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Tim Sainburg

@timsainburg.bsky.social
1.9K followers 2.9K following 34 posts

Neuro, Cogsci, ML, and Ethology postdoc / Schmidt Science Fellow at Harvard.

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Reposted by Tim Sainburg
Datta Lab @dattalab.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
Excited to see our paper describing a stereotyped receptor map for smell (led by @davidhbrann.bsky.social ) out in the world! See below for short thread with open access link to paper www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/s...
nytimes.com
Scientists Unveil ‘Long Lost’ Map for Smell
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Tim Sainburg @timsainburg.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
Today’s AI agents share the same basic architecture: a thinking part (the LLM) is coupled to an acting part (an engineered runtime + tools) through a narrow symbolic interface (e.g. json & text). In our new paper, we call this split *Cartesian agency*. arxiv.org/abs/2604.07745
Figure contrasting biological intelligence with cartesian agents, where cartestian agents form an inverted pyramid of control in biological cognition.
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Kelsey Tyssowski @kelseytea.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
🧠🌟🐭 Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity! We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have: (1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs) (2) better hand dexterity (3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN number🧵
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Andi Kautt @akautt.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
Reposting this open postdoc position with more detailed specifications. Couldn't find the right fit in the first round—not due to lack of strong candidates, but because we're looking for someone whose expertise matches a specific project. More details in the job ad. Apply! tinyurl.com/2uskxyrp
tinyurl.com
Postdoctoral Research Associate - Biology
Position Summary A postdoctoral position is available in the laboratory of Dr. Andreas Kautt in the Department of Biology on the Danforth Campus at WashU in St. Louis. The Kautt Lab studies the mechan...
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Lena Gies @lenagies.bsky.social · 14/09/2025
Thank you to everyone at #ibac2025 for this amazing conference. I met so many great people and learned a lot about so many interesting projects. Excited to see you all again some time! And proud that my poster got the student poster price ☺️ stay tuned for the publication!
Me with my poster on the greylag goose vocal repertoire and how data representation types influence the predictions of unsupervised methods
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Diego Gil @diegogil.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
The psych job market may not be dead... but it is gravely injured 😬 So far it's looking like the Trump administration's attacks on higher ed/research are going to have more than 2x the impact on the job market as the covid-19 pandemic. #psychjobs #neurojobs #academicjobs
Bar plot showing the number of psychology jobs posted each year by area. There are major dips in 2020 due to covid, and in 2025 (now).
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Tim Sainburg @timsainburg.bsky.social · 02/09/2025
New paper out today with Asaf Zorea : "Domain-general noise reduction for time-series signals with Noisereduce" (open access)! We present Noisereduce, a lightweight Python library for denoising signals. Read the paper: doi.org/10.1038/s415... Code (library): github.com/timsainb/noi...
doi.org
Domain general noise reduction for time series signals with Noisereduce - Scientific Reports
Scientific Reports - Domain general noise reduction for time series signals with Noisereduce
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Felix Baier @felixbaier.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
🚨Very happy that my PhD work is now out in @nature.com! We discovered that evolution, by acting in the midbrain, shifted the threshold to escape in Peromyscus mice, to fine-tune defensive strategies in different environments www.nature.com/articles/s41... This was a truly collaborative effort! 🧵⬇️
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Nick Jourjine @nickjourjine.bsky.social · 18/06/2025
Very happy to share the latest from my postdoc‬! 10 yrs of mouse social networks + 1.25 yrs of acoustic data ➡️ insight into vocalization & sociality in a wild population of your favorite lab model 🐁 paper: bit.ly/4n93yyD data: bit.ly/4lfFBEk code: bit.ly/4kNnMwx #bioacoustics #neuroskyence 1/8
Graphical abstract for "Vocal communication is seasonal in social groups of wild, free-living house mice."

The abstract has, from top to bottom, a title, four middle image panels, and two bottom text panels.

