Let biological sex be multifaceted, as all biology is. And when you need to be precise in scientific research, be precise. Say ‘gametic sex’ or ‘chromosomal sex’ or ‘anatomical sex’, or whatever is appropriate to your own work.
Roshni Patel
@roshnipatel.bsky.social
assistant prof at University of Oregon. interested in pop gen, stat gen, human complex traits. also ELSI, metascience, ethics education, etc... she/they. 🌈 roshnipatel.github.io
Working on this project was so fun! ❤️ It's really awesome to work with so many passionate scientists who are all committed to improving our field (despite a climate that might not always be so friendly to that) We'd love any feedback, especially from other trainees and early career researchers!
Roshni Patel@roshnipatel.bsky.social · 4w agoSo excited to see this out! It was an absolute joy and honor to work so closely w @jayatirsharma.bsky.social and @christacaggiano.bsky.social on this - both are terrific examples of the kind of interdisciplinary human genetics researchers that we need more of (and will be on the job market soon 👀)
I think this work really underscores that we are at a turning point in human genetics. There is a growing consensus that doing good research in human genetics requires an expanded skillset (including, e.g., one that can navigate the relationship between genetics, ancestry, and pop descriptors) (1/)
Jayati Sharma, PhD, ScM@jayatirsharma.bsky.social · 4w agoIn what has been a labor of love & joyful collaboration, we are super excited to share our preprint on recommendations towards the ethical and accurate use of population descriptors generated from a survey by trainees, for trainees. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
So excited to see this out! It was an absolute joy and honor to work so closely w @jayatirsharma.bsky.social and @christacaggiano.bsky.social on this - both are terrific examples of the kind of interdisciplinary human genetics researchers that we need more of (and will be on the job market soon 👀)
Jayati Sharma, PhD, ScM@jayatirsharma.bsky.social · 4w agoIn what has been a labor of love & joyful collaboration, we are super excited to share our preprint on recommendations towards the ethical and accurate use of population descriptors generated from a survey by trainees, for trainees. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
In what has been a labor of love & joyful collaboration, we are super excited to share our preprint on recommendations towards the ethical and accurate use of population descriptors generated from a survey by trainees, for trainees. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Recommendations for the ethical and accurate use of population descriptors: a trainee-led survey of early-career researchers
Despite the importance of population descriptors in human genomics research, many scientists struggle to translate evolving ethical guidelines into their computational workflows. To characterize this ...
biorxiv.org
I commented yesterday, there’s still time
Bethany Brookshire@beebrookshire.bsky.social · last mo.You may have heard about the OMB rule change that will put politics over federal grants. However bad you think it is? It's probably worse. Thanks to @theverge.com for letting me report this one out. There is still time to comment. bit.ly/4v2X4nQ
Hi Genetics/Comp-Bio community 👋 Interested in mentoring a comp-bio research student in East Africa over the summer? Do you have any experience in bioinformatics, biostats, genome/RNA-seq analyses, ML, or metagenomics? We'd love to have you as a mentor in our new program! 🧵 (1/n)
People have got to wake up to how bad the situation in US science is right now
Science Magazine@science.org · 3mo agoBreaking news: Indiana University plant microbiologist Roger Innes has been locked out of his laboratory by the school in response to a request by one of his federal funders. The move comes after Innes complained about the government’s prosecution of Chinese postdocs. https://scim.ag/4tsDqRr
When the NIH abruptly terminated thousands of research grants last year, the fallout wasn’t distributed equitably. A new analysis suggests the cuts disproportionately hit women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ investigators. My latest for @nature.com
NIH grant cuts disproportionately hit minority and female scientists
A survey reveals sharp divides in who bore the brunt of last year’s spree of grant cancellations by the Trump administration.
nature.com
DNA is not the same as kinship. Our perspective paper argues that treating genetics as the ultimate proof of identity or family can: • erase community-defined relationships • reinforce Western biases • and even cause real harm in policy + research Special Issue: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
🧪 Pathways for future scientists are becoming scarce, threatening a strong and innovative workforce: “We are not simply shrinking budgets. We are shrinking who gets to imagine themselves in science at all.” @jpflores.rbind.io hechingerreport.org/opinion-path...
