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Venki Murthy

@neurovenki.bsky.social
3.8K followers 1.4K following 1.2K posts

Neuroscience Professor at Harvard University. Personal account and posts here. Research group website: vnmurthylab.org.

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Venki Murthy
David Roberts @volts.wtf · 05/10/2026
Holy shit.
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Please read this piece from the wonderful student-run newspaper @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social at my college. We should all be angry and willing to do something, however small. www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...
thecrimson.com
We Need To Talk About Sexual Violence on Campus | The Harvard Crimson
I am so proud of Jane Doe for having the strength to file a lawsuit. But I also think of the many survivors who couldn’t. That includes me.
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
May be, maybe, the #USMNT is actually entering a new generation of special talent. Wow, these kids!!! Excited for the future!
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
So, this #USMNT, even with a relatively inexperienced roster, CAN indeed play well (technically and intensely). Why were they faffing about in the first half against Mexico then?
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
The passing accuracy from #USMNT is worse than random at the moment. Really needs some sort of a reboot.
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Poor play from the #USMNT so far and poor traffic on this site. Hope both improve!
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Kurt Rosenwinkel, Ben Wendel, Ben Street and Jeff Ballard - wow! (Victor's Places has amazing performances)
youtu.be
KURT ROSENWINKEL Quartet feat | Ben Wendel | Ben Street | Jeff Ballard
YouTube video by Victor’s Places
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Straight from The Saint of Bright Doors. @vajra.me
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Unequivocal improvement of outfield players for #USMNT over the past decade, but ridiculous regression of goalkeepers.
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Anderson and Bellingham the only two #England players up to snuff. And this was at home as well.
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Oyarzabal is ridiculously good as a (super)sub, wow! #Spain #England
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Reposted by Venki Murthy
Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 22/03/2025
The Wind Shifts, by Wallace Stevens (back in 1917, yet feels so modern!).
Text of the poem. Full text in: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148730/the-wind-shifts
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Signal boost to our tenure track faculty search in "AI in Life Sciences". Broadly construed, so PLEASE apply!!
mcb.harvard.edu
Tenure-Track Professor in Life Science and AI - Harvard University - Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology
The Life Sciences Departments in Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences seek to recruit a tenure-track professor whose research is at the interface of AI and life sciences, […]
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Reposted by Venki Murthy
Harvard_MCB @harvardmcb.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Nick Bellono Named 2026 Schmidt Sciences Polymath 🔬 🧠 🧪🧬 #AcademicSky #higherEd www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... @nbellono.bsky.social @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social @schmidtsciences.bsky.social @harvardbrainsci.bsky.social @harvard.edu
mcb.harvard.edu
Nick Bellono Named 2026 Schmidt Sciences Polymath - Harvard University - Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology
MCB Professor Nicholas Bellono has been named a 2026 Schmidt Sciences Polymath, receiving up to $2.5 million over five years to pursue an ambitious new research direction exploring […]
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Congratulations @dulaclab.bsky.social!!!
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
How this not a coaching issue from Arteta? If a strategy hasn't worked for 60 minutes and you are 3 goals down, you just keep doing the same thing? Sigh. #Arsenal
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
#Arsenal, can you start working to bring Kevin Schade on board this Winter transfer window? He has been amazing for #Brentford today. #EPL
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Reposted by Venki Murthy
Namnezia 🥑 @namnezia.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
This is an example that we created to encourage other scientists to describe other research wins. We’re still developing the course templates, etc. docs.google.com/document/d/1...
docs.google.com
Research Wins
Research Wins Narratives It is not an exaggeration to say that every novel therapy that has been developed to treat various conditions and improve human health has been made possible due to federally...
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
How does Ruben Amorim still have a job managing a top club in Europe? Milan looks ridiculously poorer than in recent years (and Benfica running then ragged right now). #UEL #EuropaLeague
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Reposted by Venki Murthy
Jeremiah Cohen @jeremiahycohen.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Happy to share the version of record of our locus coeruleus paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Prior thread on some of our discoveries in this study: bsky.app/profile/jere...
nature.com
Topographic structure and function of locus coeruleus noradrenaline neurons - Nature
Dorsal and ventral noradrenergic neurons in the locus coeruleus form topographic subpopulations whose projection patterns and activity encode choice switching, reward-prediction errors and disregard o...
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Reposted by Venki Murthy
Men in Blazers Media Network @meninblazers.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
A Celebration of Black Arsenal, with Femi Koleoso, is out NOW ⬇️ mibcourage.co/4xUbtVx
mibcourage.co
Black Arsenal: Ezra Collective's Femi Koleoso on Identity, Henry, Vieira & the Gunners
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Loving the new Interpol album This Mirror Weighs a Ton (nice sad-dad-band break from my jazz focus!). Current favorite track is Iron City.
youtu.be
Iron City
YouTube video by Interpol - Topic
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Faculty Job Alert 📣! The Life Sciences Departments in Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences seek to recruit a tenure-track professor whose research is at the interface of AI and life sciences, from methodological developments to AI-enabled discovery. Please spread the word!
academicpositions.harvard.edu
Tenure-Track Professor in Life Science and AI
The Life Sciences Departments in Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences seek to recruit a tenure-track professor whose research is at the interface of AI and life sciences, from methodological developme...
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Reposted by Venki Murthy
Humanists International @humanists.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Humanism is a progressive non-theistic belief system that emphasizes human worth, human potential and human responsibility. If you think you might be a humanist and want to connect with the international humanist movement, sign up to our newsletter: humanists.international/sign-up-for-...
