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ekernf01.bsky.social
Statistician and computational biologist; uw alum; jhu student. He/him. http://ekernf01.github.io
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For me, it's roughly day 100 of being pleasantly surprised that a position-weight matrix can capture a complex-seeming distribution over zillions of possible antibodies... ... and then bust out of the screen and be manufactured in real life.

Apparently, transcriptomics is not the only field struggling with overly optimistic results from new deep learning techniques. www.understandingai.org/p/i-got-fool...

Why do you need a PhD in computer science to find an antigen expressed in one cell type but not the rest? www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=5... The work looks important and it would be a privilege to contribute. But, see question above.

I'm defending my PhD next Friday, May 23!(!!!!). I'll be highlighting our work looking at aneuploidy in early human development. If you're interested I'd love to have you join via Zoom (DM me for info) or on the Homewood campus!

Easily the most important thing happening next week. Come and watch my friend Sara defend her PhD!

I phoned the Baltimore DOT to thank them for putting traffic calming near my home. They said "We don't get many of these. We only hear it when it's bad."

Cellular plasticity always has fewer rules than I expect. Blood cells can crawl out of your vessels and start laying down cartilage to fix burns. doi.org/10.1097%2F01...

There are, right now, very deliberate and carefully planned philanthropy projects aiming to unlock new discoveries across many fields of science. www.gap-map.org

Multiplexed perturbation screens facilitate a key prerequisite of "virtual cell" efforts: getting lots of perturbation data with detailed outputs. However, they present unique experimental design obstacles. 🧵

🚨 I just released the alpha-version of my AI in Genomics textbook! It covers (so far!) sequence language models & deep learning for DNA/RNA/proteins. Check it out: biobook.michel.science

We say a statistic U is complete for a family theta when: E[v(U)|theta] = 0 for all theta ==> v(U)=0 "Complete" is the worst possible name. I propose a better name: "parsimonious".🧵

This looks like a great opportunity -- focus on adding statistical rigor to clinical ML/AI. www.jeanfeng.com/joining

I wrote a guest post on a good friend and colleague's excellent newsletter, the Connected Ideas Project. It's about moving from academia to industry in biotechnology doi.org/10.59350/z2s...

I would like to pay someone to help make my personal website look a little better. It's Jekyll. If interested, please DM for details.

Nominative determinism strikes again.

Back around 2020, I thought we'd never have the resolution to map enhancer-gene contacts en masse with DNA looping assays. But region-capture micro-C is now making this possible.

👇

Big new study of eQTL's whose effect depends on drug exposures finds that drug-dependent eQTL's are more like disease risk loci in general (context, constraint) and sometimes overlap disease loci when plain eQTL's do not.

New blog post: pitfalls and open questions in GRN inference, ft. Audrey II. ekernf01.github.io/guiding-ques...

Implement a 100% tariff and ruin a movie Close Encounters of the 6th Kind

Biotech is discovering the awesome power of fractional factorial designs (or similar randomized designs) and I'm all for it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractio... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Tempus: a company that I did not know existed, but in fact publishes REAMS of successful-seeming cancer diagnostics research. www.tempus.com/publications/

Verge: a company to check out for people interested in gene regulatory networks and perturbation profiling of human cells. www.vergegenomics.com/approach

I did* a deep dive on a fancy MCMC method for reaction rate parameter inference: - some molecules not observed - measurements intermittent, not continuous - system is stochastic (low molecule counts) - all reactions known github.com/ekernf01/pre... *I wrote this 10 years ago (!?)