Sofie Valk
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sofievalk.bsky.social
Sofie Valk
@sofievalk.bsky.social
2.1K followers 2.4K following 97 posts
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Reposted by Sofie Valk
romy-lorenz.bsky.social
Please share widely! 🚀 I am recruiting a PhD student for an exciting cross-species collaborative project using layer fMRI to investigate how interoception shapes cognitive control - Application deadline is: 1.10.2026 - Start: Jan 2027
www.mpg.de/26934670/phd...
PhD Position (m/f/d) | Ultra-High-Field Layer fMRI of Cognitive Control and Interoception
PhD Position in Ultra-High-Field Layer fMRI of Cognitive Control and Interoception
www.mpg.de
August 21, 2026 at 8:44 AM
Reposted by Sofie Valk
matthiasnau.bsky.social
🚨 Job alert 🚨
Our department @vuamsterdam.bsky.social is hiring an Assistant Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience! Join our lovely community here in beautiful Amsterdam! 🧠🔥

Deadline: October 15
Apply: workingat.vu.nl/vacancies/as...
Vacancy — Assistant Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience
Join the Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) as Assistant Professor in cognitive neuroscience.
workingat.vu.nl
August 19, 2026 at 7:42 PM
sofievalk.bsky.social
Brain structural variations across neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions are systematically constrained by the brain's intrinsic architecture > www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...
Lifespan brain structural variation reveals shared organization across mental health conditions
Elucidating the neurobiological basis of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions (NDPCs) remains challenging because brain alterations vary within diagnoses and overlap across them. Whether dive...
www.medrxiv.org
August 20, 2026 at 6:53 PM
Reposted by Sofie Valk
alexfornito.bsky.social
Not sure how to visualise your connectome data?

Check our latest led by @m-gajwani.bsky.social & C Adamson on NeuroMarvl: an open source web-based platform for visualising and sharing connectomes!

Paper:
tinyurl.com/2t7ftu9d

Software:
tinyurl.com/yrv3xja3

@nsb-lab.bsky.social
August 19, 2026 at 1:21 AM
Reposted by Sofie Valk
ashleytyrer.bsky.social
1/ I’m delighted to share our new paper, out now in @cpsyjournal.bsky.social with @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social and @micahgallen.com, correlating variations in cortical microstructures with individual differences in gamified exploration-exploitation behaviours! 🧵 doi.org/10.5334/cpsy...
Cortical Microstructural Variations Correlate With Individual Differences in Gamified Exploration–Exploitation Behaviours | Computational Psychiatry
doi.org
August 6, 2026 at 1:48 PM
Reposted by Sofie Valk
guggenheim.bsky.social
Building by Susan Hefuna, 2009
https://botfrens.com/collections/212/contents/137847
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Guggenheim UBS MAP Purchase Fund and partial gift of the artist and Pi Artworks, 2015
August 4, 2026 at 8:28 AM
Reposted by Sofie Valk
antihebbiann.bsky.social
Happy Monday! Come learn how jellyfish swim.

In a review led by fluid dynamics maestro Alex Hoover, we outline how neuromechanical modeling will help us understand how modulation of neural activity allows jellyfish to jet and pirouette through fluids

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Figure 1. The fluid dynamics of jellyfish swimming. a) Minimum intensity projection of a video clip of swimming Clytia hemisphaerica recorded at 30 fps; dark spots capture trajectories of tentacle bulbs, mouth, and gonads over time. Blue outlines approximate the margin of jellyfish on the frame of maximum extent on two successive swim pulses; green arrow shows direction of swimming. b) Minimum intensity projection of the same animal during a period of turning, showing asymmetry in the movement of bulbs on the inside vs outside of the turn. c) 3D diagram of the bell of a swimming jellyfish, showing starting and stopping vortex rings and fluid flow into (blue) vs away from (purple) the bell during the passive energy recapture phase of swimming. d) Cross section of a swimming jellyfish showing fluid vorticity toward the end of a swim pulse relaxation phase, showing locations of the starting and stopping vortex rings and the boundary layer. e) Swim pulse dynamics of an oblate jellyfish under symmetric bell contraction, producing straight swimming. The starting vortex ring is generated by active muscle contraction of the bell (ii, purple arrows), while the stopping vortex ring is generated by passive elastic relaxation (iii-iv, green arrows) from the mesoglea. Forward motion during the relaxation phase arises from the interaction of the starting and stopping vortex rings, with the starting vortex ring pulling fluid away from the bell and the stopping vortex ring directing fluid into the subumbrellar cavity. f) Swim pulse dynamics under asymmetric bell contraction, producing turning. Initially at rest (i), the neuronal signal initiates a muscular contraction in the bell margin on the inside of the turn before a stronger contraction of the bell margin is observed on the outside of the turn (ii-iii, purple arrows). The corresponding passive restoration yields a stronger expansion of the bell margin on the outside of the turn (iv, green arrows).
July 27, 2026 at 3:09 PM
sofievalk.bsky.social
July is many things but also preprint month, this time with another dive into non-isocortex territory 🤿.

