Sandy Keenan edits Viewpoint and news articles for Spectrum. She is a New York-based journalist who has enjoyed a richly varied career — as reporter, editor and newsroom manager — with The New York Times and Newsday. She started out as a sportswriter for the Miami Herald, then moved on to Sports Illustrated and then Newsday, where she transitioned from covering Knicks, Mets and Yankees games on deadline into editing and over to news. She eventually became Newsday‘s assistant managing editor in charge of news, investigations and narrative projects. More recently, with the Times, she served as environment editor, deputy sports editor and a staff writer for the Home & Garden section.
Sandy Keenan
Contributing Editor
Spectrum
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The “Brainhack” hackathon revealed that disagreement in neuroscience runs deeper than most researchers suspect—even in electrophysiology, a field that prides itself on hard data.
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Gaëlle Chapuis, Mattia Chini
1 June 2026 | 7 min read
‘Unbelievably beautiful’ evidence extends Nobel Prize-winning model of vision
Orientation tuning—the ability to distinguish a horizontal line from a vertical one or something in between—originates in the visual cortex, according to new mouse synapse imaging experiments.
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Orientation tuning—the ability to distinguish a horizontal line from a vertical one or something in between—originates in the visual cortex, according to new mouse synapse imaging experiments.
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Claudia López Lloreda
29 May 2026 | 5 min read
Bringing basic biology back to INSAR
As the International Society for Autism Research has grown over the past two decades, basic science has become less central, Christine Wu Nordahl says. This year, she and other meeting organizers aimed to change that.
Bringing basic biology back to INSAR
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Diana Kwon
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