Filipa Simões

@simoesfilipa.bsky.social

Development and Regeneration of the Heart | Cardio-Immuno Genomics | Group Leader University of Oxford IDRM-DPAG | playing with zebrafish & cardiac organoids | academic mama of 2 children & 1 dog | curiosity led

Thrilled to post thread re: new single-cell lineage of mouse embryo reconstructed w/ DNA Typewriter. One animal, zygote to late organogenesis (E13.5). Tree has 1,340,794 transcriptionally profiled, annotated tips (cells), 1,142,588 dated internal nodes, rooted at zygote 1/n

"One is you have to be very curious about something. No. 2, you have to have an unfailing urge to address the question you have. No. 3, I think it helps to try to combine knowledge in at least two different fields where people don’t necessarily interact.” www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/s...

Susumu Tonegawa Dies at 86; Nobel Laureate Showed How Antibodies Fight Infection

The first Japanese scientist to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, he went on to discover how memories are stored, advancing understanding of how the brain works.

nytimes.com

Amen!! to all of it. Only to add that as computational biologist, I don't get paid to code. I get paid to turn biological questions into computational experiments, to interpret numbers and tons of data to give biological insights. Learning to write, code or text, is learning to think.

“A Penn professor thought she’d sell 1000 copies of her ‘Odyssey’ translation. She sold a million this year alone, thanks to Christopher Nolan.” “West Philly's Emily Wilson, who penned a highly acclaimed translation of the epic poem in 2017, is having a big summer.”

A Penn professor thought she’d sell 1000 copies of her ‘Odyssey’ translation. She sold a million this year alone, thanks to Christopher Nolan.

West Philly's Emily Wilson, who penned a highly acclaimed translation of the epic poem in 2017, is having a big summer.

share.inquirer.com

A true giant of #DevBiol! For you youngsters who might not know, among her decades of fantastic discoveries was this thing she found in 1981 that she called "Embryonic Stem Cells." I think some people still study them. Thanks to Alex for writing this lovely piece!

Developmental Biology@devbiol.bsky.social · 2w ago

#DBfeature A tribute to Gail R Martin, mouse geneticist and mentor extraordinaire (April 12, 1944 - Feb 9, 2026) By Alexandra Joyner doi.org/10.1016/j.ydbio.2026.05.007

Gail Martin looking at the camera, sitting on a bench in front of a lily pad pond in her garden in Berkeley. Photo from Brigid Hogan.

How does an embryo generate the right cells in the right place? Delighted to share our latest findings on how neural crest cells acquire vagal or trunk identities Spoiler alert: The timing & combination of CDXs preconfigures cell identity & distinct HOX states www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Temporally distinct CDX programmes preconfigure vagal and trunk neural crest

Neural crest cells (NCCs) are progenitor cells vital in establishing the head, heart, gut and peripheral nervous system of vertebrate embryos. Disruptions to NCC development underlie neurocristopathie...

biorxiv.org

Maybe creativity is just how big a bag of tricks you have; how many different tricks you've seen, applied in different contexts. And perhaps some people have a little bit more skill remembering all those tricks or applying them in different situations. - Arjun Raj, @arjunraj.bsky.social

Just approved an order for standard lab consumables. Prices have nearly doubled since starting the lab. Meanwhile, the bar for publishing keeps rising, requiring ever more costly experiments, while grant budgets barely changed. Hard to see how this is a sustainable trajectory for academic research.

'I would not be talking about the fish that my team discovered if we didn’t have long-term funding that allowed me to fail and learn from failures. The only way I was able to learn from failures was to have long-horizon funding, when I wasn’t being measured from year to year'

“I Am an Unabashed Optimist About the Long-Term Future of Science.”

The new president of the National Academy of Sciences talks about learning to see as a scientist and communicating science in a noisy information landscape.

issues.org