wsdewitt.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Congrats to @magdalenarussell.bsky.social! This is a wonderful summary of Maggie's impressive thesis work. I'm stoked she's soon joining my lab as a postdoc. As I was walking out after her brilliant defense, a senior faculty member told me: "You scored".

submitted 4 hours ago • 0 comments

RNA xkcd.com/3056

submitted 6 hours ago • 98 comments

Join the @standupforscience.bsky.social rally on March 7 to help protect the American scientific enterprise & defend science as a public good that drives social, political, & economic progress. Learn more & find your local site: https://buff.ly/3EWhSZM #standupforscience2025 #scienceforall

submitted 22 hours ago • 0 comments

A mathematical theory of evolution: phylogenetic models dating back 100 years—a new #PhilTransB theme issue describes recent developments in models of #evolutionary trees and networks, and in #phylogenetic modeling for applications in biology: https://buff.ly/41r1wkR @tanjastadler.bsky.social

submitted 5 days ago • 2 comments

The breadth and scope of cowardice amongst our scientific leadership is staggering.

submitted 5 days ago • 28 comments

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

NEW: Trump actions on science may affect a generation as pauses + cuts in graduate admissions begin. “We had just flown them out, we told them we love you, we want to admit you, and then everything just stopped." "It's freezing everybody into inaction." www.statnews.com/2025/02/19/t...

submitted 7 days ago • 5 comments

Pretty sad. Just got the email that CZI is canceling the second round of Diversity Leadership Awards. Private industry will definitely not fill the hole that NIH and NSF are leaving. 😢💔

submitted 7 days ago • 56 comments

Can DNA sequence models predict mutations affecting human traits? We introduce TraitGym, a curated benchmark of causal regulatory variants for 113 Mendelian & 83 complex traits, and evaluate functional genomics and DNA language models. Joint work w/ Gökcen Eraslan and @yun-s-song.bsky.social 🧵👇

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

🚀 It's time for a new JAX ecosystem library! This time quite a small one: ESM2quinox. A #JAX + Equinox implementation of the ESM2 protein language model. GitHub: github.com/patrick-kidg... SciML is obviously my whole jam. My open source has largely focused on the differential equations ... [1/2]

submitted 15 days ago • 2 comments

New chalkboard mounted and seasoned! 🤓

submitted 15 days ago • 1 comment

I have a Commentary in Cell Systems suggesting that we should stop telling simple but misleading stories about biology & give some careful thought to how to incorporate the complexity from the outset. (This link should give free access & downloads until 1 April) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

submitted 16 days ago • 7 comments

So to my friends who are HHMI-funded, are you going to speak out about this? HHMI is a private funder and does not have to follow the executive orders, and yet.... www.science.org/content/arti...

submitted 16 days ago • 33 comments

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

"It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of man, our love of culture... This new knowledge has all to do with honor and country but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending." RR Wilson to Congress, 1969

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

It's interesting, I recorded two interviews this week, and both asked me to comment on group selection vs inclusive fitness. I was diplomatic, but honestly, I think the anti-group selection dogma stemming from the 60s is pretty embarrassing, highlighting a surprising lack of critical thinking.

submitted 20 days ago • 6 comments

Elon Musk and other right-wing tech figures have been on a campaign to delegitimize the digital encyclopedia, Lila Shroff writes. What happens if they succeed?

submitted 21 days ago • 25 comments

Seattle Public Library (@seattlelibrary.bsky.social) has a service called "Your Next Five Books": you tell them a bit about what you've enjoyed reading and what you're in the mood for, and a few days later a librarian sends you a very long email with well-researched ideas for books to try. 💙📚

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

Genomic Foundationless Models: Pretraining Does Not Promise Performance I've long believed genomic foundation models are not as useful as claimed. In my mind, there isn't enough training data to justify their size. Interesting to see more work in this direction. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

submitted 24 days ago • 3 comments

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? Jevin West (@jevinwest.bsky.social) and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take. thebullshitmachines.com

submitted 22 days ago • 125 comments

Snow on UW's Red Square this morning

submitted 23 days ago • 0 comments

If you can, do something, speak up and act up. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

submitted 24 days ago • 4 comments

submitted 23 days ago • 0 comments

This is an excellent critique and natural history of some enduring bad ideas about the impossibility of human agency (although I disagree with the very end, positioning the topic beyond the purview of science)