OPINION: We need to expand research experience for college students to HBCUs, regional public universities and community colleges
If we want a scientific workforce capable of addressing the challenges we face, we must invest in scientists long before they become scientists. That means expanding research opportunities, supporting...
hechingerreport.org
Current NIH leadership want you to think they are using rigorous, consistent & scientific processes to screen studies to align them with agency priorities. But the process that they have put down on paper is a sham. It’s important to know NIH is not following its own guidance. Here’s why: 🧵1/
7/ In reality, my colleagues still inside NIH tell me that their assessments are largely ignored. Once a grant or application is picked up by the tool, they are almost never able to move the grant forward as is - regardless of the scientific justification.
Great perspective by @philipcball.bsky.social. Elementary genetics teaching (HS/college) focuses on Mendelian traits (single gene => single trait). However, it is now clear that polygenicity and pleiotropy are the norm. Curriculum must change accordingly. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Should biology put complexity first?
The dictum “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler” poses a problem for biology. How simply can it be told without doing dama…
sciencedirect.com
Excited that our work was featured on the local (Bay Area) news for their Black History month series. Interview with Noah and clips from my interview with @dornsife.usc.edu and CGSI talk in the article below www.nbcbayarea.com/discover-bla...
Stanford researchers help trace ancestry for African Americans
A group of Stanford researchers is offering a mathematical model to help link family connections up to 410 years ago.
nbcbayarea.com
Sam Trejo and @daphmarts.bsky.social, authors of What We Inherit: How New Technologies and Old Myths Are Shaping Our Genomic Future, write for @livescience.com about new reproductive technologies and the importance of regulation:
Live Science@livescience.com · 6mo agoNew tech allows parents to 'score' IVF embryos for desirable traits — and it's in desperate need of regulation www.livescience.com/health/genet...
Publications which use "national IQ" data still appearing in Springer Nature journals in 2026. Cool cool doi.org/10.1057/s415...
Beyond GDP: national intelligence quotient as a catalyst for sustainable socioeconomic welfare - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications - Beyond GDP: national intelligence quotient as a catalyst for sustainable socioeconomic welfare
doi.org
Fun news! @gcbias.bsky.social and I are teaching a 2-week online population genetics workshop this summer to raise money for the Center for Population Biology at UC Davis. We're trying to gauge interest -- please fill this out if you might be interested! And please share broadly!
Davis Summer Population Genomics Program
Want to learn population genetics? Please fill out this form to indicate your potential interest in a 2-week intensive online summer population genetics course taught by Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra and Graham...
docs.google.com
Someone on LinkedIn just asked me "why scientists should care and mobilize" right now. But the answer is simple: BECAUSE IT IS THE MORALLY RIGHT THING TO DO. People are being killed in the street, our democracy is being eroded, & we are watching the onset of authoritarianism before our eyes. 1/
To the extent that the fate of NIH and ICE funding may continue to be linked, we as scientists may feel forced to choose between protecting our own funding and the safety and wellbeing of our neighbors. This is a false choice. open.substack.com/pub/sciencea...
