News | Ulanovsky Lab

15/08/2024	Eli Farber joins the lab as an M.Sc student. Welcome, Eli !
01/04/2024	Maximilian Kirschhock joins the lab as a Postdoc. Welcome, Max !
30/10/2023	Gily Ginosar wins the prestigious Nemko Prize in Cellular or Molecular Nuroscience - from the Society for Neuroscience (SfN). This prize recognizes the best Ph.D thesis in the World in the field of Cellular or Molecular Neuroscience in the year 2022-2023. See the Press Release and Tweet by SfN. Congratulations, Gily !
21/09/2023	Shaked Palgi wins the Azrieli Brain and Neural Science Ph.D Fellowship. Congratulations, Shaked !
04/04/2023	Just came back from our first Island Expedition off the coast of Zanzibar, where we performed the first ever electrophysiological recordings in bats navigating outdoors ! This was an amazing trip scientifically - and also lots of fun ! We cannot decide if the turtles or sunsets were more amazing...
01/09/2022	The paper "Natural switches in behaviour rapidly modulate hippocampal coding" is published in Nature. The study, led by Ph.D students Ayelet Sarel and Shaked Palgi, asked how rapid switches in natural behaviors modulate hippocampal coding. Pairs of bats flew in a long tunnel, switching between navigation and collision-avoidance. Hippocampal neurons switched very rapidly from representing the animal’s own position when flying alone, to jointly representing the inter-bat distance x self-position when encountering another bat. Thus, hippocampal circuits are highly flexible and can rapidly change their core computation – to represent the relevant behavioral variable.
13/07/2022	Gily Ginosar wins one of the top 10 places in the "Sciences in Shorts" Movie competition by Nature. The movie that Gily prepared describes the results of her recent paper in Nature (2021). Congratulations, Gily !
02/06/2022	Gily Ginosar wins the prestigious Capranica Prize from the International Society for Neuroethology. This prize is given for the best paper in Neuroethology published in the year 2021. Congratulations, Gily !
08/05/2022	Tamir Eliav wins the John F. Kennedy Prize for outstanding Ph.D stduents ! Congratulations, Tamir !
08/03/2022	Tamir Eliav wins the Lee Segel Prize in Theoretical Biology ! Congratulations, Tamir !
09/02/2022	The construction of the new 700-meter Flight Tunnel + large Maze for bats was finished today ! See here a time-lapse movie of the construction of the Tunnel+Maze (courtesy: Shaked Palgi).
20/08/2021	Yuval Waserman joins the lab as an M.Sc student (joint with Misha Tsodyks). Welcome, Yuval !
19/08/2021	Paper on locally-ordered 3D grid cells is published in Nature. The study, led by Ph.D student Gily Ginosar, showed that 3D grid cells in flying bats exhibit fixed local distances between firing-fields -- a local metric for space -- but no hexagonal global lattice as predicted theoretically. We modeled grid cells as emerging from pairwise-interactions between fields, yielding hexagonal lattices in 2D but local order in 3D -- thus describing both 3D and 2D grid cells using one unifying model. These results argue against grid-cell models that rely on lattice-like periodicity.
28/05/2021	Paper on multiscale representation of very large environments is published in Science. The study, led by Ph.D students Tamir Eliav and Shir Maimon, demonstrated a novel spatial code for very large environments. Using a wireless-electrophysiology system, we recorded hippocampus CA1 neurons of bats flying in a 200-meter long tunnel, and found a multifield multiscale code - whereby neurons exhibited multiple fields, and the fields of the same neuron differend up to 20-fold in size. A theoretical analysis showed that such a multiscale code dramatically reduces the decoding-errors.
16/03/2021	Ayelet Sarel wins the best poster prize in the annual meeting of the Israel Society For Neuroscience (ISFN) in Eilat ! Congratulations, Ayelet !
01/03/2021	Itay Yona joins the lab as an M.Sc student. Welcome, Itay !
