Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦
Neuroscience PhD candidate committed to engrams and social memory | Josselyn lab & Laschowski lab based @UofT & @SickKids | 🇨🇦🇺🇦
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦Join us December 5th at University of Toronto (in-person and online) for a special seminar by Dr. Aran Nayebi on reverse-engineering the brain and building neuroscience-inspired artificial intelligence. #neuroAI #compneuro @anayebi.bsky.social @utoronto.ca @uoftcompsci.bsky.social
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦New paper from the lab 🚨 Led by Ali Golbabaei, this study explores the how the composition of prefrontal cortical engrams changes with memory age: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lzT-3BtfH...
- Had a pleasure to give an invited talk at UCU on engrams and how they support various memory phenomena: youtu.be/ETVgqyQwZVM?...
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦Imagine a brain decoding algorithm that could generalize across different subjects and tasks. Today, we’re one step closer to achieving that vision. Introducing the flagship paper of our brain decoding program: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroAI #compneuro @utoronto.ca @uhn.ca
- Looking forward to giving a talk on the latest developments in engram research 🧠 The main lecture will be in English, with a part on my own research in Ukrainian. Kindly hosted by Ukrainian Catholic University — everyone’s welcome! Register via the QR code 👇
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦“If everything is everywhere, why have distinct areas? Here we show that the function of a brain area is more related to how different types of information are combined (formatted) in neural representations than merely whether that information is present.”
- New results for a new year! “Linking neural population formatting to function” describes our modern take on an old question: how can we understand the contribution of a brain area to behavior? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧠👩🏻🔬🧪🧵 #neuroskyence 1/
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦Come join us at University of Toronto. We're hiring a Professor of computational cognitive neuroscience. #neuroAI #compneuro jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-...
- #IBB shared some highlights from their visit to @sjo09.bsky.social lab. It was rewarding to see how much interest was sparked by #engrams as well as #ML and #NeuroAI 🧠✨ Shoutout to @mhsarikahya.bsky.social & other JF lab members!
- Wrapped up 2 intense weeks at #NeuroAI by @neuromatch.bsky.social! 🚀 Our team explored how RNNs encode spatial memory — and found they implicitly learn a discrete spatial layout. 🔍 Check it out: github.com/neur1s/GridVaders Thanks to my amazing teammates! #AI #Neuroscience #RNN #GridWorld
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦(1/7) New preprint from Rajan lab! 🧠🤖 @ryanpaulbadman1.bsky.social & Riley Simmons-Edler show–through cog sci, neuro & ethology–how an AI agent with fewer ‘neurons’ than an insect can forage, find safety & dodge predators in a virtual world. Here's what we built Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06981
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦Your brain doesn’t just passively track time ⏳ - it structures it. In @Science.org we show that activity in 🧠 memory circuits (LEC) drifts constantly, but makes sharp jumps at key moments, segmenting life into meaningful events. (1/2) 👉 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
- ☝️
- This is your quarterly reminder that the hippocampus is a cortical (not subcortical) structure! Nicola Palomero-Gallagher underscored this point during our #OHBM2025 educational course!
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦[Not loaded yet]
- My first time at #FIP and thrilled to have scored a poster prize 🥳
- Making social memories at #CAN2025
- Conferenciating at #CAN2025 today? Come see my poster on social memory! Learn how the amygdala helps us tell apart friends vs. foes (as reenacted in the photo) and how this ability is shaped by oxytocin signaling and engrams :)
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦fantastic day at the 2025 Neural Circuits and Behaviour Satellite meeting! great talks by trainees Xin Zhao, Govind Peringod, Luca Pancotti, and Peiying Wen, and congrats to Govind for his top trainee talk award! so cool to see all the great circuits and behaviour work across the country
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦[Not loaded yet]
- Sadly, today marks three years since russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. I’m deeply grateful to those who continue to defend and support my homeland. Toronto stands with Ukraine! 💙💛 #StandWithUkraine
- DeepLabCut has demonstrated high performance on professional skiers, but how does it handle snowboarders who spend more time eating snow than riding? 🤭 Despite a very small training dataset, the output is surprisingly promising! @deeplabcut.bsky.social #PoseEstimation #Snowboarding
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦[Not loaded yet]
- Celebrating Women in Science with @sickkidsvs.bsky.social! 👩🔬👯♀️ Video reposted from www.instagram.com/reel/DF8Zz2n...
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦New paper out in @currentbiology.bsky.social with the inestimable @kurtfraser.bsky.social and @janaklab.bsky.social. We think this work illuminates an important way the brain dynamically orchestrates motivation, and look forward to testing new hypotheses this inspires in disease models.
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦[Not loaded yet]
- ⭐Christmas highlight in Cell Research! @sjo09.bsky.social and I address the idea that learning-associated astrocytes become essential members of a memory engram ensemble, shifting the neuron-centric view of memory function. Big shoutout to @m-r-williamson.bsky.social! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦[Not loaded yet]
- what wonderful news! 👏
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦I've been arguing that we will be able to train foundation models on neural data from different species, because I suspect that there are sufficiently preserved motifs in neural computation across the phylgenetic tree. This paper appears to support that idea! www.cell.com/cell/abstrac... 🧠📈 🧪
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦Alright #neuroAI 😉 crew and those in #AI #ML perhaps interested in brain-inspired models and what’s next (not just foundation models please!). Here is my vision/roadmap of the next steps. A reflection & projection wrapped into a Perspective. Feedback very much welcomed. 🧠🧪👩🔬 arxiv.org/abs/2411.15234
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦Now out in Neuron! We benchmark place cell models using a massive CA1 dataset—nearly 70,000 rate maps—collected as mice explore environments with different geometries BVC models perform remarkably well, but we hope this dataset/approach becomes a resource for testing/refining place cell models
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦1/ I work in #NeuroAI, a growing field of research, which many people have only the haziest conception of... As way of introduction to this research approach, I'll provide here a very short thread outlining the definition of the field I gave recently at our BRAIN NeuroAI workshop at the NIH. 🧠📈