www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...
Selective convergence and graded divergence of hippocampal and amygdala subregions using functional connectivity
The hippocampus and amygdala are neighboring medial temporal lobe structures linked to memory and affect, yet how their subregions are jointly embedded within distributed isocortical systems remains u...
www.biorxiv.org
July 7, 2026 at 6:29 PM
sofievalk.bsky.social
Our new study, led by the amazing
@alex john asks how thalamic nuclei mature differently across childhood and adolescence, and how structural and functional development are linked.

doi.org/10.64898/202...
Nucleus-level thalamic organization anchors multimodal signatures of thalamocortical maturation
The human thalamus is composed of multiple nuclei that differ in structure and function. From early development onwards, these nuclei form reciprocal, nucleus-specific connections with the cerebral co...
doi.org
July 4, 2026 at 9:12 AM
Reposted by Sofie Valk
theatlantic.com
“Some of the best time we spend with other people happens not when we’ve planned something special, but when we simply make room for them in the middle of an ordinary day,” Rafaela Jinich writes in The Wonder Reader:
The Beauty of Doing Nothing Together
There’s something reassuring about being with people when nobody is trying especially hard.
bit.ly
June 21, 2026 at 8:15 AM
Reposted by Sofie Valk
roxana-zeraati.bsky.social
If these research directions resonate with you and you're interested in joining our team, we now have 2 open PhD positions!

More information about the positions: nextcloud.tuebingen.mpg.de/index.php/s/...

More information about our research: www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/906930/natur...

#NeuroJobs
An illustration of different animals engaging in natural decision-making.
May 21, 2026 at 2:00 PM
Reposted by Sofie Valk
spacelabimt.bsky.social
New study in Communications Psychology: large-scale NLP analysis of dream reports reveals the structure, content, and determinants of dreaming. 💤💭

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

#sleepscience #sleepresearch #dreamscience #dreamresearch
Individual traits and experiences predict the content of dreams - Communications Psychology
Individual traits and experiences jointly shape dream content. By analyzing the semantic structure of thousands of reports, we reveal systematic patterns showing how dreams reflect personality, sleep ...
www.nature.com
May 3, 2026 at 6:47 AM
Reposted by Sofie Valk
theatlantic.com
As the weather gets nicer, many of us feel the allure of hanging out. But modern life can make it hard to find places to just be, or to make new friends, Isabel Fattal writes in the Wonder Reader: theatln.tc/KhWkbk52
April 21, 2026 at 8:30 PM
Reposted by Sofie Valk
guggenheim.bsky.social
Three Sounds by Vasily Kandinsky, 1926
https://botfrens.com/collections/212/contents/137300
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
February 3, 2026 at 11:23 AM
Reposted by Sofie Valk
richardfbetzel.bsky.social
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Awesome new work from Nick Weaver and Chris Lynn.

How complicated is the human brain, really?

