Oscar Solis

On October 15, 1986, the football teams of IBM Zurich Laboratory and Dow Chemical were due to play a game against each other. But it was almost derailed by a sudden announcement made just a few hours before kick-off. The sudden announcement was that two of the IBM players – Gerd Binnig (right, holding flowers) and Heinrich Rohrer (left, holding flowers) had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. The two laureates were rushed off to a press conference, but they insisted the conference end on time because their football team needed them. Although IBM lost the match 2-4 they still had a reason to celebrate.

How can our brains be so efficient? The 2026 #KavliPrize #Neuroscience Laureates broke longstanding beliefs & revealed that proteins form locally at synapses, right where neurons transmit signals, not in the cell body like previously thought. Learn more at kavliprize.org

I'm honored to be one of the first @sciam Young American Scientists! Big thanks to Geoff Schoenbaum and other mentors, colleagues, and trainees. Science is a group effort and I'm lucky to have had great collaborators. @UAB_CNC @UAB_CNBCI @UABNews @NIDAnews scientificamerican.com/article/kaue-m…

The #CPDD26 count down starts today! Our little Adventure Bear is making sure the OCC is ready for all the sessions and science we have in store. See you soon!

Excitatory synapses onto axonic spines jump-start action potentials and route information flow | Nature Neuroscience nature.com/articles/s4159…

NPP in the News...Check out a recent @npp_journal paper on What you eat as a teenager may shape food choices later in life at bit.ly/3Pm35NL. The full article on Adolescent obesity induces sex-specific alterations of action control can be found at bit.ly/3Rp96Kb

Don’t miss this opportunity! ACNP Travel Award Applications are open for the ACNP 65th Annual Meeting: January 10-13, 2027, San Diego, California. Deadline to Submit is May 14, 2026, at 5:00 pm Central. tinyurl.com/5bzaz8va #ACNP2027 #travelawards

For those interested in the history of psychedelic research… I wrote a narrative piece describing studies of psychedelic effects on serotonergic neurons in the dorsal raphe, from late 1960s to 1980s: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/28…

A New Opioid Agonist? | Science | AAAS science.org/content/blog-p…

Modified nitazenes, opioids 1,000 times stronger than morphine, show remarkably few adverse effects in rodents, renewing the potential of these drugs for pain relief go.nature.com/4t4SHsp

#JNeurosci: Galvan et al. show that most GPe neurons exhibit substantial variability in firing over minutes, calling into question whether firing patterns alone can reliably define cell types. doi.org/10.1523/JNEURO…

Nature research paper: A µ-opioid receptor superagonist analgesic with minimal adverse effects go.nature.com/4c2p4Ay

Huge congrats to Michael Michaelides and collaborators! Modified nitazenes, show limited adverse effects in rodents, reopening discussions around their potential as analgesics: lnkd.in/eSBkD4UT With @Victor_Mathis_ , we write a News & Views: rdcu.be/fbcq1 @Nature

Our latest study in @Nature highlights DFNZ: a potent µ-opioid receptor superagonist that provides analgesia with minimal adverse effects. This research demonstrates significant potential for a novel class of pain therapeutics. Open to collaborations. nature.com/articles/s4158…

The review article on the 2026 Brain Prize winners' science is out: The cellular architecture of touch and pain, by Professor Fan Wang (MIT, US)

New preprint from @yavinshaham lab. Using FDG-PET in rats, we show that heroin self-administration and addiction vulnerability are associated with specific whole-brain metabolic alterations, without impairments in social reward processing.

Our live tissue clearing paper is out in @naturemethods! We achieved optical clearing of mammalian brain tissues without compromising normal neuronal function. Big congrats to @Shigenori774 and our wonderful collaborators! 🎉 nature.com/articles/s4159… (1/10)

Happy 30th birthday, Pokémon! Since 1996, the Japanese media sensation has inspired generations of researchers in fields as diverse as evolution, biodiversity and research integrity. go.nature.com/4tZOzKY

Last month, I published part of my PhD thesis in @NatureMedicine : Clinical genetic variation across Hispanic populations in the Mexican Biobank. 🔗 nature.com/articles/s4159… ... and we got the cover of the February issue!

Online now: Integrative analysis of single-neuron projectomes links connectome, transcriptome, and function in the mouse cortex dlvr.it/TPJxw4