Weinan Sun
sunw37.bsky.social
Weinan Sun
@sunw37.bsky.social
Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, and Beyond.
Assistant professor at Cornell Dept. of Neurobiology & Behavior
Pinned
1/12 How do animals build an internal map? In our new paper, we tracked thousands of mouse CA1 neurons over days/weeks as they learned a VR navigation task. @nspruston.bsky.social & co-1st author @johanwinn.bsky.social
Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw_4...
Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Learning produces an orthogonalized state machine in the hippocampus
YouTube video by Weinan Sun
www.youtube.com
Reposted by Weinan Sun
Thanks Misha for the shout-out!
It has been a truly mind-opening journey. WHOLISTIC is one step towards whole-organism neuroscience and a true physiological observatory - with extensions on the way! I am continually amazed by what the data reveals - so much remains to be discovered and mined.
Preprint -
Excited to present WHOLISTIC, which extends the concept of whole-brain functional imaging to the entire body. Pioneering work by incredibly talented Virginia Ruetten @vmsruetten.bsky.social, this platform reveals whole-organism cellular dynamics in vivo.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
September 8, 2025 at 4:30 PM
Reposted by Weinan Sun
New #Outlook #PsynomLB 'Emergence of orthogonal hippocampal representations during spatial learning' https://bit.ly/4mlOXQa by Prof. Vern Bingman @BGSU_Biology about the recent paper https://bit.ly/4jZO0eT by @sunw37 @JohanWinn @CornellNBB et al. @nature @Psychonomic_Soc
Emergence of orthogonal hippocampal representations during spatial learning
Learning & Behavior - Sun et al. (2025) reveal the progressive, dynamic changes in the response properties of thousands of hippocampal neurons as mice learn a conditional discrimination while...
bit.ly
May 23, 2025 at 4:20 PM
Reposted by Weinan Sun
Excited to share our latest story! We found disentangled memory representations in the hippocampus that generalized across time and environments, despite the seemingly random drift and remapping of single cells. This code enabled the transfer of prior knowledge to solve new tasks
March 17, 2025 at 1:35 AM
Reposted by Weinan Sun
It was fun to visit Weinan's lab @sunw37.bsky.social at Cornell to give this talk. Exciting to see the experiments he's cooking up, and we had lots of fun discussions about PFC, hippocampus, consciousness and meditation!

Part of the talk content is here: blog.dileeplearning.com/p/space-is-a...
March 14, 2025 at 10:31 PM
Reposted by Weinan Sun
We read "Large Concept Models" in our reading group. It models language at the sentence resolution - "concepts". We had lots of thoughts about it! You can read them in our new Janelia CVML blog post:
janelia-cvml.github.io/blog/posts/L...
#ML #AI #Janelia @adjavon.bsky.social @bogovicj.bsky.social
Large Concept Models: Language Modeling in a Sentence Representation Space – Janelia CVML
Summary of and thoughts on Meta’s recent paper
janelia-cvml.github.io
February 14, 2025 at 6:35 PM
Reposted by Weinan Sun
(1/11) Today I preprinted a lot of work from my postdoc with @dudman.bsky.social, which started with a question of how the nervous system balances flexibility with efficiency of learning. The thread below gives some background....
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Cortical control of innate behavior from subcortical demonstration
Motor control in mammals is traditionally viewed as a hierarchy of descending spinal-targeting pathways, with frontal cortex at the top. Many redundant muscle patterns can solve a given task, and this...
www.biorxiv.org
February 13, 2025 at 7:16 PM
Reposted by Weinan Sun
delighted to share our work revealing a new type of excitatory hippocampal neuron we call the "ovoid cell", which has really exquisite properties relative to adjacent pyramidal cells! superb work of first-author @adriennekinman.bsky.social and many others in the lab

