Lab news and milestones. Announcements about Miniscope hardware, software, and community events are posted on miniscope.org/wiki/News.

  • Summer 2026
    2026 Miniscope workshop program As part of our NIH BRAIN Initiative U24 resource, the lab is running hands-on Miniscope workshops in 2026 at UCLA, in Paris, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and in the Research Triangle, alongside bi-weekly drop-in office hours on Zoom.
  • August 1, 2026
    Miniscope DAQ Software v2 released A major Qt 6 release of the acquisition software with a redesigned single-window interface, builds for Windows, macOS, and Linux, integrated commutator control, and more reliable recording.
  • June 16, 2026
    Minian v2.0 released under the Miniscope GitHub organization The Minian calcium imaging pipeline has moved to github.com/miniscope/minian and received its first major update since 2022 — PyPI packaging, a unified CLI, and ~12× faster motion estimation.
  • May 28, 2026
    STIMscope preprint posted on bioRxiv Chorsi et al. describe STIMscope: centimeter-scale all-optical imaging and patterned optogenetic manipulation at single-cell resolution.
  • May 26, 2026
    A new miniscope.org The Miniscope community and documentation platform relaunched on Labki, our open-source semantic-wiki framework. Guides, hardware and software projects, events, and a community forum now live in one place, and Daniel wrote about why we are rebuilding the ecosystem’s infrastructure.
  • April 2026
    Congratulations, Dr. Raymond Chang! Raymond defended his Ph.D. in Physics on streaming frameworks for scalable calcium imaging analysis and real-time neural computation.
  • January 28, 2026
    Wireless power for neural recording devices at SPIE Photonics West Daniel presented an invited review of wireless power transfer for neural recording devices in freely behaving animals (Aharoni, Brosch & Sasatani, Proc. SPIE Optical Power Delivery II).
  • September 2025
    NIH BRAIN Initiative U24 award to sustain the Miniscope ecosystem A five-year cooperative agreement (U24 NS144101, with Peyman Golshani) to rebuild the foundational infrastructure of the UCLA Miniscope Project — documentation, testing, training, and community support.
  • August 2025
    Open-source miniature 2-photon microscopes in *Nature Communications* Madruga et al. report high-performance, open-source miniature two-photon systems for freely behaving animals.
  • 2025
    Daniel promoted to Associate Professor and named Eleanor Leslie Chair in Innovative Brain Research
  • June–July 2025
    Two new Miniscopes in *Science Advances* MiniXL, a large field-of-view epifluorescence Miniscope for single-cell, multi-region imaging (Zhao, Guo et al.), and a dual-channel Miniscope for simultaneous two-color imaging (Dong et al.).
  • 2024
    W. M. Keck Foundation Junior Faculty Award and CZI Collaborative Pairs Award Support for a next-generation neural-behavioral recording platform and for collaborative work on sleep-dependent memory.