Sara A Solla
Professor, Northwestern University
Computational neuroscience | Neural manifolds
- Reposted by Sara A SollaAt @uwpsychology.bsky.social, former Fellows-to-Faculty awardee Sama Ahmed studies the neurobiology of multitasking: simonsfoundation.org/fellows-to-faculty-… #neuroscience
- Reposted by Sara A SollaFull survey results show American public have high levels of confidence in scientists while revealing some partisan differences (including on how to fund science), but statements asserting lost trust should be read instead as intentional efforts to degrade trust. www.pewresearch.org/science/2026...
- Reposted by Sara A SollaWow! Yay! The Senate just rejected Trump’s proposed science cuts, voting 82–15 to boost funding for NOAA, NASA, and the NSF. The bill already passed the House 397–28. Strong bipartisan support for science still exists.
- Reposted by Sara A SollaThank you Vishal Mathur for choosing “What Is Intelligence?” as your favorite read from 2025! I really enjoyed our conversation for @hindustan-times.bsky.social last October on how prediction is fundamental to intelligence.
- Reposted by Sara A SollaI talked to @latif.bsky.social at @radiolab.bsky.social about brain organoids for their new episode. Listen here: radiolab.org/podcast/brai...
- Reposted by Sara A SollaAre you a journalist looking to deepen your understanding of complex systems? Join the 2026 CSSS Journalism Fellowship at SFI, offering a space to study complexity alongside researchers and reflect on science communication from within the field. Apply by Feb. 4, 2026 santafe.edu/journalism-f...
- Reposted by Sara A SollaGift link.
- Reposted by Sara A SollaMove over ReLU 🚀 Meet **ReSU** (Rectified Spectral Unit): a biologically inspired, self-supervised unit for learning from dynamical data. A backprop-free multilayer ReSU network learns predictive features and recapitulates *Drosophila* vision. To appear at AAAI: arxiv.org/abs/2512.23146
- Reposted by Sara A SollaEpisode #36 in #TheoreticalNeurosciencePodcast: On low-dimensional manifolds in motor cortex – with Sara Solla @sasolla.bsky.social theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn36 Manifold analysis has changed our thinking on how cortex works. One of the pioneers of this modelling approach explains.
- Reposted by Sara A SollaApplications open for SFI’s 2026 GWCSS program, a 2-week workshop for Ph.D. students and early-career scholars to explore complex systems and computation, collaborate on challenges, and advance their research with support from SFI faculty. Apply by Feb 4, 2026 www.santafe.edu/gwcss
- Reposted by Sara A SollaThe @nytimes.com Lost Science series continues. Here's my Q&A with a scientist who was studying how wildfire smoke threatens human health when the EPA decided that her research was no longer a funding priority. Gift link: nyti.ms/4jhpw14
- Reposted by Sara A SollaEasy action to do right now 👇 You don't need to be in earth sciences; just let them know you value high quality research and recognize how important it is to the country.
- Scientist at #AGU25 are speaking out to #SaveNCAR. Join more than 2000 of your colleagues to call or email your members of Congress to ask them to support NCAR today: agu.quorum.us/campaign/151...
- Reposted by Sara A SollaDelighted to talk at Brown about our self-supervised neuronal algorithm for modeling biological circuits—and challenging backprop along the way. Thanks to @leokoz8 for the kind invitation! youtu.be/AF3Uhrm__U4?...
- Reposted by Sara A SollaBiological neurons cluster dynamical stimulus trajectories to predict what’s coming and infer what just happened. If you’re at NeurIPS, stop by our poster #2107 — on display now until 2pm
- Reposted by Sara A SollaInterested in algorithmic neuron models and learning rules at the intersection of neuroscience, AI, dynamical systems, and control theory? Have a PhD in neuroscience, physics, EE, or math? Consider joining us: apply.interfolio.com/173400 If you’re at NeurIPS, feel free to DM me.
- Reposted by Sara A SollaI send money to @wikipedia.org every year. This is something you can do to make a difference and fight against AI slop.
- I take Wikipedia for granted. Reading this Jimmy Wales interview reminded me in our Fantasyland age what a remarkable and important creation it is. True pillar of civilization. Runs on only $200 million a year. Requires our support. So I’m finally donating. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/m...
- Reposted by Sara A SollaIt feels like the converastion about manifold dimensionality is back, so I thought I'd share a paper that explains nicely why measuring the "embedding dimensionality" of a manifold (e.g., counting PCs) can be very different from its actual "intrinsic dimensionality (DoFs) doi.org/10.1016/j.co...
- Reposted by Sara A SollaOne thing I feel strongly about: The NIH peer review system is the beating heart of the agency and the whole US biomedical research agency. It is the worst system for assigning grants but no other system has been developed that is better. It draws democratically from the scientific community.
- Reposted by Sara A SollaPSA to academics posting threads about your paper here: you can (and should) post the link to the paper in the first post. Your X/Twitter brain rot have have you thinking otherwise, but please free yourself of that. (Also you can call them 'blue-prints' if you want).
- Reposted by Sara A SollaWe've seen some remarkable outcomes in people with advanced, refractory cancers, including pancreatic, melanoma, and renal, with personalized neoantigen mRNA vaccines. But this work is now endangered. www.scientificamerican.com/article/pers...
- Reposted by Sara A SollaToday over Chicago's Lakefront
- Reposted by Sara A SollaIt’s baby octopus season 🐙🦑 Saw this little guy last night with the Salish Sea School in Anacortes, WA as part of their free community dock walk I volunteer as an interpreter for. We can tell it is a giant pacific octopus from the single line of chromatophores on each arm.
- Reposted by Sara A SollaDay 2 of the #NaturalPhilosophy Symposium concluded with a panel discussion featuring the day's speakers: Alan Guth, Jennifer Nagel, David Albert, Simon DeDeo, Emily Riehl, and Anil Seth. Stay tuned for the exciting final day of the Symposium! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Apnv...
- Reposted by Sara A SollaYet another epic fascinating bluetorial from @jeremymberg.bsky.social
- Reposted by Sara A Solla🚨Job alert🚨 The lab has up to *3 postdoc openings* for comp systems neuroscientists interested in describing and manipulating neural population dynamics mediating behaviour This is part of a collaborative ARIA grant "4D precision control of cortical dynamics" euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/383909
- Reposted by Sara A SollaFor children and teens, heart and blood vessel complications of Covid overshadow the very rare and short-term risk of vaccinations, a new report from nearly 14 million kids www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
- Reposted by Sara A SollaDo you have what it takes to win Science’s #DanceYourPhD competition? We want you to top last year’s food-themed frolic from the Helsinki chemist who dressed up as a chili pepper. Or maybe you can get #AI to dance on your behalf? Learn more: scim.ag/3LuVObX
- Reposted by Sara A Solla
- Reposted by Sara A Solla🧪⚛️Max Born won the Nobel Prize in Physics for giving the correct interpretation of the wave function in a footnote to his paper in 1926. The rest of the paper incorrectly states that the wave function amplitude gives the probability. The mind boggles about what Nature's bot would say about that.
- So my reviewers were bots before we knew bots existed?
