April 20, 2026

Spring has been busy for the Neuroscience Department. We completed two faculty recruitments, with one more in progress, and we are preparing for our first Neuroscience Department commencement in May, which will combine both undergraduate and PhD graduate classes. Our labs are pushing forward on important science, with major papers ranging from studies of single molecules to neural circuits to human visual perception to neurodegeneration to neural computation. And the undergraduate major is burgeoning.

We continued to be concerned about the future of federal research funding nationwide, and its potential impact here at Berkeley. Despite this worry, I am proud that our community has continued to strongly advance scientific knowledge and provide outstanding education and research training in these challenging times.

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.

Human brain fiber tracts measured by DTI imaging on the NexGen 7T MRI. David Feinberg.

Faculty News - Spring 2026

We are happy to announce that Michael Ward will be joining as Neuroscience faculty (50-50 with the MTx division of MCB), starting in July. Ward is a preeminent researcher who studies the molecular and cellular basis of neurodegeneration, focusing on two related diseases, amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). His group applies cell biology, proteomic, and functional genomics approaches in iPSC neuron models to understand the molecular and cellular basis of neurodegeneration, and to develop novel therapies. The Ward lab will be located in the Li Ka Shing Center. Welcome, Michael!

We have also been successful in recruiting a new faculty member as part of last year's Systems, Computational & Cognitive Neuroscience search. An official announcement will be made in a few weeks.

Awards and Prizes

Congratulations to three Neuroscience Department faculty for their election as Fellows to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Jack Gallant was recognized for his contributions to the field of systems and cognitive neuroscience, particularly revealing the neural representations underlying vision and language. Frederic Theunissen was cited for his contributions in understanding the neural basis of auditory processing. Linda Wilbrecht was chosen for her distinguished contributions to the neurobiology of learning and adolescence development.
HWNI member Noah Whiteman was also elected as a AAAS Fellow, for his work in evolutionary and ecological genetics, including molecular mechanisms of co-evolution of species.
Markita Landry received a Fulbright Scholar Award for research on neuroprotective compounds in plants.
Michael Yartsev was elected as a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Marla Feller was awarded a Vallee Visiting Professorship.

Research Discoveries

Notable recent discoveries from recent publications by Neuroscience Department faculty include: from the Ji lab, the development of FACED 2.0, a new large-scale voltage and calcium imaging method for studying neural activity in large cell populations in vivo; from the Brohawn lab, the discovery of the structure and gating of the volume-regulated ion channel LRRC8A:D; from the Landry & Beery labs, use of a new neurochemical nanosensor to reveal the circadian dynamics of dopamine release; and from the Adesnik lab, identification of the cortical microcircuit that drives context-dependent inhibition for visual processing. The Knight lab discovered cross-hemispheric connectivity rules within orbitofrontal cortex; the Weiner lab discovered altered cortical folding patterns in autism spectrum disorder; the Feldman and Bouchard labs identified the laminar origins of high-gamma ECoG signals. The Tsao lab discovered rapid switching of neural coding strategies during face processing, and showed that visual imagery uses similar coding mechanisms to visual object processing in the human brain. And the Jagust lab discovered important new features for how tau protein accumulates during Alzheimer's Disease. (These are just some highlights from >60 papers published in the last few months by Neuro faculty labs.)

Tau accumulation in Alzheimer's Disease. From Maboudian, Fonseca et al, Ann. Neurol. 2026

PhD Program News

We are proud of our talented and committed graduate students, who continue to make discoveries and push the boundaries of science. Thanks also to everyone who participated in admissions and recruitment for the new graduate student cohort (full information will be available shortly about our incoming class).

Congratulations to Odilia Lu (Lammel lab), who won the 2026 Lindau Prize to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. She will join two other Berkeley graduate students to represent UC Berkeley at the meeting this year! And congratulations to Alina Tiemroth (Gomez lab), who was named a Curci Graduate Fellow.

PhD student papers, since the November newsletter, include Corrina Fonseca and Samira Maboudian on spatial patterns of tau accumulation in Alzheimer's Disease, Franklin Caval-Holme on a novel microscopy method for near-infrared dopamine imaging, Lily Gong and Christine Tseng on semantic representations in bilingual language processing, Madeline Klinger on coding of task variable in prefrontal cortex in adolescent mice, and Erin Aisenberg and Atehsa Sahagun on signaling by gastrin-releasing peptide in the nucleus accumbens. In addition, Haidyn Bulen, Aryanna Layden, Emily Meschke, Kaeli Vandemark, and Lucia Rodriguez all had bioRxiv preprints on portions of their thesis research. Shout-out also to visiting graduate student Yuelin Shi (Tsao lab) on dynamic switching of the neural code for face processing in IT cortex. Congratulations to all!

If your paper is not cited here, submit your accomplishments next time (link at end of newsletter).