11/02/2021	Arseny Finkelstein accepts a tenure-track position of Assistant Professor at the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Medicine - and will start his new lab at the end of 2021. Congratulations, Arseny !
01/07/2020	Johnatan (Yonatan) Aljadeff starts a tenure-track position of Assistant Professor at UCSD - Division of Biological Sciences. Congratulations, Yonatan !
06/01/2020	Shaked Palgi and Saikat Ray win the best poster prize in the annual meeting of the Israel Society For Neuroscience (ISFN) in Eilat ! Congratulations, Shaked and Saikat !
23/10/2019	Nachum Ulanovsky gives a Special Lecture at SfN 2019 in Chicago. In this lecture, Nachum emphasized the importance of studying the brain under more naturalistic conditions.
15/10/2019	Johnatan Aljadeff joins the lab as a Postdoc. Welcome, Johnatan !
01/07/2019	Shaked Palgi joins the lab as an M.Sc student. Welcome, Shaked !
07/04/2019	David Omer takes a tenure-track position of Assistant Professor at the ELSC center for Brain Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem - and will start a new Marmoset-Hippocampus lab at ELSC in July 2019. Congratulations, David !
07/11/2018	Nachum Ulanovsky wins the Kimmel Award for Innovative Investigation - with a 1M$ Research Prize.
01/11/2018	Paper on nonoscillatory phase-coding and synchronization is published in Cell. The study, led by Ph.D student Tamir Eliav, demonstrated that hippocampal neurons encode the animal's position through temporal-coding (phase coding), in the absence of the theta oscillations observed in rodents. This unexpected type of neural coding - nonoscillatory phase-coding - dissociates the concept of phase-coding from the concept of oscillations; and it shows that coding but not oacillations is conserved across species (rodents, bats, and possibly primates).
12/07/2018	Nature published today a News Feature about the bat-lab and about Nachum - as well as a Video Interview with Nachum about the work done in the lab and the future vision for Natural Neuroscience.
09/07/2018	Arseny Finkelstein wins the FENS-Kavli Ph.D Thesis Prize, which was awarded today in a ceramony at the biannual forum of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS). This prize recognizes the best Ph.D thesis in Europe in the field of Neuroscience defended since the last FENS Forum. Congratulations, Arseny !
25/06/2018	Ayelet Sarel wins the prestigious Capranica Prize from the International Society for Neuroethology. This prize is given for the best paper in Neuroethology published in the year 2017. Congratulations, Ayelet !
28/05/2018	Ayelet Sarel wins the prestigious Wolf Excellence Scholarship for Ph.D students. Congratulations, Ayelet !
16/01/2018	Saikat Ray joins the lab as a postdoc. Welcome, Saikat !
12/01/2018	Paper on social place-cells in the bat hippocampus is published in Science. The study, led by postdoc David Omer, describes the discovery of hippocampal neurons in bats that represent the spatial position of a conspecific bat, in allocentric coordinates. The representation of the other was very different for a live bat than for inanimate moving objects. We tremed these neurons "social place-cells", and proposed they may underlie social-spatial cognition in bats and other mammals.
11/12/2017	Tamir Eliav wins the best poster prize in the annual meeting of the Israel Society For Neuroscience (ISFN) in Eilat ! This is the second time that Tamir wins it (on a second bat-project...) !! Congratulations, Tamir !
07/11/2017	Nachum Ulanovsky wins the Andre Deloro Prize - from the Adelis Foundation.
13/01/2017	Paper on vectorial representation of spatial goals in the hippocampus of bats is published in Science. The study, led by Ph.D student Ayelet Sarel, describes the discovery of hippocampal neurons in bats that represent the direction and distance to goals - a vectorial representation of navitational goals. This finding fills a central gap in the neurobiology of navigation - how are navigational goals represnted in the brain: We propose that these vectorial goal-direction and goal-distance cells may underlie goal-directed navigation across species.
15/11/2016	Ayelet Sarel wins the prestigious Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds Ph.D fellowship. Congratulations, Ayelet !
