From Our Neurons to Yours

This week, Wu Tsai Neuro launched the Stanford Digital Brain Project, an ambitious effort to build predictive models of the human brain.
So today on the show, we’re bringing you two conversations to get you up to speed on what this new initiative is and why it matters.
First we’re going to revisit a conversation from last year with Wu Tsai Neuro Faculty Scholar Dan Yamins about the vision for building digital models of the brain. We talked about how such models would let neuroscientists test hypotheses about brain function or develop personalized interventions for brain diseases in a virtual environment far faster than can be done in the lab.
Then, in the second half of the episode, we'll bring you a conversation with cognitive neuroscientist Russ Poldrack, one of the leaders of the new initiative, about what it's actually going to take to build this thing. We talk about the experiments now getting underway to capture the brain data that'll be needed to train these models, and why collecting this kind of data is already a remarkable scientific undertaking on its own, well before anyone actually builds a model out of it.
Learn more
Stanford Digital Brain Project to build predictive models of the human brain (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2026)
Building predictive models of the brain (Stanford YouTube)
Building AI simulations of the human brain (From Our Neurons To Yours, 2025)
Neuroscientists use AI to simulate how the brain makes sense of the visual world (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2024)
AI models of the brain could serve as digital twins in research (Stanford Medicine, 2025) 
The Yamins NeuroAI Lab
The Poldrack Lab
Dan Yamins on Substack
Russ Poldrack on Substack

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Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu
Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Today we’re going to be talking about a recent study that is rewriting neuroscience textbooks, potentially changing our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease, our brain’s immune system, and the potential for immunotherapy for the brain.
Today’s guest is Julia Belk, lead author of a new study that discovered that as we age, immune cells from the blood somehow cross the supposedly impenetrable blood–brain barrier, and replace the brain’s native immune cells, the microglia. The findings help us understand growing links between the aging immune system and Alzheimer’s disease and why certain blood mutations – ones traditionally linked to cancer – might actually protect against neurodegeneration.
Julia is an HHMI Hannah Gray postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Sidd Jaiswal at Stanford Medicine. Their research was supported by the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at Wu Tsai Neuro.
Learn More
Jaiswal Lab at Stanford Medicine
Mutant microglia and resilience to Alzheimer’s disease
Blood Cells Replenish Microglia in the Brain as People Age (The Scientist, 2026)
Peripheral Blood Cells Replenish Aging Human Microglia (Neuroscience News, 2026)
Aging brains welcome reinforcements from outside immune cells (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2026)
Blood Cells Mutated in Old Age Protect Against Alzheimer’s Disease (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2023)
Why Our Memory Slips After Age 50 (Ground Truths, a Substack from Eric Topol, 2026
Somatic mutations reveal the ontogeny of microglia in human ageing (Nature, 2026)
Clonal hematopoiesis is associated with protection from Alzheimer’s disease (Nature Medicine, 2023) 
Send us a text!
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu
Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Today on the show we're doing something a little different.
Quite different, actually. Nine seasons in, listeners might wonder: Why do we make this show? How do we prepare for it? What do we hope you get out of it? What even is the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute? 
The idea has been brewing for a while, and this time we're doing it: From Our Neurons To Yours is taking you behind the scenes of From Our Neurons To Yours. Producer Michael Osborne joins host Nicholas Weiler to talk about where the show came from, how we get ready to bring you to the frontiers of neuroscience, and yes, what Wu Tsai Neuro is all about.

Send us a text!
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu
Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Today on the show, we explore the complex biology underlying a seemingly straightforward question: How do our brains stay healthy – or not – as we age?
There seems to be a constant flow of new secrets to healthy brain aging – inflammation, estrogen levels, how the brain clears out its waste. We've talked about many of these explanations on the show, and it can be easy to think that whatever the latest one is, that's the one. At least until the next one comes along.
In reality, each of those things is probably part of a larger complex system that guides brain aging. But if that's the case, how do the parts fit together, and how do scientists figure out interventions that could slow or prevent neurodegeneration?  
That's a tricky challenge to be sure, but it's that challenge we're going to dive into with today's guest, neurobiologist Tom Clandinin. 
Learn more
Clandinin Lab
Qiu Lab
Allen Lab
Big Ideas in Neuroscience tackle brain science of everyday life and more (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2026)
Convergence of biological and artificial networks (Current Biology, 2021)
Coupling of activity, metabolism and behaviour across the Drosophila brain (Nature, 2021)
Drosophila Connectomics: Mapping the Larval Eye’s Mind (Current Biology, 2017)
Flies and humans share a motion estimation strategy that exploits natural scene statistics (Nature Neuroscience, 2014)
Send us a text!
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu
Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Today on the show, we bring you a conversation with Carolyn Bertozzi, the Baker Family Director of Sarafan ChEM-H and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences. 
Bertozzi is a Nobel Laureate, a MacArthur Fellow, and an all around cool person – although it didn't come up in the conversation, she used to play in a band with Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello.
Although Bertozzi wouldn’t call herself a neuroscientist — she’s a chemist at heart – her work is having a big impact on neuroscience. Today, she focuses on the sugar molecules that stud the outer surfaces of our cells. It turns out that these molecules are incredibly important for how cells communicate with each other. But understanding these molecules is so complex and challenging that Bertozzi had to invent a new branch of chemistry in order to study them. In this episode, we'll hear how this research is opening doors not only within neuroscience but across biology and drug development as well.
Learn more
The Bertozzi Lab
‘To advance science, I think it’s important to blur the boundaries between the disciplines’ (Stanford Report, 2026)
Changes in brain’s ‘sugar shield’ could be key to understanding effects of aging (Stanford Report, 2025)
Life is sweet (Stanford Magazine, 2022)
Stanford’s Carolyn Bertozzi wins Nobel in chemistry (Stanford Report, 2022)
Interview with Carolyn Bertozzi (Nobelprize.org, 2022)
Aging brains pile up damaged proteins (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2025)
Nobel Prize: How click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry are transforming the pharmaceutical and material industries (The Conversation, 2022)
Glycocalyx dysregulation impairs blood-brain barrier in ageing and disease (Nature, 2025)
Send us a text!
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu
Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.