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Resuscitation, by Sara Daniele Rivera @saradan4.bsky.social, from her 2024 collection The Blue Mimes on @graywolfpress.bsky.social. #poetry
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Haha, two more ineffectual dribbling specialists (Tel, Kudus) coming on for Spurs and their best player (Bentancur) subbed out. Everton goal incoming.
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Reposted by Venki Murthy
Jieyu Zheng @jieyusz.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
🤫for rodents it’s likely, but for humans perhaps not. Human patients born with missing cortex are usually bound to bed and die at young age.
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Am I a curmudgeon for enjoying Wrexham get this beatdown from West Ham? #EFL
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Reposted by Venki Murthy
Mayank Mehta @mayankmehta.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Prestigious, fully funded, 3 yearlong postdoctoral fellowship ($90,000/year salary plus benefits) in neural computation and NeuroAI is available starting October 2027. The Candidate must have a very strong CV, including empirical publications. See our lab's page for our research directions.
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Reposted by Venki Murthy
Andrew Straw @andrewstraw.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
We are hiring! Come join us in the Straw Lab at the @biologyunifreiburg.bsky.social . Seeking a scientist to work on the neural and computational mechanisms of visual navigation in honey bees. uni-freiburg.de/en/job/00005...
Bee trajectories in agricultural landscape and two photon microscope for in-vivo calcium activity imaging.
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Intrusive Sonnet, a poem by @jessicagoodfellow.bsky.social in the Sep 26 issue of @thebaffler.com magazine. #poetry
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Cheap, if you ask me.
Vintage advertisement. Chouteau Ave., St. Louis, Missouri. Photo by Jack Klobnak (c.1970’s)
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Reposted by Venki Murthy
Julijana Gjorgjieva @gjorjulijana.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Supper happy to see this published. In short, we show how dendrites and inhibition allow neural circuits to learn new representations while protecting representations that are already stored in the network. See below for a detailed post by @cmiehl.bsky.social: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
My timeline rn :-)
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
New preprint! Taking inspiration from ML where train-test split is critical to show that an agent is generalizing rather than just memorizing, we did some experiments that suggest mice have an inductive bias towards generalization. Led by an amazing graduate student Ningjing Xia. See what you think!
biorxiv.org
An inductive bias for generalization in mouse olfactory learning
Animals must generalize from limited experience, yet behavioral experiments in the laboratory setting rarely assess whether or how rapidly they generalize. This contrasts with machine learning systems...
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
This work is now published in @cp-cellreports.bsky.social! Thanks to co-authors H McCalmon, G Cai, C Tsibouris, @noehamou.bsky.social, J Hoskins, F Pashakhanloo, @sueyeonchung.bsky.social and V Kapoor.
cell.com
Sparse input representations explain odor discrimination in complex, concentration-varying mixtures
Detecting a target odor against complex backgrounds requires separating signal from interference. McCalmon et al. show that discrimination performance depends on target odor concentration but not back...
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Reposted by Venki Murthy
Stephen Judkins @stephenjudkins.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Remember how power bricks used to be bigger, heavier, hotter, and less powerful than power modern power supplies? The SNES power supply can provide 8.5W and this much smaller GaN USB-PD can supply 65W, at greater efficiency. Well, the same thing is probably going to happen to grid transformers. 🧵
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UM-MIND - Institute for Neuroscience Discovery @um-mind.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
UM-MIND is hiring! We are recruiting several tenure-track neuroscience faculty members, preferably at the Assistant Professor level, to join our institute at the University of Maryland School of Medicine here in Baltimore, MD. Learn more here: umb.taleo.net/careersectio... @medschool.umaryland.edu
umb.taleo.net
Assistant Professor, University of Maryland – Medicine Institute for Neuroscience Discovery (UM-MIND)
Click the link provided to see the complete job description.
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Reposted by Venki Murthy
Tony Zador @tonyzador.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
How do you build a brain from a genome? We know a lot about the mechanisms and molecules Here we revisit the algorithmic problem: What kinds of programs can specify a brain within the genome’s information budget and the finite time available for development? stankerstjens.github.io/could-a-comp...
stankerstjens.github.io
Could a computer scientist build a brain?
How does a brain wire itself, starting from a single cell, using only the information encoded in a genome? We pose this as an engineering problem.
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
View of Boccadasse beach in Genoa from the apartment we were staying in recently. "an old mariners' village", says Wikipedia. Incredibly lovely.
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Reposted by Venki Murthy
Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 13/08/2026
Size and Lifespan xkcd.com/3283/
Comic. [Graph with size in kg on x axis (10^-10 to 10^40) and lifespan in seconds on y axis (10^0 to 10^20). A scatter plot with an approximately linear arc shows points in all different colors: white blood cells, yellowjackets, gray wolves, blue whales, a slash from top to bottom for black holes, Red Sea, Greenland, a smaller slash for red dwarfs and blue giants.
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Some Carl Sandburg, from his 1963 collection Honey and Salt. Love is a Deep and a Dark and Lonely. #poetry
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Saw this iridescent insect dead on our floor. Image search says it could be a blue mud dauber. What say you, entomology friends?
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Midsummer, by Arthur Sze. "I smell eucalyptus where there is no eucalyptus and locate summer in rain." #poetry
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Reposted by Venki Murthy
Victoria Rose Richards @aerialembroidery.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
'You'll choke too' - an aerial embroidery landscape inspired by all the wildfires happening right now... I'm upset every time I smell smoke outside and somehow we have people starting them maliciously too! But we all breathe the same air so they'll choke too (1/2 - see thread for close-ups)
An embroidery hoop containing a sewn landscape from above. It shows a forest on the right, a line of fire and charred ground with smoke on the left. The smoke is felted wool.
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Reposted by Venki Murthy
John Glover @jtglover.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Hard to be an old book lately, I tell you what. #sonnet
Harvest Me Like One Of Your Antique Books