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: Dopamine imaging in Tarchik et al., eNeuro 2026. Right: Coding of visual objects by a single neuron in human temporal cortex, from Wadia et al., Science 2026

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.

This year, the Neuroscience Academic Job Search Workshop Series expanded to include attendance by postdocs at chalk talks for the candidates in the Neuroscience faculty job search.

Three of our postdocs have accepted faculty positions and will be starting their own labs, since the Fall newsletter. Congratulations to Dan Silverman (Dan lab), who will start as a Group Leader in Neuroscience at Heidelberg University. Congratulations to Caitlin Mallory (Foster lab) for her faculty position at Albert Einstein College of Medicine; and to Natsumi Komatsu (Landry lab) for her faculty position at University of Illinois.

Congrats also to Masaya Harada (Lammel lab) who received a Moore Foundation Fellowship and a fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).

Tell us about your papers and accomplishments, using the submission link at end of the newsletter. And postdocs, please Join the Slack #postdocs channel!

Above: Blood flow imaging using FACED 2.0. From Zhong et al., Nat. Methods 2025.

Neuroscience Undergraduates

The Neuroscience major is thriving. We now have 225 declared majors, and are approaching our planned capacity of 150 new majors per year. We anticipate that 100 majors will graduate in Spring 2026. Many of these students are doing research and honors theses in Neuroscience Department labs, and other labs at Berkeley or UCSF.

Honors students, as well as the Gunther Stent Neuroscience Research Scholars students, will present their research as a talk or poster in the Neuroscience Undergraduate Research Poster Session or Honors Symposium. Please see below for the dates & times.

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. We are pleased to announce that the commencement speaker will be Dr. Liqun Luo, from Stanford University. Dr. Luo is an esteemed neuroscientist and author of a major neuroscience textbook used in many of our courses. Ticket sales information has been sent to graduating students. We look forward to an exciting ceremony for our graduates and their families!

The selectivity filter in the LRRC8A:D ion channel. From Lurie et al., Nat. Comm. 2025

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.

Over the past few months, we have continued our efforts related to climate and belonging in the department. We added a student representative to the Chairs and Area Heads committee, to provide a student voice in department decision-making. This representative is currently Dyana Muller. We implemented a new requirement that faculty and graduate students engage in a mentorship and menteeship discussion at the time when a student begins a research rotation, and again when the student selects and joins their PhD thesis lab. The goal is to align expectations and establish open communications at the beginning of the faculty-thesis mentor relationship. We are currently planning the Spring all-student meeting, which is an important opportunity to discuss plans and concerns.

As part of our climate efforts, we are also holding a Graduate Student and Faculty Bridging Event on May 7. The goal of the event is to share perspectives about being a mentor and a mentee, including individual goals, satisfactions, and challenges, so that faculty and students can appreciate each other’s experiences, and get to know each other better. This event will have external moderators, and is patterned on a successful bridging event held within Biosciences last Fall. Graduate students and faculty should have received an invite -- please RSVP!

As always, 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 Neuroscience Conference/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.

Upcoming Neuroscience Seminars

Thu, Apr. 23. Gaby Maimon. Functional logic of a cognitive brain system.

Thu, Apr 30. Anna Schapiro. Learning representations of specifics and generalities over time.

Neuroscience Spring Thesis Symposium

In the Neuroscience Spring Thesis Symposium, PhD students who are graduating this calendar year present a formal research talk on their PhD dissertation research. Please join for exciting science and to celebrate the accomplishments of our amazing students.

Thu, May 19, 1-4:30 PM (101 Barker)

Speakers: Jing-Jing Li (Collins), Corrina Fonseca (Jagust), Maura McDonagh (Baranger/Kaufer), Laura Gomez (Feldman).

Fri, May 20, 1-4:30 PM (101 Barker)

Speakers: Ryan Schultz (Isacoff), Nathan Munet (Wallis), Eric Hu (Wallis), Miah Pitcher (Feller).

Fri, May 20, 4:30-5:30 PM (132 Barker Neuro Lobby)

Celebratory reception for all graduating PhD students. Please come join!

Other Graduate Events

The Student Advocacy Committee (SAC) will be holding a week-long series of events during the week of May 4-8. Be on the lookout for their announcements.

Undergraduate Research Poster Session and Symposium

The Neuroscience Undergraduate Poster Session will take place on May 4, from 3-4:30 PM in the VLSB Courtyard (joint with MCB and IB). Honors students who are selected for research talks will present in the Neuroscience Undergraduate Symposium on May 5, from 3:30-5 PM (joint with MCB Neurobiology, location TBA).

Area-level Research Meetings

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. Next date: Mon, Apr 27.
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.

Note: Invitations for these events are sent to the lab email lists for the relevant area, and also to all Neuro PhD students. If you are not receiving notices, contact your PI to make sure your lab email list is up-to-date, or contact Liz Gardner to get on the relevant list.