Andrew Davinack
@vermiformes.bsky.social
Associate Professor of Biology - Wheaton College Massachusetts Marine Parasitologist | Ailurophile | New Yorker | Horror-writer Davinack Lab: https://departments.wheatoncollege.edu/faculty/davinack-andrew/
I will be taking a two year leave of absence from my current institution and the U.S., and will be moving to Norway in December to join the Horizon Europe TETTRIX research team at NTNU. The goal is to develop a biodiversity framework for representing "dark taxa". #taxonomy #biodiversityinformatics
I have an honors student this fall exploring genetic variation in the terminal regions of #monkeypox viral genomes. We’ve been using AI to debug some of the scripting errors we encounter and some of our prompts were flagged by OpenAI. At least there are now guardrails on some of these platforms.
When I'm not doing science, I'm writing and publishing American folk horror stories. My first one just came out in Black Hare Press. Here's an interview I did with them: blackharepress.com/blogs/author... #horror #folkhorror #writers
Dissecting Drew Davinack
Welcome back to the Black Hare Press Dissecting Author interviews, where we dissect an author to find out who they are, what they write, and what keeps their creative juices flowing. Today, we slice...
blackharepress.com
I feel betrayed. None of my fellow millennials informed me that Evanescence had released a new album. I had to figure this out two months later??? Disappointed in all of you.
Visited my hometown of NYC this weekend to see the parents. So much has changed yet so much has remained the same. I have a love/hate relationship with this place like all NYers. Is it still the greatest city in the world? Undoubtedly. Does it often get on my nerves? Always #empirestateofmind
Two of our long time faculty members retired last year. The powers that be will likely not replace them but rather opt for teaching-track positions. That means we have two research labs now empty. Which means I’ve *inherited* a bunch of cabinets to store my overflow of #worm samples. 🪱
My student and I were featured in a recent article by Wheaton College. Rylie helped develop our new python software package pygenoscape, which spatially interpolates genetic distances among individuals to visualize genetic differences across a landscape. #popgen #PUI #undergradresearch
Blazing new paths in scientific software
Professor Andrew Davinack and Rylie Seaberg ’26 created software that transforms genetic data into three-dimensional landscapes, allowing researchers to see how genetic variation changes across geogra...
wheatoncollege.edu
They don’t know I’d let the world burn before I see any harm come to them
When I’m not playing with worms and parasites I’m teaching grown men how to strangle other grown men. #jiujitsu #weirdhobbies
Every three years all the #polychaete folks gather to discuss the wonderful world of worms followed by a final night of dinner and dancing and conga lines. And so we end another IPC and part ways. Hope to see everyone again in 2029 in Japan 🇯🇵
It has been scorching all week in Germany. I can never understand the Europeans’ aversion to air condition. Good lord 🥵 #summertravels #polychaeteconference
Yesterday while getting work done at my hotel lobby in Frankfurt I was approached by two police officers who started interrogating me about a stolen cellphone - I was patted down, ordered to unlock my phone and they started searching me. Don’t tell me - I know why… what an introduction to Germany!
In my upcoming book I also draw heavily from horror movies. The opening chapter begins with a scene from @realgdt.bsky.social and Chuck Hogan’s “The Strain”. If you haven’t seen the series or read the book, you should - it’s one of the most accurate on screen representation of #parasites.
Andrew Davinack@vermiformes.bsky.social · 4mo agoIf you think parasites are cool and are the true rulers of our planet, I have a new book coming out that will solidify that argument. Unveiling my first popular science book due out in December. #parasites #parasitology #popularscience #SciComm cup.columbia.edu/book/puppet-...
If you wonder why your NSF funding got cut. Now you know: www.yahoo.com/news/politic...
White House wants to shift billions of dollars of research funding away from ‘slow consensus peer review’ and into individual scientists and AI
Moving funding to individual scientists and AI could undermine US scientific credibility at home and abroad.
yahoo.com
What's the point of a double or even single-blind peer review if the authors posted a preprint?
With all the talk about #Cyclospora, this is a good time for some self-promotion. If you want to understand #parasites and how they tick (no pun intended) and why getting rid of them entirely is not necessarily a good idea, check out my new book coming out in the Fall - release date has moved up!
Andrew Davinack@vermiformes.bsky.social · 4mo agoIf you think parasites are cool and are the true rulers of our planet, I have a new book coming out that will solidify that argument. Unveiling my first popular science book due out in December. #parasites #parasitology #popularscience #SciComm cup.columbia.edu/book/puppet-...
My institution, Wheaton College Massachusetts, has a vacancy for a one-year Visiting Assistant Professor position in the Biology Department. A 3/3 teaching load: must be able to teach Intro Bio and Nutrition. Come join us! #academicvacancies #newengland jobs.wheatoncollege.edu/postings/4844
Visiting Assistant Professor
The Biological, Chemical, and Environmental Sciences (BCES) Department at Wheaton College is seeking applicants for a one-year Visiting Assistant Professor position starting Fall 2026 (2026-2027 acade...
jobs.wheatoncollege.edu
Remote BLASTing is way slower than manually checking sequence similarities on NCBI. Whudda thought? 🤡
July 1st: my first day as an Associate Professor - do absolutely nothing.
This summer my undergraduate honors student is exploring whether blue mussels infected with trematodes harbor similar loads of microplastic compared with uninfected mussels. She’s also exploring whether the sporocysts themselves harbor microplastics. #parasitology #PUI #undergrad
My undergrad student and I just built a tool that visualizes gradients in genetic composition among individuals distributed across a landscape. New #popgen tool. Works for sanger sequence data or precomputed distance matrices generated from RAD-seq datasets. academic.oup.com/bioinformati...
pygenoscape: a Python package for spatial interpolation and visualization of genetic distance landscapes
AbstractMotivation. Spatial genetic structure is central to population genetics and phylogeography, but many approaches rely on discrete population models
academic.oup.com
Me submitting yet another NSF proposal that is not going to get funded.
About to submit yet ANOTHER NSF proposal focused on taxonomy. It's the same proposal I've submitted over the past few years, dressed up different to satisfy reviewers who think that more data (aka genomes) actually means more resolution for understudied taxa...when it actually doesn't.
Yahtzee! Live trematode sporocysts squirming around inside the mantle of blue mussels collected in Rhode Island. With the amount of people who slurp up mussels raw, it's amazing that this species haven't added humans to their vertebrate host repertoire. #parasites #parasitology #seafood
Last year I wrote about northward return of screwworm, banishment of which was a USDA/US-C. America collab triumph. What has put that @ risk (w/a case just found in Texas)? Guess. Or read on. Plus you'll quickly grasp why we really, really don't want screwworm anywhere. www.salon.com/2025/04/28/w...
The US could get screwed on screwworm
For years, a multi-country effort kept screwworm at bay. The US picking fights with Mexico isn't helping
salon.com
🧵 Public science in the US has taken some heavy hits over the last year, but the White House OMB is proposing a series of changes that will result in a TKO for science as we know it unless we fight back. Here's what's happening, and why it matters. 1/n