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Laura Grima

@lauragrima.bsky.social
2.6K followers 1.1K following 267 posts

Research Scientist in the Dudman lab @HHMIJanelia. PhD @Oxford, BSc @RoyalHolloway. dopamine | foraging | decision-making | hippocampus | reinforcement learning 🧠🧪👩‍🔬🐭💻 Wondering what mice are thinking about.

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Reposted by Laura Grima
Shervin Safavi @neuroprinciplist.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
We are thrilled 🥳 to share that we’re joining forces with @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social to establish a joint research unit, @cmc-unit.bsky.social integrating embodied and natural decision making across species! We also have open PhD and postdoc positions (check below for more info) 🎉
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Laura Grima @lauragrima.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Grateful to have been selected as an Allen Institute Next Generation Leader - and for the opportunity to learn from and engage with this wonderful community!
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Lauren Burgeno @laurenburgeno.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
🚨 New Walton × Bogacz Collab Preprint! POV: dopamine refuses to have just one job.🧠 DLS dopamine carries distinct reward AND action prediction errors — parallel teaching signals that could support value learning and habit formation. Enjoyed working with Yuhao, Juan Carlos, et al. on this one!
doi.org
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bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Dopamine dips during unrewarded actions promote punishment-resistant reward seeking www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
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Spencer LaVere Smith @spencerlaveresmith.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
Ecological Visual Processing in the Mouse - with @michaelgoard.bsky.social @crisniell.bsky.social @mbeyeler.bsky.social Visual computations that are engaged in ecological contexts: active sensing, motion processing, scene analysis, distance estimation, and spatial perception. doi.org/10.1146/annu...
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Laura Grima @lauragrima.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
#fens2026 has revealed to me a real diversity in how neuroscientists use travelators.
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Open Neuroscience @open-neuroscience.com · 07/07/2026
📜 Project Showcase 🛠️ pyControl: Open source, Python-based, behavioural experiment control. 👩‍💻 🧑‍💻 Developed by Thomas Akam 👀 To learn more about it: open-neuroscience.com/en/post/pyco... #OpenSoftware #OpenScience #OpenSource
pyControl
Open source, Python-based,
behavioural experiment control.pyControl is a system of open source hardware
and software for controlling behavioural
experiments in neuroscience and psychology,
built around the MicroPython microcontroller.pyControl is a user-friendly and flexible tool
addressing a commonly encountered use case
in behavioural neuroscience:
(1) Defining behavioural tasks as extended state machines.
(2) Running them efficiently as high-throughput experiments.
(3) Communicating task logic to other researchers
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Laura Grima @lauragrima.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
Looking forward to speaking at Barrels Meeting this Saturday, and a poster this Tuesday afternoon at #FENS2026 - PS02-07PM-083. Presenting mostly published work but sneaking in some new CA1 data/analyses that I’m excited about and keen to discuss…!
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David Robbe @davidrobbe.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
Excited to share our new paper: "The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice,". Out now in @cp-iscience.bsky.social 🧵1/9 www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
cell.com
The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice
Biological sciences; Behavioral neuroscience; Laboratory animal science
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Tim Behrens @behrenstimb.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
This paper is an absolutely beautiful combination of a deep set of cognitive ideas, a super creative task, a surprisingly impressive behaviour, and an elegant modelling framework. One of my favourite things in the last year.
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Michael Totty @mictott.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
And here's another for all the ventral striatum / olfactory tubercle folks. It's hard not to love the Calleja and interface islands.
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peterdoohan.bsky.social @peterdoohan.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
How do brains plan actions towards goals? To get at this question we studied mice navigating complex mazes as goals changed on every trial 🧵 Work with @thomasakam.bsky.social @behrenstimb.bsky.social @kristorpjensen.bsky.social now on BioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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Raymond Chua @raymondrchua.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
Excited to share our new paper accepted at ICML 2026 with @tyrellturing.bsky.social and Doina Precup! 🇰🇷 See you in Seoul. A major challenge in continual reinforcement learning is balancing: • plasticity (learning new things) • stability (not forgetting old ones) 🧵 1/15
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Miguel Nunez @nunezkant.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
1/ 🚨🚨Preprint alert! "Perfect" isn't always smart 🧠. Anyone can tell apart two stimuli (including our mice). But how do we extract rules that apply to new stimuli? 🧵 biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @marius10p.bsky.social @computingnature.bsky.social #neuroAI #neuroscience #AI
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Laura Grima @lauragrima.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
@fluketc.bsky.social and @dudman.bsky.social have hit it out the park again. In my (perhaps biased) opinion this - along with their previous papers - is field-defining work. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
Reward magnitude determines reinforcement learning efficiency
Standard animal learning studies minimize individual reward magnitudes to maximize the repetitions of reinforced behaviors. We investigated how reward magnitude influences initial learning across five...