This paper introduces a way to measure the compressibility of brain activity -- i.e. how many correlations do you actually need to predict large-scale neural activity. 1/
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org
January 21, 2026 at 7:04 PM
Reposted by Sofie Valk
tobiasuhauser.bsky.social
Very happy to see this out now in @nathumbehav.nature.com - kudos to @magdadelrio.bsky.social who has led this work and nicely brought together data from two very different studies!
article is here: doi.org/10.1038/s415...
and PDF is here: rdcu.be/eZ27x
January 21, 2026 at 11:44 AM
sofievalk.bsky.social
Happy to have been able to contribute to this great work 👶🗻⛰️🏔️
December 30, 2025 at 12:58 PM
Reposted by Sofie Valk
ethz.ch
In a groundbreaking study, an international team led by ETH Zurich researchers has for the first time calculated how many glaciers worldwide are likely to remain until the end of the century and for how long. It looks bleak. ethz.ch/en/news-and-...
The Alps to lose a record number of glaciers in the next decade
How much longer will glaciers survive? A new study from ETH Zurich researchers offers the first detailed projection of how many glaciers could vanish by 2100 due to global warming – and why regions su...
ethz.ch
December 15, 2025 at 4:54 PM
Reposted by Sofie Valk
amnsbr.bsky.social
I’m now a bit obsessed with GPUs 🤓 They have great potential for scaling up neuroimaging and neuroscience analyses 📈
Coming up next: GPU-accelerated neuroimaging meta-analyses (work in progress 🚧: github.com/amnsbr/nimar...)

20/n
GitHub - amnsbr/nimare-gpu: GPU-accelerated activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis (a GPU wrapper for NiMARE)
GPU-accelerated activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis (a GPU wrapper for NiMARE) - amnsbr/nimare-gpu
github.com
November 14, 2025 at 5:29 PM
Reposted by Sofie Valk
amnsbr.bsky.social
✨ New preprint ✨

Introducing cuBNM, a toolbox we developed to run brain simulations *much* more efficiently on GPUs 🎉🚀

Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Documentation: cubnm.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
GitHub: github.com/amnsbr/cubnm

1/n 🧵
November 14, 2025 at 5:29 PM
Reposted by Sofie Valk
reid-lab.org
This is 🤯

All publicly available. Looks like an amazing new histology-based human probabilistic atlas and parcellation tool.

#neuroskyence #mri #brainmapping

A probabilistic histological atlas of the human brain for MRI segmentation | Nature share.google/5AD0iW7pxgb4...
A probabilistic histological atlas of the human brain for MRI segmentation - Nature
NextBrain is an open source, probabilistic atlas of the entire human brain, assembled using artificial-intelligence-enabled registration and segmentation methods to reconstruct the multimodal serial h...
share.google
November 6, 2025 at 5:35 AM
Reposted by Sofie Valk
rebeccarhelm.bsky.social
Many sea stars begin life as young fairy-like creature (called a brachiolaria) that float through the open ocean. Eventually, a small star forms within them (here in yellow). The fairy-like brachiolaria sinks under the star’s weight, and the star pops out!
🎥@the_story_of_a_biologist (on Insta)
October 9, 2025 at 4:24 AM
Reposted by Sofie Valk
kunkakom.bsky.social
Open Science Professor ship at HU Berlin
www.academics.de/jobs/w2-prof...
W2-Professur "Open Science" an der Philosophischen Fakultät - Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin bietet Stelle als W2-Professur "Open Science" an der Philosophischen Fakultät in Berlin - jetzt bewerben!
www.academics.de
October 3, 2025 at 6:28 AM
Reposted by Sofie Valk
natmethods.nature.com
HippoMaps: an open-source resource for studying the human hippocampus at different scales and with different modalities.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
@jordandekraker.bsky.social @borismontreal.bsky.social @jclauneuro.bsky.social @neuroak.bsky.social @sofievalk.bsky.social @donnagift.bsky.social
HippoMaps: multiscale cartography of human hippocampal organization - Nature Methods
HippoMaps provides an open-source resource for studying the human hippocampus at different scales and with different modalities such as histology, fMRI, structural MRI and EEG.
www.nature.com
October 3, 2025 at 12:50 PM
sofievalk.bsky.social
Hello! It has been a while, but for the Hector Fellow Academy I created a small project at the interface of neuroscience and music. In short, it is like a neuro-jukebox of projects of friends and colleagues integrating music and art. I thought it would be nice to share here
cng-lab.github.io/kiosk
NEUROSONICS
cng-lab.github.io
September 19, 2025 at 9:02 AM