News
Recent News
We are part of the Department of Psychology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California at Berkeley. Our research focuses on understanding the functional organization of the frontal cortex at the single neuron level. Our methods use sophisticated behavioral paradigms, multichannel recording and computational analysis of neuronal data. We aim to understand the neuronal mechanisms underlying a number of high-level cognitive and behavioral processes, including decision-making, learning and working memory. The goal of our research is to guide the development of the next generation of treatments for mental illness.
March 2024
Alyssa Sanchez joins our lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Alyssa graduated from Martin Usrey’s lab at U.C. Davis where she studied the visual responses of the lateral geniculate nucleus. Welcome to the other end of the brain Alyssa!
November 2023
Joni had fun as part of a symposium at the Society for Neuroscience Meeting with Alaa Ahmed, Aaron Batista (our Uber driver), and Christos Constantinidis.
October 2023
New paper in the Scientific Reports via our collaboration with Jose Carmena, which examined how motor signals from brain-machine interfaces compare with natural movements.
Previous news
Aug 2023: New paper from Thom and Zuzanna in Nature Neuroscience describing how value dynamics in orbitofrontal cortex can influence response preparation signals in motor cortex.
Jul 2023: New paper in the Journal of Neuroscience via our collaboration with Erin Rich which showed clear differences in neuronal tuning across the cingulate sulcus.
May 2023: Celia graduated. She has moved on to be a science writer at Wired magazine.
Jan 2023: Joni was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dec 2022: New paper from Thom in the 25th Anniversary of Trends in Cognitive Sciences outlining what the next 25 years may hold for neural decoding
Jul 2022: Eric was awarded an NRSA to study interactions between prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus during model-based learning.
Jun 2022: New paper from Zuzanna published in Neuron which shows that orbitofrontal value flip-flopping biases motor preparation signals in the anterior cingulate cortex.
May 2022: Congratulations to Dr. Zuzanna Balewski on being awarded her PhD.
Apr 2022: Congratulations to Eric on passing his qualifying exam.
Mar 2022: New paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience describing our views on orbitofrontal-hippocampal interactions.
Dec 2021: New paper in Neuron via our collaboration with Feng-Kuei Chiang and Erin Rich showing that when animals use strategies to perform working memory tasks, neural codes shift from single-unit tuning to population-level distributed codes.
Aug 2021: New paper in Cell where we show that hippocampal place cells can also encode locations in an abstract, cognitive space.
Jul 2021: Happy to be part of the team that put together this paper in Neuron on the challenges posed by gender bias in academia.
Jun 2021: Eric Hu has joined the lab. Eric is a first year HWNI graduate student. He will be studying how the hippocampus encodes a cognitive map. Welcome to the lab Eric!
Jan 2021: Dr. Thomas Elston has joined the lab as a postdoctoral researcher. Thom receieved his training from Dr. Andreas Nieder. Welcome to the lab Thom!
Nov 2020: Our collaboration with Dr. Bradley Voytek at U.C. San Diego details an algorithmic method for defining the frequency bands in a field potential signal. The paper was published in Nature Neuroscience.
Jul 2020: Our collaboration with Dr. Erin Rich at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine examines the temporal dynamics of neural populations involved in decision-making. The paper was published in eLife.
Jun 2020: Nathan Munet has joined the lab. Nathan is a first year HWNI graduate student. He will be studying how attention and value signals interact in prefrontal cortex.
Apr 2020: Lauren Meckler has joined the lab as our new Lab Manager.
Jan 2020: New paper in Neuron detailing how closed-loop theta microstimulation of orbitofrontal cortex disrupts reward learning.
May 2019: Congratulations to Celia on passing her qualifying exam.
Mar 2019: Eric published an IEEE paper about our custom shuttle designs, which are available for download from the Resources tab.
Feb 2019: Joni's TiCS review was voted the the best review in TiCS in 2018.