André M. Bastos

Precision on the court. Curiosity in the classroom. That’s the AND in Vanderbilt University. 🏀⚓️⬇️

The entire NSF research budget is ~$9B/year. This is literally funding every awarded PI at every field and every institution. But we've decided that all of basic science is a rounding error in comparison to venture bets. Please consider funding basic science more.

Teaser for the MaDeLaNe summer school, June 1-3, 2026, at Vanderbilt: youtube.com/watch?v=vjxJ2W… Video credit: Alex Maier (on YT: @astonishinghypothesis) Join us to learn the latest analysis tools for complex, multi-channel neuronal data from experts Register at: madelane.bastoslabvu.com

Phds&postdocs: join us for a summer school June 1-3 at Vanderbilt Univ. on Multi-Area, high-Density, Laminar Neurophysiology (MaDeLaNe). Get hands-on training from experts on advanced methods for analyzing neural data! No registration cost! Apply here: madelane.bastoslabvu.com

1/2 New paper supporting a 4-factor model of Executive Functions in nonhuman primates (NHPs) using a multi-task assessment approach. NHPs show consistent cognitive phenotypes: A first step quantifying the cognitive architecture in NHP biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

We need to keep our National Primate Research Centers Open! I urge you to reject this proposal to transition the Oregon NPRC away from research. In the next pandemic, how else will we test new drugs before giving them to people? In chips? Not yet feasible! science.org/content/articl…

Interpreting EEG requires understanding how the skull smears electrical fields as they propagate from the cortex. I made a browser-based simulator for my EEG class to visualize how dipole depth/orientation change the topomap dbrang.github.io/EEG-Dipole-Dem… Github: github.com/dbrang/EEG-Dip…

Fun fact: The 1998 paper that introduced Google and PageRank to the world ends with this acknowledgment: "Supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement IRI-9411306. Funding also provided by DARPA and NASA." Sergey Brin was on an NSF Graduate Fellowship. Larry Page was a PhD student on the grant. Google—now worth $2 trillion—exists because American taxpayers funded "the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project." Not a startup garage myth. A government grant. Every time someone says public research funding "picks winners and losers" or "crowds out private innovation," remember: the most dominant technology company of the 21st century was incubated entirely with public money, inside a public university, by researchers on federal fellowships and grants. The private sector didn't see it coming. VCs passed. The government funded it anyway—not because it would become Google, but because fundamental research into information retrieval seemed worth understanding. That's the point. You can't predict which grants will change the world. You fund the science and let researchers explore. The internet (DARPA). GPS (DoD). Touchscreens (CIA/NSF). mRNA vaccines (NIH). Google (NSF/DARPA/NASA). Public investment in basic research isn't wasteful spending. It's the seed corn of the entire modern economy.

Here is a whole-#brain #MRI protocol that resolves the venous network at 0.35 millimeters in under 7 minutes. Actually this will be very useful for diseases like #Alzheimer where neurodegeneration, atrophy and veins are involved science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Come join us in beautiful NH this summer!

@elonmusk Any interest in collaborating with an academic lab to implant the devices in multiple areas and decode nonmotor and nonsensory (more cognitive task elements) in NHPs?

Neuralink will start high-volume production of brain-computer interface devices and move to a streamlined, almost entirely automated surgical procedure in 2026. Device threads will go through the dura, without the need to remove it. This is a big deal.

It is not often I get an epiphany when I do research. But this year Torbjørn Ness, Christof Koch, and I realized that when we know how to compute electric brain signals generated by a neuron, we also know how to electrically stimulate the same neuron. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/a…

@CoryMillerMarmo is right. If we divest from biomedical research with non-human primates in the US, that would be a (un)strategic disarmament of one of our nation's vital research capacities. The research will move to China, and make the US less able to react to the next pandemic

Here is my new OpEd about how the plan to end research with monkeys at the CDC effects our entire biomedical system nationalreview.com/2025/12/americ…

Yup, NeurIPS, that's what I meant. It's amazing to see a conference go from a few hundred to pushing over 25k attendees in just a few years. Apparently, the "Neur" element has been less emphasized lately tho?

Amazing: The Wall Street Journal is now covering the NIPS conference on AI w dedicated reporting. And NIPS attendance (over 25k) may soon outpace SFN (Neuroscience), which until recently held the title of world's biggest scientific research conference. wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-con…

I photographed @KarlDeisseroth and @michelle_monje in Michelle’s office at @Stanford. Between them on the table is her PhD notebook, opened to a page from the period when they were actively collaborating on her doctoral research. It is an artifact in the truest sense. A working record of ideas taking shape. Handwritten equations, sketches, annotations. The physical residue of long hours spent thinking together, testing assumptions, and pushing at the edges of what was known at the time. Karl is widely known for inventing optogenetics, a breakthrough that made it possible to control specific neurons with light and permanently altered the trajectory of neuroscience and psychiatry. Michelle is a neuro oncologist whose work revealed that neurons do not merely coexist with cancer but can actively drive the growth of brain tumors, especially in children. Her research reshaped how scientists understand the relationship between the nervous system and cancer, opening entirely new therapeutic directions. What struck me in this moment was how naturally their scientific lives intertwine. The notebook is not just symbolic. It marks a real period of shared intellectual labor, when their collaboration was formative rather than retrospective. Before prizes, before widespread recognition, before entire fields reorganized around their ideas. This is what scientific partnership looks like at its most honest. Not just co authorship or proximity, but sustained curiosity carried across years. The notebook holds the memory of that time. The photograph holds the present. Together they tell a story about how deep science is often built. Slowly. Carefully. In conversation. And sometimes, with the person you choose to build a life with. @theNASEM #NewHeroes

@BastosLabNeuro Something is clearly flawed in Mackey and Schroeder’s critique. New investigators, who were not part of the original paper, joined the original authors in stating that Mackey and Schroeder are wrong.