To help you decide what’s next after you’ve completed your postdoc, SfN has created a toolkit guiding you through career options available to you. Learn about various opportunities within and outside of academia and how to evaluate each based on your skills, interests, and values. Explore the toolkit’s ready-to-use presentation to learn: - Questions to consider as you prepare to take the next step in your career. - Differences among types of faculty positions. - What to share in an application and what to expect during the academic interview process. - Where to find out more about nonacademic careers. - Ways to build your network. - How to assess and develop relevant skills and highlight transferable ones on a resume or CV. Read this toolkit now and refer to it as you advance in your career. You can also share the toolkit with an audience at your institution or at your local SfN chapter meeting.

Each year, the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO) partners with the Society of Neuroscientists of Africa (SONA) to host summer neuroscience schools in Africa for graduate students and junior faculty from across the continent. Instructors from Africa and elsewhere collaborate to lead lectures, labs, and one-on-one student coaching. Peter Kalivas, neuroscience professor and chair at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), has been an instructor twice and plans to continue in the years to come. Here, he shares his experience from July 2018 in Nairobi, Kenya and his hopes for the global scientific community. Can you give a snapshot of the goal and structure of the summer school? The broad goal of the IBRO-Africa summer schools is to promote neuroscience research and education in Africa. This year’s school in Nairobi, Kenya centered around addiction. Attendees were PhD students from across Sub-Saharan Africa, including Cameroon, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda, and faculty were from Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, and the United States. Faculty from Africa and North America partnered to lead the course, breaking up lectures by topic area. So, someone from North America gave a talk about addiction through the lens of epidemiology. Then, a faculty member from Africa gave a talk focused on addiction issues specific for Africa. From there, all the instructors go into the neurobiology of addiction.

In this webinar, you will come away with an understanding of the challenges and opportunities of a having a career as a scientific manager in an academic institute or department, research foundation, nonprofit, or company. You will also be able to identify ways to gain experience and knowledge to prepare for this career niche.

Bill Griesar and Jeff Leake, cofounders of the neuroscience outreach nonprofit NW Noggin, in Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Canada, share examples of how their undergraduate and graduate student volunteers use art to connect with youth in their community. Through art, which encourages self-expression and problem solving in different ways, NW Noggin helps kids see how neuroscience relates to their lives — and shows them how they can pursue a career in neuroscience.

When something at school or work doesn’t unfold as you hoped it would, it can be challenging to let go and move on. Use this advice from six neuroscientists to help you process situations, move forward, and ultimately build your resilience.

Interstitial cells of Cajal (ICC) regulate smooth muscle excitability and motility in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. ICC express the Ca2+ activated Cl- channel Ano1 and depolarizing current resulting from its activation can be transduced to electrically coupled smooth muscle cells (SMCs) due to the presence of gap junctions. Thus, responses of ICC can affect SMC contractility and mediate complex motility patterns. While the role of certain classes of ICC as intestinal pacemakers is well established, other possible roles ascribed to ICC are controversial. There is currently debate in the literature regarding whether certain classes of ICC are innervated by enteric motor neurons and act as neuromodulators, receiving direct enteric neural input and transducing this neural signal to electrically coupled SMCs.

Eight neuroscientists offer their perspective on gaining experience, handling stress, asking for what they need, and more. What would you tell your former self? “Get involved in more than one lab. Although it's possible to get many lab skills and experiences in one lab, it’d be better to get experience in different areas to figure out what you’re interested in.” –Zack Sluzala, Baldwin Wallace University

Mouse lines with tetracycline-controlled gene expression in specific neuronal populations provide valuable tools for studying their development, function, connectivity and pathology in vivo. Our initial goal was to generate a mouse model that could express amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)-associated genes specifically in spinal cord motor neurons under the control of the HB9 promoter. However, HB9-tTA mice unexpectedly direct target gene expression in a small subset of dorsal horn neurons. These mice represent a new tool for scientists who are interested in studying these spinal cord neurons. Significance Statement We have generated new mouse lines that can manipulate gene expression in a small subset of dorsal horn neurons in the spinal cord. These new tools will be useful for scientists who are interested in studying the development, function, and connectivity of this small subset of spinal neurons in vivo.

Early and accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) will be key for effective personalized treatment plans (Cummings, 2023). Significant difficulties in auditory processing have been frequently reported in many patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), the prodromal form of AD (Tarawneh et al., 2022), making it an outstanding candidate as AD diagnostic biomarker. However, the efficiency of diagnosis with this parameter has not been explored. Here we show that when male mice with amyloidosis begin to show memory decline, changes in the auditory brainstem response (ABR) to clicks enable the reliable diagnosis of disease using a machine learning algorithm. Interpretation of the machine learning diagnosis revealed that the upper levels of the auditory pathway, including the inferior colliculus, were the probable sources of the defects. Histological analyses show that in these locations, neuroinflammation and plaque deposition temporally correlate with behavioral changes consistent with memory loss. W...

One pending question in social neuroscience is whether interpersonal interactions are processed differently by the brain depending on the bodily characteristics of the interactor, i.e., their physical appearance. To address this issue, we engaged participants in a minimally interactive task with an avatar either showing bodily features or not while recording their brain activity using Electroencephalography (EEG) in order to investigate indices of action observation and action monitoring processing. Multivariate results showed that bodily compared to non-bodily appearance modulated parieto-occipital neural patterns throughout the entire duration of the observed movement and that, importantly, such patterns differ from the ones related to initial shape processing. Furthermore, among the electrocortical indices of action monitoring, only the early observational Positivity (oPe) was responsive to the bodily appearance of the observed agent under the specific task requirement to predict the partner movement. T...