Why preserve the rhythms of a mind
when buttons exist? For poetry, press red,
shade of trampled hearts. For novels, find
the one that’s blue as a hero newly dead.
Machines grow hungry: feed them iron ink,
chain-lined paper, stories built from days
of toil and boredom. (Gatekept dreams will shrink
a wallet, unlike the slop that clankers praise.)
Congested shelves can breathe at last, their freight
predestined for some better place, where coy
truth is barely a token. Musty weight
departs, mere offal for the worms to enjoy.
And now we have books—The Codex On Demand!—
with vistas fixed, unable to expand.

—	John T. Glover
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Wow!!! "To investigate how these seemingly conflicting demands are resolved, we have carried out volume electron microscopy based reconstructions of the head direction circuits in the central complex of four species of bees and ants."
biorxiv.org
Deep conservation of head direction circuits in bees, ants and flies
To navigate, animal brains must continuously estimate the body's heading in space and compare it with internal goals to guide movement. In the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster a neural circuit in the...
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Reposted by Venki Murthy
Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
docs.google.com/document/d/1...
docs.google.com
Writing Center alumni open letter
Sign the open letter here. View further comments from Writing Center tutors and alumni here. To President Alan Garber, Dean Hopi Hoekstra, Dean David Deming, and Dean Amanda Claybaugh: As current ...
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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
This paper from Shadmehr and colleagues looks amazing. "Thus, the climbing fibers solved the credit assignment problem by providing the gradient of a loss function with respect to the output of their individual P-cells."
biorxiv.org
Climbing fibers encode the gradient of a loss function for the cerebellum
Neurons in the brain are often many synapses away from motoneurons, yet if a movement results in error, each distant neuron needs a teacher that considers its specific contribution to production of th...
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