So excited to be selected one of STAT’s 2026 Wunderkinds. Huge thanks to my PhD advisors @VamsiMootha & Ben Neale + all my incredible mentors & colleagues. It's a huge honor to be in this inspiring cohort of scholars! @statnews #STATWunderkinds
Rahul Gupta
@rahulg603.bsky.social
Internal medicine resident at MGH. Previously MD-PhD at Harvard in HST. PhD co-advised by Vamsi Mootha and Ben Neale. Interested in statistical genetics, mitochondrial biology, and disease mechanism. Website: gupta.bio Blog: emergentpropertiesblog.com
Congratulations to Broadies Yasha Ektefaie, @rahulg603.bsky.social, and Mohamed El-Brolosy on being named 2026 #STATWunderkinds!
Meet the 2026 STAT Wunderkinds
This year, as in past years, we've found inspiring stories and innovative research. All are blazing new trails as they attempt to answer some of the
statnews.com
Where does treatment end and enhancement begin? The Emergent Properties team gets together for a wide-ranging discussion on the ethics of human enhancement, including GLP-1s, hyperbaric chambers, the Enhanced Games, & gene editing to improve cognition. emergentpropertiesblog.com/2026/09/26/h...
Roundtable: The ethics of human enhancement
What are the ethics of human enhancement? Given the breadth of this question, this is an excerpt of a discussion held between the six of us addressing this topic. Although we are certainly not experts...
emergentpropertiesblog.com
We took ~750,000 whole genomes and found the putative mechanism by which mitochondrial DNA mutations accumulate with age in blood. Spoiler: we think these mutations arise by replication error and tag age-related clonal hematopoiesis. Read @nature.com broad.io/ob2jft
Mechanism of age-related accumulation of mtDNA mutations in human blood - Nature
Genome-wide analyses indicate that accumulation of mitochondrial DNA mutations, a hallmark of ageing, may be caused by cryptic replication errors, which act as passenger mutations that eventually become detectable with age owing to age-related somatic mosaicism, rather than oxidative damage.
broad.io
Thrilled to share our new @natcomms.nature.com paper on local ancestry informed allele frequencies in gnomAD, which are live now on the browser! Check out my stellar PhD student @pragskore.bsky.social’s Bluetorial on how this brings finer detail to variant interpretation 🧬🖥️
Pragati Kore@pragskore.bsky.social · last yr.📃 We’re excited to share our latest work, now published in Nature Communications — a major update to the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD) that improves allele frequency resolution for two gnomAD-defined genetic ancestry groups using local ancestry inference (LAI).
How do experts gain intuition?💡 I argue: 1. expert intuition (“fast”) = pattern-matching on past experiences 2. careful reasoning (“slow”) = confronting a new scenario with step-wise thinking 3. wise decision-making toggles between both styles Read the new post: tinyurl.com/28tb33fc
The basis of expert intuition
Have you ever thought about what makes someone an “expert” at something? Is it their ability to carefully and correctly respond to a scenario, or is it their ability to complete a task intuitively and...
emergentpropertiesblog.com
A project many years in the process, we’re pleased to present our work on multi-ancestry meta-analysis across a boatload of traits in the UK Biobank: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Pan-UK Biobank genome-wide association analyses enhance discovery and resolution of ancestry-enriched effects - Nature Genetics
Genome-wide analyses for 7,266 traits leveraging data from several genetic ancestry groups in UK Biobank identify new associations and enhance resources for interpreting risk variants across diverse p...
nature.com
After years of chats, friends from my MD/PhD program and I launched a nerdy blog about science + medicine. We explore everything from evolutionary theory to big data in science. @kaitavjeet.bsky.social just posted on the power of abstraction in biology 🧫 emergentpropertiesblog.com/2025/08/19/a...
The case for abstraction in biology
One of the most challenging questions in all of biology is how to make sense of complex systems. This question is becoming increasingly relevant as advances in sequencing technologies decrease the cos...
emergentpropertiesblog.com
Exciting preprint from @rahulg603.bsky.social and colleagues! Mechanism of age-related accumulation of mitochondrial DNA mutations in human blood www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Mechanism of age-related accumulation of mitochondrial DNA mutations in human blood
One of the strongest signatures of aging is an accumulation of mutant mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) heteroplasmy. Here we investigate the mechanism underlying this phenomenon by calling mtDNA sequence, ab...
biorxiv.org
Using population and statistical genetics across 750,000 people, we believe we have identified a putative mechanism for an important aging biomarker: the apparent age-related mtDNA mutation accrual in blood. Very excited this is up! broad.io/7b3tuy
Type 1 diabetes (T1D) and other autoimmune diseases often co-occur in families. Leveraging data from 12.6K genotyped trios in @finngen.bsky.social, our work - online today in Cell Genomics - studied the transmission of parental autoimmune diseases on T1D in offspring. www.cell.com/cell-genomic...
Effects of parental autoimmune diseases on type 1 diabetes in offspring can be partially explained by HLA and non-HLA polymorphisms
Leveraging Finnish nationwide multi-generational registers and the biobanks of FinnGen, Wang, Liu, et al. investigated the effect of parental autoimmune diseases on offspring T1D. Their creative and r...
cell.com
Final_Version_of_Tarrifs_actualFINALcopy_version7_USETHISONE.docx
White House says no one will be fired over the Signal scandal because no one involved was trying to cure cancer.
There are days in life that shake you. I’m shattered 💔 to share that I just found out that the US Government terminated my 2024 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (~$2 million), threatening my long-promised assistant professor job at Columbia University & academic career... 1/🧵
Here’s Elon cutting pediatric brain cancer research 👇🏻
Rachael Sirianni, PhD@docsirianni.bsky.social · 2y agoThis is horrible to post, but I may as well post it. We are essentially shutting down research operations in my group, which is focused on treatments for pediatric brain cancer. I’m a well funded investigator, and there’s no choice. Science can’t function without the stability of NIH
New preprint from the lab! 🚨 🧫 New galactose #CRISPR screening strategy 🎯 481 genes required for #OXPHOS ⚙️ #FAM136A in IMS proteostasis 👂Mito defects in #Menieres disease by @marcellharhai.bsky.social @fbm-unil.bsky.social A short thread 1/5 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
