Sasha Gusev
@sashagusevposts.bsky.social
Statistical geneticist. Associate Prof at Dana-Farber / Harvard Medical School. www.gusevlab.org
Excited to share 2 important milestones in my academic journey- Our work on “Pervasive interactions between exposures & polygenic risk can inform more effective clinical & behavioral interventions,” showing PGSxC interactions & their utility, is out in #NatureGenetics @genomestake.bsky.social
Over the weekend GPT built me a lab management app that is more effective than anything I've ever used (a bunch of spreadsheets in Dropbox).
Very exciting new method for inferring latent disease trajectories, led by the tireless Dr. Urbut with Natarajan and Parmigiani labs. If you're considering a postdoc in this area talk to Sarah! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A Bayesian framework for longitudinal EHR and genetic discovery - Nature
A Bayesian generative framework that integrates longitudinal electronic health records with genetic data to identify latent disease signatures is presented.
nature.com
How are NIH abstracts changing with the new administration? A short 🧵 on common term trends over time: sashagusev.github.io/nih-abstract...
We're excited to have an incredible lineup of invited speakers at #IGES2026 this fall! Josée Dupuis, @mikeinouye.bsky.social, Sriram Sankararaman, and @sashagusevposts.bsky.social will present on cutting-edge topics in complex disease genetics, from multi-omics integration to biobank-scale methods.
Anyone have a recommendation for tracking and organizing AI agent work on a codebase? Linear.app? Ideally with an emphasis on organization.
Twitter is going kind of crazy about crime and genetics right now (What's new?). My next post is a deep dive into a paper behind a widespread claim that brutal execution in Medieval Europe selected for reduced aggression, allowing civilization to develop. The title says it all, really.
Capital punishment is not a breeding program
No, medieval execution didn't "genetically pacify" Europe
sequencesandconsequences.substack.com
1/9 🚨 BREAKING OUT OF STEALTH MODE 🚨 Multivariate GWAS in Genomic SEM now runs on a laptop! New preprint + package update: a closed-form analytic solution makes multivariate GWAS ~800× faster, cutting runtimes from hours on HPC clusters to minutes on a personal computer.
The Predator Emerges
ALT: The Predator Emerges
static.klipy.com
Recommend read! Struggling to implement code/bring your thoughts on paper is what builds topic-level expertise. Great tool for everyone already on the other side of the learning journey, but what about trainees? Would I have wanted it for myself when I started out? Not entirely sure.
Sasha Gusev@sashagusevposts.bsky.social · 2mo agoI wrote about AI in academia. "PhD-level thinking", LLM bias, grunt work, alignment, AGI, data center water use, AI politics -- something for everyone.
I wrote about AI in academia. "PhD-level thinking", LLM bias, grunt work, alignment, AGI, data center water use, AI politics -- something for everyone.
Thoughts on AI in academia
PhD-level thinking, LLM bias, alignment, AGI, data centers, and AI politics
open.substack.com
I asked GPT-5.5 and Opus-4.7 to generate nonpartisan political candidate bios. Then in a new session I asked the models to help me rank candidates to vote for from the full list. GPT was 5x more likely to put a GPT-generated candidate bio in the top half.
Especially concerning when we know DOGE was using AI models to identify “DEI” projects to cut. A self-reinforcing cycle against women and URM researchers.
Sasha Gusev@sashagusevposts.bsky.social · 2mo agoI assigned random gender/ethnicity labels to scientific abstracts from the literature and then asked Claude to do a thematic analysis. Claude identified a clinical versus computational split for female/male authors and a DEI focus for Black/URM authors. All in completely random data.
I assigned random gender/ethnicity labels to scientific abstracts from the literature and then asked Claude to do a thematic analysis. Claude identified a clinical versus computational split for female/male authors and a DEI focus for Black/URM authors. All in completely random data.
First real post on the new blog! If you follow human genetics, you've likely of "missing heritability". If you look at twins to estimate heritability, you get values much larger than what molecular genomic methods produce. IQ, for example, goes from 50-80% heritability to 10-15%. Which is right?
