News
Recent News
We are part of the Department of Neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley. Our research focuses on understanding the functional organization of the frontal cortex at the single neuron level. Our methods use sophisticated behavioral paradigms, multichannel recording and computational analysis of neuronal data. We aim to understand the neuronal mechanisms underlying a number of high-level cognitive and behavioral processes, including decision-making, learning, and working memory. The goal of our research is to guide the development of the next generation of treatments for mental illness.
August 2026
New paper in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience shows that orbitofrontal cortex encodes value-based decisions, but not perceptual decisions.
June 2026
Wooseok Jung joins the lab as a second year Bioengineering Graduate student. He will be researching how the brain decides what options to evaluate, a critical problem in both artificial and biological intelligence. Welcome to the lab Wooseok!
May 2026
Congratulations to Eric and Nate who both graduated this year! My scarlet Cambridge hood stands out in the sea of blue :)
Previous news
Jan 2026: New paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences via a collaboration with Paul Glimcher showing that neurons in anterior cingulate cortex encode value relative to an internal reference point.
Aug 2025: Dr. Hexin Liang joins our lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Hexin graduated from Daeyeol Lee’s lab at Johns Hopkins where she studied navigation through cognitive maps. Welcome to the lab Hexin!
Jun 2025: New paper in the Journal of Neuroscience showing how orbitofrontal cortex and the hippocampus track the current state of a behavioral task.
May 2025: Dr. Yufei Si joins our lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Yufei graduated from David Feldheim’s lab at U.C. Santa Cruz, where she studied sensory coding in the mouse superior colliculus. Welcome to the lab Yufei!
Feb 2025: New paper in Nature Neuroscience showing that hippocampus encodes context, while orbitofrontal cortex encodes a context-dependent value, and that the contextual information is transmitted via a phase code.
Dec 2024: Congratulations to Thom, who has started his own lab as an Assistant Professor at U.T. Austin.
Apr 2024: New paper in Nature Neuroscience via our collaboration with Steven Kennerley, which showed that neurons encode a distribution of prediction errors in anterior cingulate cortex, consistent with distributional reinforcement learning.
Mar 2024: Dr. Alyssa Sanchez joins our lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Alyssa graduated from Martin Usrey’s lab at U.C. Davis where she studied the visual responses of the lateral geniculate nucleus. Welcome to the other end of the brain Alyssa!
Nov 2023: New paper in the Journal of Neuroscience based on a symposium at SfN comparing cognitive and motor learning.
Oct 2023: New paper in Scientific Reports via our collaboration with Jose Carmena, which examined how motor signals from brain-machine interfaces compare with natural movements.
Aug 2023: New paper from Thom and Zuzanna in Nature Neuroscience describing how value dynamics in orbitofrontal cortex can influence response preparation signals in motor cortex.
Jul 2023: New paper in the Journal of Neuroscience via our collaboration with Erin Rich which showed clear differences in neuronal tuning across the cingulate sulcus.
May 2023: Celia graduated. She has moved on to be a science writer at Wired magazine.
Jan 2023: Joni was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dec 2022: New paper from Thom in the 25th Anniversary of Trends in Cognitive Sciences outlining what the next 25 years may hold for neural decoding
Jul 2022: Eric was awarded an NRSA to study interactions between prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus during model-based learning.
Jun 2022: New paper from Zuzanna published in Neuron which shows that orbitofrontal value flip-flopping biases motor preparation signals in the anterior cingulate cortex.
May 2022: Congratulations to Dr. Zuzanna Balewski on being awarded her PhD.
Apr 2022: Congratulations to Eric on passing his qualifying exam.
Mar 2022: New paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience describing our views on orbitofrontal-hippocampal interactions.