuro Faculty Job Workshop series in 2025, with support from prior members Miriam Hernandez Morales and Marta Gajowa.

To submit your papers and accomplishments for future newsletters, use the link at the bottom.

Neuroscience Undergraduates

We are excited to have almost 100 neuroscience majors or intended majors after our first year. Our first graduating class of 10 neuroscience majors graduated in May 2025, in a commencement ceremony held jointly with MCB. Big congratulations to these students who were pioneers in a major that was just forming. Among our 2025 graduating class, Yijia Wu won the Neuroscience Department Citation and, Raul Habib won the Neuroscience Outstanding Scholar Award. Congratulations!

In other undergraduate news, Naz Ovaici (MCB Neurobiology) won an I.L. Chaikoff award for honors research in the Jagust lab, as did Celine Cen (Feldman lab), Anna Jiang (Dan lab), and Soliana Yohannes (Feldman lab). Emiliano Lara, an undergrad in the Ivry lab, was selected for a Scripps Research Summer Undergraduate Fellowship, where he'll be working with Dr. Luke Lairson on a research project related to multiple sclerosis.

In 2024-2025, we offered 17 undergraduate courses across the range of neuroscience. In 2025-2026, we will add 7 new undergrad courses to complete the Neuro curriculum. This includes new courses in Computational Neuroscience, Cognitive and Computational Laboratory, Brain Behavior and Environment (capstone), Neuroethology (capstone), Psychedelics, and a new Cognitive Neuroscience course. Thanks to faculty and to staff Bonnie Tom and Maria Park for the hard work to launch these classes.

Upcoming Events

No official events are scheduled until Fall.

• Regular Thursday afternoon events (seminars and social hours) will begin in the first week of September.
• The Neuroscience welcome picnic to launch the new year, and to welcome our incoming PhD students, will be Thursday, Aug 21, in the afternoon.

Regular area-level research meetings also generally have the summer off. Please join the events in your area. For details and contact information, see the Department Areas web page. These events are:

• Hardly Strictly Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience. One Tues per month.
• Systems-Behavioral Neuroscience Club. First Weds of the month.
• Cognitive Neuro Colloquium. Alternate Mondays.
• Computational Neuroscience Meeting. Once a month, dates TBA.

Department Contacts & Links

Neuroscience Department website

Events Calendar

Access Requests & Room Scheduling

Staff contacts

To submit news for future newsletters 

Department Chair: Dan Feldman

Department Manager: Liz Gardner