Mengsen Zhang

My lab is hiring a technician at @UFNeuroscience! 🧠🐭 We use in vivo ephys, optogenetics & machine learning to study how the brain controls social behavior in mice. Looking for rodent research & mentorship experience — please repost & share! Apply here: forms.gle/VACAMuoaRbWRG7…

Running a research lab is about leading people. I created a free toolkit on the human side of lab leadership—covering hiring, mentoring, conflict navigation, lab culture, and performance management. Open access: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo… #TeamScience #AcademicLeadership

PLOS Comput. Biol.: Attractor dynamics of a whole-cortex network model predicts emergence and structure of fMRI co-activation patterns in the mouse brain journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/a…

Congratulations to our Ph.D. student @Jared_Reiling_ for successfully passing his comprehensive exam!! Great work!

Interested in cortical wave dynamics? Check out our review on the physics, physiology, and psychology of cortical waves led by J Cruddas with @jchrispang Out now in @NeuroCellPress sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

The first article in the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience special issue 10 years of @theabcdstudy is now online! 🧠 sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

New in Brain Stimulation! @SteinAthena & colleagues introduce tECS - transcranial endogenous current stimulation, using personalized EEG-derived waveforms to target aperiodic brain activity. A novel approach in neuromodulation. brainstimjrnl.com/article/S1935-…

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…

I had a really great time at neuro4pros last year! Highly recommend to junior professors in comp Neuro!

💖 We are so proud of all our graduates! We offer courses that teach skills and techniques for #ComputationalSciences and research in #Neuroscience, #ClimateScience, and #AI and #MachineLearning. Will you part of our 2026 Cohort? ➡️Learn more: neuromatch.io/courses/

How to Pick a Graduate Advisor #PhD #Science #academia #phdlife

Interested in the latest advances in neuroscience (neural dynamics and internal models) and how they can be leveraged to build smarter, adaptive AI? ➡️ My first real solo piece 🖤🫶 @NatureNeuro rdcu.be/eWVmA

PhD Survival Guide

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 Annual reminder that the book is open access. How do we think of the brain as a deeply interconnected system with highly distributed, non hierarchical processing. Want to learn about the brain from a fresh perspective? mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544603/…

eLife Computational Neuroscience: Building a mathematical model of the brain elifesciences.org/articles/96231…

I am searching for postdocs interested in developing a deeper scientific understanding of any aspect of AI and using this understanding to improve AI systems. If interested please email me materials by Jan 10th 2026: a CV, 3 letters of reference, and a statement of research interests (can be short, just indicating what you would like to work on). The positions are generously funded by grants from @schmidtsciences and @SimonsFdn. You will have the opportunity to collaborate with many labs across @StanfordHAI and also the Simons Collaboration on the Physics of Learning and Neural Computation (physicsoflearning.org).

Finally got the job ad—looking for 2 PhD students to start spring next year: gao-unit.com/join-us/ If comp neuro, ML, and AI4Neuro is your thing, or you just nerd out over brain recordings, apply! I'm at neurips. DM me here / on the app or email if you want to meet 🏖️🌮

We have 14 survey lectures for our @SimonsFdn Collaboration on the Physics of Learning and Neural Computation! All videos available at: physicsoflearning.org/webinar-series Here is the list: @zdeborova: Attention-based models and how to solve them using tools from quadratic networks and matrix denoising @KempeLab: Recent lessons from LLM reasoning @MBarkeshli: Sharpness dynamics in neural network training @KrzakalaF: How Do Neural Networks Learn Simple Functions with Gradient Descent? Michael Douglas: Mathematics, Economics and AI Yuhai Tu: Towards a Physics-based Theoretical Foundation for Deep Learning: Stochastic Learning Dynamics and Generalization @SuryaGanguli: An analytic theory of creativity for convolutional diffusion models Eva Silverstein: Hamiltonian dynamics for stabilizing neural simulation-based inference @adnarim066: Generation with Unified Diffusion Bernd Rosenow: Random matrix analysis of neural networks: distinguishing noise from learned information @jhhalverson Nerual networks and conformal field theory @KempeLab Synthetic data: friend or foe in the age of scaling @WyartMatthieu Learning hierarchical representations with deep architectures @CPehlevan Mean-field theory of deep network learning dynamics and applications to neural scaling laws

@Jared_Reiling_ @MultiscaleComp @SfNtweets Break a leg and have fun!!! 🥳

Join me this morning at #Sfn2025 to learn how topological data analysis reveals expansive social postural states during social interaction of freely moving animals! Poster HH9, 8am-12pm! @MultiscaleComp @Mengsen @SfNtweets