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Atypical hippocampal excitatory neurons express and govern object memory - Nature Communications
Pyramidal cells are classically thought to comprise the excitatory output of the subiculum. Here, the authors show the existence of “ovoid cells”, excitatory subiculum neurons with specialized gene ex...
www.nature.com
February 13, 2025 at 6:38 PM
Reposted by Weinan Sun
#Cellpose 3 paper now out. Not all images are perfect. Restore your images with Cellpose3 to get better segmentations, w/ @marius10p.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...
February 12, 2025 at 11:10 AM
Reposted by Weinan Sun
Can whole-brain imaging of cellular c-Fos signals be used to classify #psychedelics? 🧠🔬💊

Our study by @aboharbf.bsky.social and @pashadavoudian.bsky.social, developing an imaging and machine learning pipeline to test a panel of psychoactive drugs.

Paper here 👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Classification of psychedelics and psychoactive drugs based on brain-wide imaging of cellular c-Fos expression - Nature Communications
A challenge in psychiatric drug discovery is to predict the therapeutic potential of a novel compound. Here, the authors show that brain-wide imaging of immediate early gene expression can be used to ...
www.nature.com
February 13, 2025 at 3:51 PM
Reposted by Weinan Sun
I’m excited about this collaborative project by @sunw37.bsky.social, @johanwinn.bsky.social, and many other talented contributors. Read about how our @hhmijanelia.bsky.social team imaged thousands of neurons in mouse hippocampus as mice learned cognitive tasks over several days: hhmi.news/4hXIp7r
February 13, 2025 at 1:45 PM
Reposted by Weinan Sun
Must-read for anyone interested in cognitive maps & the hippocampus.
1/12 How do animals build an internal map? In our new paper, we tracked thousands of mouse CA1 neurons over days/weeks as they learned a VR navigation task. @nspruston.bsky.social & co-1st author @johanwinn.bsky.social
Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw_4...
Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Learning produces an orthogonalized state machine in the hippocampus
YouTube video by Weinan Sun
www.youtube.com
February 13, 2025 at 1:26 AM
Reposted by Weinan Sun
Do I like this so much because it's a fantastic bit of science or because it's a fantastic job of doing science communication?!? Probably both. Regardless, awesome work that is worth checking out:)
1/12 How do animals build an internal map? In our new paper, we tracked thousands of mouse CA1 neurons over days/weeks as they learned a VR navigation task. @nspruston.bsky.social & co-1st author @johanwinn.bsky.social
Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw_4...
Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Learning produces an orthogonalized state machine in the hippocampus
YouTube video by Weinan Sun
www.youtube.com
February 12, 2025 at 11:53 PM
Reposted by Weinan Sun
Fantastic video explaining a study of hippocampal map formation.
1/12 How do animals build an internal map? In our new paper, we tracked thousands of mouse CA1 neurons over days/weeks as they learned a VR navigation task. @nspruston.bsky.social & co-1st author @johanwinn.bsky.social
Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw_4...
Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Learning produces an orthogonalized state machine in the hippocampus
YouTube video by Weinan Sun
www.youtube.com
February 12, 2025 at 9:01 PM
Reposted by Weinan Sun
Great fun!!!
1/12 How do animals build an internal map? In our new paper, we tracked thousands of mouse CA1 neurons over days/weeks as they learned a VR navigation task. @nspruston.bsky.social & co-1st author @johanwinn.bsky.social
Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw_4...
Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Learning produces an orthogonalized state machine in the hippocampus
YouTube video by Weinan Sun
www.youtube.com
February 12, 2025 at 7:38 PM
1/12 How do animals build an internal map? In our new paper, we tracked thousands of mouse CA1 neurons over days/weeks as they learned a VR navigation task. @nspruston.bsky.social & co-1st author @johanwinn.bsky.social
Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw_4...
Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Learning produces an orthogonalized state machine in the hippocampus
YouTube video by Weinan Sun
www.youtube.com
February 12, 2025 at 7:36 PM
Reposted by Weinan Sun
Come lead a group at Janelia, be our neighbor. Nov 1 deadline for this round www.janelia.org/our-research...
September 12, 2023 at 1:17 PM