Lauren Burgeno, PhD 🇺🇸➡️🇬🇧👩‍🔬🧠💉🔬🧀🍺

🥳🍾🍺Celebrating my first *1st author paper finally being up after way too many years!! No time for a twitter thread explainer now, but soon! Big shout out to co-lead author @RFarero , PhD supervisor @PaulEMPhillips and rest of our team for guidance & help along the way!

Couldn’t agree more! We need to 10x polysubstance use research funding. We actually need whole research centers dedicated to basic research on polysubstance use. Right now they are almost all exclusively dedicated to a single substance.

@brainaddiction oops! Just realized I managed to comment on your post without it actually being a reply in the thread 🫣😳- x.com/LBurg/status/1…

Fantastic paper in rats show opposing changes in dopamine signaling with drug cues after escalation of cocaine self-administration. Escalation of intake > increased DA in response to non-contingent drug cues (likely promoting increased incentive salience), while it leads to decreased DA release to contingent drug cues which is what happens during self-administration(perhaps related to tolerance?, but not mentioned in the paper), both highly predicting intake. There is no escaping the ups and down of dopamine...

@brainaddiction Early on I spent some time looking at whether diffs in patterns of intake ( steady vs. bursts) might produce different dynamics in brain cocaine levels that could explain diffs in DA, but I am not sure my computational approach was ideal, so would be worth revisiting!

@brainaddiction The escalators start with lower intake initially and this escalates over weeks, whereas escalators start a bit higher and maintain stable intake so overall the number of infusions ( and drug-cue pairings) don't differ.

Lauer is super concerned about the demoralizing impact of low success rates...now that it is white folks being affected drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2025/09/30/lau… via @drugmonkeyblog

Our new paper in collaboration with Bill Carlezon and @ErikMusiek on the effects of pain on sleep architecture is now out at @npp_journal . Work done by the amazing @DominikaJBurek and @khairunisa_ibk nature.com/articles/s4138…

I missed your statement on the attacks on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion activities of the NIH. Could you re-post the link, please?

There are companies worth £50bn* based in this terraced house in Bolton. Turns out they also have a bank. With a valid VAT registration number. (*on paper)

@mohebial I’m so sorry to hear of your loss. Sending all the love and hugs to you and your family Ali.

My dad—arguably the best in the world—has sailed away. He was an advocate of science, a caring cardiologist, and a history enthusiast. He loved telling jokes and making people laugh. I will do the same: laugh and make laugh, until we meet in the deep blue... So it goes...

New preprint w/ @lab_plotkin about cholinergic interneurons causing local serotonin release in striatum and how this is related to obsessive-compulsive disorder biorxiv.org/content/10.110… For the story, read on 1/9

@KordingLab Ive mainly switched to python, but the amount of time spent dealing with package conflicts after updates where my 10 year old Matlab code still runs perfectly sometimes gives me think about my choices

Neuroscientists. Are you seriously still using Matlab?

As the author of this PDF, it's been interesting seeing people guess at the rationale behind its design. However, the rationale had nothing to do with theory vs practice, and everything to do with pragmatically coping with an unaccommodated disability in academia. (1/16)

@GoldbergLab @KamalaHarris @Tim_Walz Thanks for reminding me, I need to do the same tomorrow!!!

Sending in my ballot from Jerusalem @KamalaHarris @Tim_Walz

I received news this week that I've been promoted to full professor! As such, I have made some minor revisions to the label on my door. Special thanks to all of those who have offered their generous support/contributions for this academic journey. 🙂

@mohebial @Jackie_Gio We also use the relyx cement in A2 shade , but we build the whole headcap from it so maybe like 7 mice per syringe. We put down a layer of optibond first then use relyx

@Jackie_Gio That's great. Thanks!

C&B metabond is great. What else do you use (for the mouse) that you like?

Tonight!