Image title: "Vocal communication in social groups of wild-free living house mice"

Middle image panels from left to right: (1) An aerial snap shot of the region where the study site is located, an agricultural landscape in rural Switzerland. (2) An image of the study site, a small barn in the forest inhabited by mice. (3) An image of a radio frequency identification (RFID) box used to track mouse social interactions. A mouse is entering the box from the left while another sits outside. (4) A spectrogram showing example vocalizations - one low frequency squeak and one ultrasonic call - recorded from an RFID box.

Bottom panels:
Left: Data Collection 
- 10 years of RFID-based tracking data (from 6,946 mice)
- 15 months of acoustic monitoring (totaling 6,594 hours)
- Machine learning for vocal detection and labeling (CNN)

Right: Key Findings
- Vocalization is seasonal (most in spring and summer)
- Vocalization is associated with the presence of pups
- Vocalization is correlated with social group dynamics
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Tay (Antonio J. Osuna Mascaró) @biotay.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
1/8 Decoding Dolphin Communication After studying 313 dolphins (in Sarasota, Florida) for over 40 years and across six generations, a catalog of their vocalizations has been produced. These vocalizations are more complex than expected. (preprint) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
https://www.sarasotamagazine.com/travel-and-outdoors/2020/08/dolphin-watching-tour-sarasota
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Dustin Rubenstein @dustinrubenstein.com · 07/05/2025
Our latest superb starling work in @nature.com. We observe long-term reciprocal helping relationships, and suggest reciprocity is an underappreciated mechanism promoting the stability of cooperatively breeding societies. Led by Alexis Earl and @gerrycarter.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
A cryptic role for reciprocal helping in a cooperatively breeding bird - Nature
A study of the cooperative breeding behaviour of superb starlings during 40 consecutive breeding seasons over 20 years reveals long-term reciprocal helping between both related and unrelated individua...
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Tim Sainburg @timsainburg.bsky.social · 30/03/2025
My talk at COSYNE is up: "Discrete actions are a unit of both behavior and evolutionary selection" with @akautt.bsky.social and @dattalab.bsky.social www.youtube.com/live/Y8Ke6HC...
youtube.com
Cosyne 2025 - Session 9: Building blocks of cognition
YouTube video by Cosyne Talks
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Nature Neuroscience @natneuro.nature.com · 20/03/2025
Expectation-driven sensory adaptations support enhanced acuity during categorical perception in European starlings 🧠🧪 @timsainburg.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Expectation-driven sensory adaptations support enhanced acuity during categorical perception - Nature Neuroscience
Bayesian models explain how context biases perceptual behavior toward expected categories, but sensory neurons do not reflect this bias. Instead, expectation sharpens sensory acuity, independent of do...
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Tim Sainburg @timsainburg.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
Sensory populations reflect the Bayesian likelihood. And expectation modulates sensory activity. But here’s the twist: sensory neurons don’t integrate the likelihood and prior expectation. (6/n)
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Tim Sainburg @timsainburg.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
Our brains use prediction in two seemingly contradictory ways. Our latest paper, just published in @natureneuro.bsky.social, investigates how we do it. 1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Expectation-driven sensory adaptations support enhanced acuity during categorical perception - Nature Neuroscience
Bayesian models explain how context biases perceptual behavior toward expected categories, but sensory neurons do not reflect this bias. Instead, expectation sharpens sensory acuity, independent of do...
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Drew Schreiner @schreinerdrew.bsky.social · 12/03/2025
Proud to have contributed to @jiaxuanqi.bsky.social's masterpiece out @nature.com! She shows that dopamine transients track the learned quality of song during juvenile learning and that dopamine release is driven not just by VTA firing, but by a local cholinergic mechanism! (1/x)
nature.com
Dual neuromodulatory dynamics underlie birdsong learning - Nature
Dopamine release in the basal ganglia of the zebra finch is driven by neurons associated with reinforcement learning and by cholinergic signalling, and tracks performance quality during long-term lear...
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Tim Behrens @behrenstimb.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
OK If we are moving to Bluesky I am rescuing my favourite ever twitter thread (Jan 2019). The renamed: Bluesky-sized history of neuroscience (biased by my interests)
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Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
I recently wrote a primer on UMAP for Nature Reviews Primers. If you are looking for an overview of the method, a getting started primer, or best practices it is a good place to start. rdcu.be/d0YZT
rdcu.be
Uniform manifold approximation and projection
Nature Reviews Methods Primers - Uniform manifold approximation and projection is a dimensionality reduction technique used to visualize and understand high-dimensional data. In this Primer, Healy...
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Drew Schreiner @schreinerdrew.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
Come to learn about the specific corticostriatal synapses that drive juvenile birdsong learning! This Thursday 11:25 Central European Time (5:25 am for me in EST, but early bird gets the worm after all)