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Brad Hulse @bradkhulse.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
Story time friends... Ring attractor networks rely on fine-tuned symmetric connectivity. The fly head direction network has ring attractor dynamics but heterogeneous connectivity. How is this possible? 1/🧵 Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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Ling-Qi Zhang @lingqiz.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
It’s very fun to analyze other people’s data for your favorite model and theory, but data reuse actually takes a huge amount of effort. We tested if current agentic AI can help with data reuse. Conclusion: it definitely can, but requires careful human supervision. #AIforScience #compneuro #neuroAI
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Paul Kristian LaFosse @lafosse.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
🚨 Ever wanted a simple way to control the activity of thousands of neurons? We introduce an all-optical raster photostimulation method to do just that! w/ @computingnature.bsky.social @marius10p.bsky.social #FluorescenceFriday #neuroskyence www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/n
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Laura Grima @lauragrima.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
Really pleased that this work with @dudman.bsky.social is now out in Neuron: A global dopaminergic learning rate enables adaptive foraging across many options
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Laura Grima @lauragrima.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
Reminder that it's possible to set up a free personal website using GitHub pages: docs.github.com/en/pages Really straightforward to then use Jekyll to make something relatively nice (with the aid of your chosen LLM, of course...) Just updated my own using this approach: lauralgrima.github.io
docs.github.com
GitHub Pages documentation - GitHub Docs
GitHub Pages turns any GitHub repository into a live website—no separate hosting required.
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Laura Grima @lauragrima.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
Who else is going to #FENS2026 in July?
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The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
Prediction without understanding sustained astronomy through a thousand years of epicycles, writes @tonyzador.bsky.social. AI is now offering neuroscience the same deal. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/machine-lear...
thetransmitter.org
Can AI do neuroscience without understanding?
Prediction without understanding sustained astronomy through a thousand years of epicycles. Artificial intelligence is now offering neuroscience the same deal.
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Ahmed El Hady @zamakany.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
After three years of working on this review with my collaborator Emily Dennis (Janelia Farm), it is finally in press. The review provides an overview and our personal reflections on what constitutes an integrative approach to neurobiology of foraging. Enjoy www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
annualreviews.org
Neurobiology of Foraging: An Integrative Approach
Foraging, defined as the search for food to sustain one's energetic needs, is a fundamental behavior performed by almost all animals to survive in their environment. Foraging involves a variety o...
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Jason Keller @neurojak.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
I like neuroscience and history, and over a decade ago I started a list of neurohistory events that influence my scientific views. I've been meaning to format as a timeline for a while, and doomscroll prevention + GenAI left me no excuse: neurojak.github.io/neurohistory/
neurojak.github.io
neurohistory mix-tape
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Hannah Haberkern @hannah-haberkern.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
How does an animal choose between exploring for a better food source and taking advantage of a known one? Our recent work in Current Biology demonstrates how recent feeding and metabolic state dynamically influence fly local search. bit.ly/3PfrIv3 #Science #Neurosky #Foraging #Drosophila
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Matt Perich @mattperich.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
New paper hot off the (pre-)press! We dig into the evolutionary origins of neural computations for behavioral control across mice, monkeys, and humans: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... As our lab's first foray into comparative analysis of neural dynamics, I’m super excited about this work! 1/18
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Laura Grima @lauragrima.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
Excited to be co-organising a #cosyne2026 workshop with Alison Comrie on 'algorithms for learning from scratch'! With a great line-up of speakers, we'll be tackling the question of what processes enable naive biological & artificial agents to adapt to new situations. Info here: tinyurl.com/4u8enf7k
sites.google.com
learningfromscratch
march 16th, workshop day 1 @ cosyne 2026
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Jake Quilty-Dunn @quiltydunn.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social: The Deliberation Taboo Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/ osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io
OSF
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Nanthia Suthana @suthanalab.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
The biggest problem holding neuroscience back right now isn’t data or tools, thanks in large part to the BRAIN Initiative. It’s fragmentation across species. I wrote this to hopefully spark discussion around an issue that can only be solved as a community👇 www.thetransmitter.org/animal-model...
thetransmitter.org
Neuroscience has a species problem
If neuroscience is serious about building general principles of brain function, cross-species dialogue must become a core organizing principle.
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Atika Syeda @atika-syeda.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
Excited to share “Orofacial behaviors, not eye movements, govern neural activity in mouse visual cortex” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Summary below...
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Kevin Thiessen, PhD @kevinthiessen.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
This is not limited to #zebrafish but includes all organismal research. If you can spare 15 minutes, you may help safeguard the future of responsible animal research in the UK. 🙏
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Mark Rubin @markrubin.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
Statistical Tests as Thought Experiments “The only populations that can be referred to in a test of significance have no objective reality, being exclusively the product of the statistician’s imagination through the hypotheses which he has decided to test” (Fisher, 1956, p. 77).
ia802908.us.archive.org
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Talia Lerner @talialerner.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
Taking the #GRCBasalGanglia Oath ✋🏼 I acknowledge that the go/no-go model of the BG was useful but it is outdated and incorrect, or at least incomplete. I pledge not to use the go/no-go model as a strawman to motivate my work.