01/08/2016	Two papers from the lab are published in Annual Reviews of Neuroscience and in Nature Neuroscience. The review in Annu Rev Neurosci, led by Ph.D student Arseny Finkelstein, discusses 3-D maps and compasses in the brain - focusing on the hippocampal formation of rodents and bats. The study in Nature Neurosci, led by Ph.D student Maya Geva-Sagiv, was titled "Hippocampal global remapping for different sensory modalities in flying bats", and it demonstrated orthogonal hippocampal maps for the same space under two different sensory systems (vision vs. echolocation) - which argues against a hippocampal abstract map but suggests a "cognitive atlas" model.
01/07/2016	Shir Maimon and Dan Blum join the lab as M.Sc students. Welcome, Shir and Dan !
19/05/2016	Arseny Finkelstein and Ayelet Sarel win prizes for their Ph.D and M.Sc research: Arseny wins the John F. Kennedy prize for outstanding Ph.D, and Ayelet Sarel wins the Dean's excellence prize for outstanding M.Sc. The prizes will be awarded at the 2016 Weizmann Institute graduation ceremony on June 1. Congratulations, Arseny and Ayelet !
01/04/2016	Arseny Finkelstein receives the Young Investigator Award from the International Society for Neuroethology (ISN). The prize was awarded at the 2016 Neuroethology Congress in Montevideo. Congratulations, Arseny!
20/01/2016	The construction of the 200-meter long Flight Tunnel for bats was finished today ! We are so thrilled to start investigating the neural coding of very-large spaces !!
01/01/2016	Nachum Ulanovsky wins his second ERC grant (European Research Council - consolidator grant: project NATURAL_BAT_NAV). The 2 million Euro grant will fund a broad set of studies on the neural basis of natural navigation: representation of goals, 3-D spaces and 1-km distances in the hippocampal formation of bats.
21/12/2015	Didi Omer wins the best poster prize in the annual meeting of the Israel Society For Neuroscience (ISFN) in Eilat. Congratulations, Didi !
19/10/2015	Nachum Ulanovsky receives the SfN Young Investigator Award (co-shared with Ed Boyden). The prize was awarded to Nachum at the SfN meeting in Chicago by SfN president Steve Hyman. Nachum is the first Israeli neuroscientist to win this prestigious award.
11/06/2015	Arseny Finkelstein wins the Capranica Neuroethology Prize from the International Society for Neuroethology (ISN). The prize was awarded for Arseny's study on 3-D head-direction cells, which was published earlier this year in Nature. Arseny will receive the prize during the 2016 Neuroethology Congress in Montevideo. Congratulations, Arseny!
22/01/2015	Review on the neural basis of spatial cognition in bats and rats is published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. The review, led by Ph.D student Maya Geva-Sagiv, describes the proposed transformations from incoming sensory information into spatial codes (place cells, grid cells, etc.), and how these cells in turn could underlie large-scale navigation. The review emphasizes the critical need to study the neural basis of long-distance natural navigation in mammals - which could be quite different from findings in 1x1-m boxes.
08/01/2015	Paper on 3D head-direction cells in bats is published a a full Article in Nature. The study, led by Ph.D student Arseny Finkelstein, describes the first recordings of 3D head-direction cells in mammals. Surprisingly, head-direction was encoded in a toroidal rather than spherical coordinate system, making the representation of 3D head-direction both commutative and continuous. These neurons form a 3D neural compass that could underlie 3D navigation
09/12/2014	Tamir Eliav wins the best poster prize in the annual meeting of the Israel Society For Neuroscience (ISFN) in Eilat. Congratulations, Tamir !
03/11/2014	David (Didi) Omer joins the lab as a postdoc. Welcome, Didi !
24/10/2014	Michael Yartsev, who recently graduated from the lab, takes a tenure-track position of Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley - and will start a new Bat-Lab at Berkeley in the summer of 2015. Congratulations, Michael !