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Brian Nosek @briannosek.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
They asked six questions: * Do you have a criminal history? * Do you have potentially embarrassing news stories about your personal history? * Do you oppose mandates in general? * Do you oppose vaccine mandates? * Do you support or oppose vaccines? * Would you be able to move to DC?
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Daniel Cardozo Pinto @dcardozopinto.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
My paper is out!! 🎉 "Opponent control of reinforcement by striatal dopamine and serotonin", @Nature Here, we show that dopamine and serotonin signals form a gas-brake system for reward in the mammalian brain THREAD ⬇️ 1/n
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Nacho Sanguinetti @neuroetho.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
🔥🔥🚨 Deadline coming up! But still in time to apply to a MindCore fellowship as a postdoc. I’m looking for an independent postdoc with experience in freely moving ephys to perform triple Neuropixel in the wild Agouti!! Get in touch! 🧪https://mindcore.sas.upenn.edu/post-doctoral-research-fellowship/
mindcore.sas.upenn.edu
Postdoctoral Research Fellowship | MindCORE
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Francesco Carli @mrfcharles.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
🧵 A huge thanks to the creators of umap-learn for their work on UMAP! While trying to get parametric UMAP to work for my project, I ran into some challenges, so I decided to dive in and build my own PyTorch-based version from scratch. You can check it up here github.com/mr-fcharles/...
github.com
GitHub - mr-fcharles/parametric_umap: A PyTorch implementation of Parametric UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection) for learning low-dimensional parametric embeddings of high-dimensional...
A PyTorch implementation of Parametric UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection) for learning low-dimensional parametric embeddings of high-dimensional data - mr-fcharles/parametric_umap
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georgia 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @blahttodea.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
hey everyone! i made a list of some useful starter packs (primarily biology/earth sciences with a few bonus things thrown in) to share with friends who have joined bsky in the last week and thought it may be useful for some people here too! 🌍🧪 #SciSky #BioSky docs.google.com/document/d/1...
docs.google.com
Starter packs
BIOLOGY Ecology Macroecology https://go.bsky.app/GBn9pNZ Global ecology https://go.bsky.app/V6tN4cv Trait based ecology and evolution https://go.bsky.app/PThMXeX Invasion biology https://go.b...
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Tim Sainburg @timsainburg.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
Excited to see Bernie’s work on "A Primer on Deep Learning for Causal Inference" published. We (Bernie) include sample colab notebooks for each section to guide you step-by-step through deep causal inference methods. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
journals.sagepub.com
A Primer on Deep Learning for Causal Inference - Bernard J. Koch, Tim Sainburg, Pablo Geraldo Bastías, Song Jiang, Yizhou Sun, Jacob G. Foster, 2024
This primer systematizes the emerging literature on causal inference using deep neural networks under the potential outcomes framework. It provides an intuitive...
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Michael Hendricks 🇨🇦 @michaelhendricks.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
We were actually "unknown" for it, but for years @neuroshea.bsky.social and I ran the bsdneuro account, which now rests in a grave befitting Bob (and his cortex).
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Cat Hobaiter @nakedprimate.bsky.social · 14/11/2024
🚨Late team change means we have a paid research assistant position with savanna chimpanzees in the incredible #MoyenBafing Nat Park. Deadline Nov 21, start mid-Jan; costs covered & small stipend. More details 👉 tinyurl.com/mbchimpjob It’ll be full on algae fishing fun times!!! 💚🐵🎣🧪 DM for any Qs
A chimpanzee sits by a pool with algae on a long fishing rod
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Vivek Nityananda @viveknityananda.bsky.social · 12/11/2024
Inspired by @hleisthen.bsky.social and @denizhanpak.bsky.social I've put together a starter pack for neuroethology (broadly defined). Follow these people if you're interested in learning about the mechanisms underlying animal behaviour. Suggestions welcome! go.bsky.app/T5JTFzE
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georgia 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @blahttodea.bsky.social · 12/11/2024
I made a starter pack for animal behaviour researchers / ethologists! please share and feel free to self-nominate or suggest others to be added as this is very much still a work in progress and not an exhaustive list 🌍🧪😊 #SciSky #BioSky #AnimalBehaviour #AnimalBehavior #Ethology go.bsky.app/Tr8VZpV
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Laura Grima @lauragrima.bsky.social · 10/11/2024
Just put together the beginnings of a systems & behavior neuro starter pack (focus on rodent work) - obviously a lot of people missing, and most included are in my own little bubble, so if you want to be added do reply here! go.bsky.app/Hxpe53o
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Bridging Brains and Bioacoustics @braincoustics.bsky.social · 13/02/2024
Excited to announce our first seminar on here! Join us next week for two talks on inter-species communication from Gašper Beguš (@begus.bsky.social) and Claire Spottiswoode 🗓️February 22nd @ 12 noon EST ✅Register here: braincoustics.com
Seminar announcement for Bridging Brains and Bioacoustics on February 22nd at 12 noon EST

