If we give up on the idea that there are discrete mental disorders as natural entities to be “discovered” and accept that we are dealing with a messy, dimensional landscape of psychopathology that can be mapped in many different ways, there is no problem at all with the idea that we can classify and map this landscape in different and better ways than the psychopathologists and nosologists of the past.

1/18: Well, after 23 years as faculty at Harvard and almost 15 years of amazing collaborations, collegiality and growth at McLean Hospital, today I officially start at @UCIrvine, where I will be the founding director of a new depression

Here's the thing. We have **NO IDEA** how to pick good graduate students. I served on admission committees for 10 years, and chaired a few, and what I learned is that all the spreadsheets of grades and test scores and recommendations and essays and publications and interview rubrics are just an elaborate ruse to pretend we know what we're doing when we simply don't. Many of the most highly ranked applicants to our "top" program flamed out quickly, and tons of the students we summarily rejected have turned into amazing scientists. But in the name of creating meritocratic seeming rankings that are more about creating a workforce than great scientists (a system that anyone paying attention knows is bullshit), we've created a homogenous process adopted by nearly all institutions that has stamped out the one thing we should be striving for - given our lack of any clear understanding of what leads to success - a wide range of difference talents and experiences.

qPCR can measure expression of virtually any gene... in homogenized tissues. Here, we show an "in-vivo qPCR" equivalent, where we measure a sequence-specific transcript with synthetic serum markers and enzyme-based signal amplification. biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…

Our new paper: Translational Insights From Cell Type Variation Across Amygdala Subnuclei in Rhesus Monkeys and Humans. (Summary to below; 1/6) psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.…

April 19th/20th is Give Day at UC Davis! CNPRC is participating in this campus wide event to raise money for new research projects focused on women's health. Help us meet our challenge goal by donating here: lnkd.in/gcKize3b

Check this out! @EricJNestler and I co-edited this PNAS special issue: The Neurobiology of Stress: Vulnerability, Resilience, and Major Depression | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences pnas.org/topic/558

Riding the ACNP twitter wave, check out my new paper which includes the bulk of my thesis work in this amazing special issue. If you like nonhuman primate transcriptomics (including some single cell!), anxious temperament or me, this one is for you!

Happy to announce the publication of our latest paper in BSaF providing open-source probabilistic atlases for the ventral BNST, dorsal BNST and paraventricular hypothalamus derived from 7T manual segmentations! link.springer.com/article/10…

Hi Bryan, on another potentially highly cited paper! I'm quite curious to know if DCZ has any hallucinogenic or therapeutic effects in HTR2A-DREADD mice🧐

Come be our colleague! Position: Computational Cognitive (Neuro)science. Topics include computational approaches to understanding memory, affect, decision making, action, or perception. Apply by Oct 1. recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF05981

Excited to share the first paper from our lab! tinyurl.com/5n7fvwvh We engineered a new kind of time-gated calcium integrator, CaST, that can rapidly and non-invasively tag activated neurons in vivo with a small, biochemical handle. What makes this tool special and unique? 1/6