Demanding a Homeland Security bill that reins in lawlessness is the best path for science–even if it stalls NIH funding
The Senate voted today on a final funding package that included both the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), among many other agencies and institutions.
open.substack.com
Relatedly, some cool recent work from @roshnipatel.bsky.social, Jeffrey Spence, @jkpritch.bsky.social et al. dives deep into expectations, based on models of natural selection, for allele frequency in a group B conditional on allele frequency in group A. academic.oup.com/genetics/art... (16/27)
Our work on the generalizability of polygenic scores (PGS) from the @arbelharpak.bsky.social Lab is now officially out! We examine the accuracy of PGS predictions at the individual level. We make 3 observations that expose gaps in our understanding of PGS “portability.” rdcu.be/e0LAr (1/27)
Three open questions in polygenic score portability
Nature Communications - Genetic predictors of health outcomes often drop in accuracy when applied to people dissimilar to participants of large genetic studies. Here, the authors investigate the...
rdcu.be
🚨 New from me: Grant review at more than half of NIH's institutes could be frozen by the end of the year. That's because crucial NIH grant-review panels are slated to be empty at those institutes by Jan 2027. A wonky bureaucratic problem with big implications. A short 🧵
Exclusive: key NIH review panels due to lose all members by the end of 2026
Thirteen of the agency’s advisory councils, which must review grant applications before funding is awarded, are on track to have no voting members.
nature.com
How well does TWAS estimate a gene’s direction of effect on a trait? We think of this as an important stress-test for the accuracy of TWAS. In a new pre-print, we find that TWAS gets the sign wrong around 20-30% of the time! doi.org/10.64898/202... 1/n
High false sign rates in transcriptome-wide association studies
Transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS) are widely used to identify genes involved in complex traits and to infer the direction of gene effects on traits. However, despite their popularity, it r...
doi.org
I wrote about the bizarre case of Herasight, the embryo selection company going all in on eugenics.
Embryo selection company Herasight goes all in on eugenics
...
open.substack.com
Thank you Alex! Excited to see our paper published in @nature.com ! Huge thanks to @jeffspence.github.io , @tkyzeng.bsky.social , @emmamarydann.bsky.social, @nikhilmilind.dev, @marsonlab.bsky.social, @jkpritch.bsky.social, and all the members of the Pritchard and Marson labs for your enormous help!
Causal modelling of gene effects from regulators to programs to traits
Nature - Approaches combining genetic association and Perturb-seq data that link genetic variants to functional programs to traits are described.
rdcu.be
Marson Lab@marsonlab.bsky.social · 8mo agoOur latest collaboration with @jkpritch.bsky.social – led by joint post-doc Mineto Ota – is in @nature.com today: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
After time in the Bay Area, I’ve started a new role as Lecturer in the Department of Allergy and Rheumatology at the University of Tokyo. We’re the group of clinicians who see patients with autoimmune diseases, while researching new treatments and patient stratification. (continued)
“What I do think is that it has become normalized in modern behavioral genomics to do what you have to do in order to make every result, no matter how small, look like a win for team genetics” ericturkheimer.substack.com/p/within-fam...
Within family prediction of psychopathology
Honey it's fine. The ratio with my shoe size is actually pretty good.
ericturkheimer.substack.com
I taught Genetics again this year. We need to include discussion of the problematic history of our field, especially as the claims of eugenics are once again centered in our political discourse. Last year I wrote this piece, explaining my reasoning and approach 🧪 1/n www.cell.com/trends/genet...
ROTO Research Group@roto-rub.bsky.social · 8mo agoNext week, we welcome @rebeccasear.bsky.social in our Lecture Series. Rebecca will talk about 21st century eugenics, scientific racism and the role of academia in promoting political ideology. Just register here to participate 👉 rotorub.wordpress.com/roto-lecture... #PhilSci #HPBio
My first lead author paper is out with Ben Kerr and @alisonfeder.bsky.social! We found that making an antiviral too strong can sometimes make resistance easier to evolve. This has implications for how we design drugs, choose doses, and think about viral evolution in the face of treatment. (1/n)
Intracellular interactions shape antiviral resistance outcomes in poliovirus via eco-evolutionary feedback - Nature Ecology & Evolution
A model of intrahost poliovirus replication shows that, after several rounds of replication, pocapavir, a poliovirus capsid inhibitor, collapses viral density, preventing intracellular interactions th...
nature.com