01/07/2014	Ayelet Sarel joins the lab as an M.Sc student. Welcome, Ayelet !
17/12/2013	Maya Geva-Sagiv wins the best poster prize in the annual meeting of the Israel Society For Neuroscience (ISFN) in Eilat. Congratulations, Maya !
28/11/2013	Nachum Ulanovsky receives the Bernard Katz Prize in Neuroscience, administered by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The prize was awarded to Nachum by Bert Sakmann at a ceremony in Heidelberg.
11/11/2013	Michael Yartsev receives the Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience, as well as the Eppendorf & Science prize for Neurobiology - both prizes awarded for Michael's Ph.D work with bats. The Lindsely prize was awarded to Michael by the SfN President Larry Swanson, at a plenary lecture during the SfN 2013 meeting in San Diego. The Lindsely prize is awarded in recognition for the best Ph.D thesis in Behavioral Neuroscience. This is the first time that a Ph.D graduate of an Israeli university received this distinguished award since its establishment in 1979. The Eppendorf & Science prize was also awarded for the first time to an Israeli. Congratulations Michael for winning these 2 prestigeous prizes in one SfN conference!
01/08/2013	Gily Ginosar and Tamir Eliav join the lab as M.Sc students. Welcome, Gily and Tamir !
01/07/2013	Alon Rubin defends his Ph.D thesis. Only 1 month after getting married. Double congratulations, Alon !
19/04/2013	Paper on 3D place cells in flying bats is published in Science. The study, led by Ph.D student Michael Yartsev, describes the first recordings of single neurons in freely-flying animals. The main findings were that in the hippocampus of bats, the representation of 3D volumetric space is uniform, nearly-isotropic, and is based on a rate code.
05/08/2012	Michael Yartsev receives the Young Investigator Award from the International Society for Neuroethology (ISN) -- as well as the Capranica Prize from the ISN. The two prizes were awarded at the 2012 Neuroethology Congress in Maryland. Congratulations, Michael!
18/07/2012	Michael Yartsev defends his Ph.D thesis. The first Ph.D student to graduate from the lab. Congratulations, Michael !
27/03/2012	Nachum receives the Krill Prize for Excellence in Scientific Research, from the Wolf Foundation. The prize was awarded in a ceremony in Jerusalem.
02/11/2011	Paper on grid cells without theta oscillations is published in Nature. The study, led by Ph.D student Michael Yartsev, provided the first direct demonstration of grid cells in a non-rodent mammalian species. Importantly, grid cells existed in bats without continuous theta oscillations in the local field potential or in spike trains - strongly arguing against theta-based computational models of grid cells.
13/09/2011	Paper on first GPS tracking of bats in the wild is published in PNAS. The paper, led by Asaf Tsoar in collaboration with Ran Nathan, provided the first evidence for large-scale cognitive map in a mammal.
01/09/2011	Dori Derdikman finishes his postdoc in the lab and takes a tenure-track position of Assistant Professor at the Technion. Congratulations, Dori !
01/08/2011	Yossi Yovel, who recently finished his postdoc in the lab, takes a tenure-track position of Assistant Professor at Tel Aviv University. Congratulations, Yossi!
08/07/2011	Nachum Ulanovsky wins the prestigious ERC grant (European Research Council - project NEUROBAT). The 1.5 million Euro grant will fund a broad set of studies on neural codes for 2D and 3D space in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex of bats.
05/02/2010	Paper on optimal localization using biosonar is publisehd in Science. The study, led by postdoc Yossi Yovel, provided the first example of an active-sensing animal that exhibits a localization behavior which follows a theoretical (mathematical) optimization principle.
15/04/2009	First electrophysiological recordings in the newly-set lab. Getting there !
01/09/2008	Renovation of the lab has finished - getting the keys to the new lab today! Now we can start working.
15/08/2007	Nachum Ulanovsky arrives as a new faculty member (Assistant Professor) to the Department of Neurobiology of the Weizmann Institute of Science. Starting renovation of the new lab.