BG GRC Oath:
I acknowledge that the go/no-go model of the BG was useful but it is outdated and incorrect, or at least incomplete. I pledge not to use the go/no-go model as a strawman to motivate my work.
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Laura Grima @lauragrima.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
I’ve recently read a couple of papers (mostly from psychopharm) where the methods are placed after the intro and not buried at the end of the paper. It’s so refreshing! N animals excluded, plans for statistical tests, etc. all up front and easy to access. Why did we stop doing this in sys neuro?
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Janelia Conferences @janeliaconf.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
Junior scientists 👉 applications are open for our workshop on the mechanistic basis of #cognition. 🧠 🤝 Joint sessions with our #TheoreticalNeuroscience workshop ✈️ Hotel, meals + reasonable travel expenses covered Apply by May 7 ➡️ janelia.news/CNW26 @michaelreiser.bsky.social @jvoigts.bsky.social
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Laura Grima @lauragrima.bsky.social · 02/01/2026
Throwback to this Reddit post I saw in 2024 and that I still think about sometimes
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Laura Grima @lauragrima.bsky.social · 23/12/2025
Anyone looking for the opportunity to do some truly exciting science during their postdoc (with an excellent mentor to boot) - check this out!
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Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · 19/12/2025
All research is exploratory if you’re confused enough
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Ching-Lung Hsu @hiallen72.bsky.social · 13/12/2025
Hippocampal relay for remote planning from Brian, Albert Lee’s group! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Signatures of remote planning in hippocampal replay
During brief, intermittent “replay” events, hippocampal activity can express navigational trajectories disconnected from both when and where they originally occurred. While replay biased toward immedi...
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Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
Soapbox time: the problem with metabolic efficiency arguments in neuroscience is that they often confuse energy efficiency with energy expenditure. Biological systems are optimized for energy efficiency, but that does NOT imply they are optimized for low energy expenditure 🧵 1/
Plot showing metabolic rate and brain size vs. body mass. Warm-blooded animals expend an order of magnitude more energy and have brain sizes an order of magnitude larger
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michael chimento @mchimento.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
New paper out today w @dalmaijer.bsky.social @barbaraklump.bsky.social and @lucymaplin.bsky.social as part of the Phil Trans special issue doi.org/10.1098/rstb.... Over 2 years, we studied a population of cockatoos thought to be the source of the innovation of bin-opening.
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Laura Grima @lauragrima.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
Thanks so much for having me Cian!
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Laura Grima @lauragrima.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
Beautiful set of experiments. Congrats Lauren et al!
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Catherine (Katie) Schretter @ceschretter.bsky.social · 23/10/2025
Excited to announce our new pre-print (www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...)! This collaborative work (co-led by Adriane Otopalik and Gerry Rubin) examines how neuronal circuits regulate social behaviors, like courtship🫶 and aggression🥊, across sexes. #neuroscience #Drosophila #WomenInSTEM 🧪1/
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Trends in Neurosciences @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
'Foraging as an ethological framework for neuroscience' by @LauraGrima.bsky.social, @Hannah-Haberkern.bsky.social, Rishika Mohanta, @MaimMorimoto.bsky.social @adiraj95.bsky.social @EmmavScholey.bsky.social www.cell.com/trends/neuro...
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Mark D Humphries @markdhumphries.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
🚨Registration for Mechanistic Basis of Foraging 2025 closes October 20th 🚨 Speakers @mkflugge.bsky.social @aaronbornstein.bsky.social @benhayden.bsky.social @ellileadbeater.bsky.social @davidrobbe.bsky.social @dlbarack.bsky.social @becketebs.bsky.social uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis...
uobevents.eventsair.com
Home - The Mechanistic Basis of Foraging
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Hannah Haberkern @hannah-haberkern.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
Amazing! Hard to believe this didn't exist until now.
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Eli Sennesh @elisennesh.bsky.social · 02/10/2025
We started our RL debate series! www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0A0...
youtube.com
RL Debate Series: Eli "abolish the value function" Sennesh
YouTube video by Sensorimotor AI
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Janelia FlyEM @janelia-flyem.bsky.social · 05/10/2025
We're very proud to be releasing the complete male fly CNS connectome! It's the product of a huge team effort here at Janelia in partnership with the Cambridge Fly Connectomics group (@jefferis.bsky.social and colleagues), plus invaluable collaborators. More soon... www.janelia.org/project-team...
janelia.org
Male CNS Connectome
A team of researchers has unveiled the complete connectome of a male fruit fly central nervous system —a seamless map of all the neurons in the brain and nerve cord of a single male fruit fly and the ...
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