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

This is an excellent critique and natural history of some enduring bad ideas about the impossibility of human agency (although I disagree with the very end, positioning the topic beyond the purview of science)

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

Our work on contrastive learning of T cell receptor representations is now out in Cell Systems! www.cell.com/cell-systems...

submitted 39 days ago • 1 comment

Hello Bluesky friends! I am a #newPI starting at UC Irvine in April, interested in gene regulation and functional genomics in stem cell models of development (esp neural crest). We are hiring at all levels – please reach out/spread the word! sskimlab.org

submitted 36 days ago • 4 comments

Hello Bluesky from UW Genome Sciences! We're happy to join other members of our department over here bsky.app/starter-pack... .

submitted 35 days ago • 0 comments

In new study, we find dramatic differences in specificities of serum neutralizing antibodies in infants w single infection by a recent SARS-CoV-2 strain versus adults/children imprinted by an early viral strain. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

submitted 36 days ago • 12 comments

submitted 42 days ago • 0 comments

Building on the UShER tree of millions of SARS-CoV-2 genomes maintained by Angie Hinrichs, Hugh Haddox and Georg Angehrn (and others in @matsen.bsky.social lab and @jbloomlab.bsky.social) have looked into how the neutral mutation rate varies along the genome: [1/N] www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

submitted 46 days ago • 1 comment

Alpental summit this morning

submitted 46 days ago • 0 comments

An incredible opportunity for the right person: The Santa Fe Institute is seeking applications for full-time resident faculty positions at all academic levels For me, this has been the best possible job ever. More info here: santafe.edu/about/jobs/r...

submitted 49 days ago • 9 comments

My thesis work on active machine learning to model regulatory DNA is now out in Cell Systems! We answer the question: When you can synthesize any DNA sequence you want, how do you decide which ones are worth testing? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

submitted 49 days ago • 3 comments

🚨 Applications for our Theory Fellow program are due at 3 pm ET tomorrow (Jan. 7) 🚨 Learn more & apply ➡️ janelia.link/theoryfellow...

submitted 51 days ago • 0 comments

Perhaps it's now time for organisations whose core missions include promoting evidence-based inquiry (e.g., universities and their academic units, learned societies, research centres, some think-tanks) to stop using X altogether to platform their work? Asking for (quite) a (lot of) friends.

submitted 51 days ago • 7 comments

submitted 56 days ago • 0 comments

First post-surgical pow: Snoqualmie opening day, Tuesday before faculty meeting 😊

submitted 65 days ago • 0 comments

Why do association studies prioritize trait-specific variants??? A quick thread about the importance of thinking about all traits at once 👇 1/6 (🧪🧬)

submitted 71 days ago • 2 comments

Very excited (and a bit nervous) to announce that I will be hiring two Postdocs for my new group(!) in Copenhagen to study the Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA which survives in present-day humans. Retweet will be much appreciated :) Link for application: candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

submitted 86 days ago • 10 comments

This work finds that costly foundation models are outperformed by CNNs in genomics benchmarks, and are outperformed by linear autoregression in time-series benchmarks. 👀

submitted 76 days ago • 1 comment

"The market for popular science, for whatever combination of public taste and commercial strategy, is strongly attracted to simple stories offering a quasi-theological insight into everything." John Dupré reviews "The Genetic Book of the Dead." lareviewofbooks.org/article/phil...

submitted 86 days ago • 0 comments

🫣

submitted 91 days ago • 0 comments

Imagine a mouse in which all 10 billion cells keep a diary from fertilization. Imagine sentinel cells recording your experiences and sending out dispatches in the form of DNA. Here's a story I wrote about cell recorders 🧪 Gift link: nyti.ms/3Z3Mqza

submitted 93 days ago • 2 comments

Hi friends new and old! I study how microbes interact and evolve in complex communities like the human gut microbiome.🦠🧬💩 I'm thrilled to share that I'm starting a lab at UC Irvine in April 2025 and am recruiting at all levels - please spread the word! kxuelab.com More about my work below...🧵1/n

submitted 99 days ago • 22 comments