Show me the honey: communication between people and wild birds in Africa
Claire Spottiswoode, University of Cambridge

Uncovering Meaningful Properties from Unknown Data with AI Interpretability: The Case of Vowels and Diphthongs in Sperm Whales
Gašper Beguš, University of California, Berkeley
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Nicholdav @nicholdav.bsky.social · 05/12/2023
Hello, I'm giving a talk at PyDataGlobal 12-1230 EST tomorrow on VocalPy, a core Python package for acoustic communication research vocalpy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ Virtual, cheap tix 🙂 pydata.org/global2023
pydata.org
PyData Global 2023
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Nicholdav @nicholdav.bsky.social · 14/11/2023
Are you using neural network models to segment and/or annotate animal sounds? You'll want to check out our #SfN23 poster HH22 comparing models that I present 1-5 today. Sneak preview here: github.com/vocalpy/Nich... (I'll thread later)
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Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia.bsky.social · 25/09/2023
Amazing, affordable daycare at IGC/ITQB & Rockefeller were essential for us "Daycare facilities need not only to be present, but it is also important to ensure that any worker at the institution is able to use them. This includes having enough vacancies and affordable prices."
journals.plos.org
Ten simple rules for a mom-friendly Academia
Author summary Although there is an increasing awareness of the importance of having more diverse scientific communities, the number of women in science is still low. A large proportion of the women w...
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Drew Schreiner @schreinerdrew.bsky.social · 11/09/2023
Hi Bluesky! I'm making the move over from twitter! I post about neuroscience - behavior, basal ganglia, birdsong, neurorethology, decision-making, substance disorders- with the occasional pic of my dog or nature #neuroscience #neuroskyence #PsychSciSky
henry the hound
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Tim Sainburg @timsainburg.bsky.social · 22/09/2023
Just migrated! I work in cognitive science, systems neuro, ethology, & ML focused on how we organize behavior! Currently work with lab and deer mice. Previously starlings, chimps, cotton top tamarins & occasionally humans. Using this account to find and share science.
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