Happy to highlight new findings by Vanesa Getseva and Lin Poyraz about the sources of variation in germline mutation rates among humans: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Joint work with Anastasia Stolyarova and @ipsitaagarwal.bsky.social. 1/n
A sibling study of variation in parental mutation rates
People are born with variable numbers of de novo germline mutations (DNMs), depending primarily on the ages of their parents. To explore additional causes, we developed an approach to call DNMs from nucleotide differences between siblings in genomic regions inherited identical by descent from both parents. Applying it to whole genome sequences from 28,985 sibling pairs of diverse genetic ancestries present in the UK Biobank and All of Us datasets, as well as 2,330 trios, we identified >800K autosomal DNMs and characterized mutation phenotypes in 27,645 sets of parents. We found subtle shifts in the mutation spectrum but no differences in total DNM rates among genetic ancestry groups, or between smokers and non-smokers. Testing for associations between parental mutation phenotypes and their burden of loss-of-function and deleterious missense variants in a set of 180 DNA repair and maintenance genes, we discovered that disruptions in REV1 and LIG1 increase germline mutation rates, and thus that rare mutator alleles segregate in population cohorts. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. NIH, R35 GM083098
biorxiv.org
David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution • "Instead of being quiescent, natural selection is everywhere."
David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution
"Instead of being quiescent, natural selection is everywhere."
dwarkesh.com
New work from us pooling together clinical sequencing data to identify large effect common risk variants for rare cancer types. This included a novel HLA locus that interacts with HPV infection to increase Anal Cancer risk. Carver et al. (2026) www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...
Thrilled to see this out. What started out as a chat several years back with @drfejzo.bsky.social about leveraging publicly available data on hyperemesis gravidarum GWAS turned into a wonderful collaboration with April Shu, @mvaudel.bsky.social, @xwww.bsky.social and many others! rdcu.be/fdl9k
Multi-ancestry genome-wide association study of severe pregnancy nausea and vomiting
Nature Genetics - Multi-ancestry GWAS meta-analysis identifies risk loci for severe nausea and vomiting of pregnancy. Downstream analyses explore maternal and fetal contributions of these loci and...
rdcu.be
Delighted to share our latest research from the 23andMe Research Team, just published in @nature.com ! We looked at data from >27,000 participants to uncover how human genetics influences weight loss efficacy and side effects of GLP-1 medications like semaglutide. A short thread 🧵👇
A little widget to play around with the various inputs and outputs that go into soft money research lab finances on a 10-year outlook. sashagusev.github.io/PISim/
Here's a little widget to play with the data across journals (as well as download the raw CSVs). sashagusev.github.io/Genetics_Pub...
Sasha Gusev@sashagusevposts.bsky.social · 4mo agoMonthly median Received to Accepted time (days) at Nature Genetics
Monthly median Received to Accepted time (days) at Nature Genetics
A little jukebox that plays the top hits from a desired country and year (ordered by the most distinct hits for that country). sashagusev.github.io/world_music/
Asked the AI to make a fun slide about potential de-skilling from AI use. Need to specify more clearly what I mean by "fun".
A week ago @terzake.bsky.social gave a platform to Nathan Cofnas. At some point, Cofnas said: "The people who do know, the experts, are not the ones calling me a racist pseudoscientist." He received no critical questions about this statement. /1 www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/20...
"IQ hangt samen met ras": dit is Nathan Cofnas, de 'rassenrealist' die ophef veroorzaakt aan UGent | VRT NWS Nieuws
De aanstelling van de Amerikaanse filosoof en ethicus Nathan Cofnas aan de UGent leidt al enkele weken tot beroering. Waarom eigenlijk? Wie is Cofnas, waar komt hij vandaan en welke ideeën predikt hij...
vrt.be
I build a feed for european grant funding that's updated daily and (IMO) far more transparent then the official EU fundign website: michelnivard.github.io/eu-grants-fe... (inspired by the NIH equivalent @sashagusevposts.bsky.social build yesterday)
