Doc Edge

I get that making music (as opposed to listening) is not everyone’s chosen pastime, but man. Man. The one thing that people have never stopped doing, no matter how bad things get or how paltry the rewards, is making music. This is Intro to Being Human stuff. Most of us literally learn it on Day One

It's been 30 years (!!!) since the conceptualization of GWAS. GWAS has driven tons of discoveries, but with recent experimental developments (CRISPR, single-cell omics), we thought it was time to think about how to drive the next 30 years of human genetics. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Every tech ‘innovation’ is now designed to ensure that living your life leaves no mental or emotional trace in your physical being

they did the thing

Ah, "the age of abundance" www.illposed.claims/posts/openai...

Prison One count of failing as a father One count of thinking this is funny

Please share! Applications open now to our comp bio PhD program at USC ⭐️ 40+ years of computational biology ⭐️ Yet we do not stand still! ⭐️ Join 12+ core and 30+ joint faculty at the cutting edge of biology ⭐️ Genomics, epigenetics, ML + AI, systems biology, population genetics, +++ Come join us 🚀

Now out in Genetics: academic.oup.com/genetics/adv...

Work by Matin Saeidi and @will-milligan.bsky.social modeling mutator allele dynamics in humans, and asking what types of mutators we should expect to find by surveying offspring in trios.

🌿 Congratulations to Dr. Jenn Coughlan (Yale University), recipient of the 2026 BSA Emerging Leader Award! We're honored to recognize them as a rising star in our community. 👏 Learn more at www.botany.org (click Awards). #BSA2026AwardsBlitz #IamaBotanist #PlantPeopleFTW

@roshnipatel.bsky.social and I wrote about using biobanks to learn about evolution, and how those findings shape interpretations of association studies. We focused on estimating evolutionary constraint and relating relating selection on variants to selection on traits and include open questions.

Please repost: My department (quantitative and computational biology at the University of Southern California) is hiring a teaching-track faculty member. The new hire will focus on teaching statistics courses to biology students. Apply by Dec 1 usccareers.usc.edu/job/los-ange...

I’m looking to hire an NIH funded postdoc to join our lab here at Davis (please RT). Ongoing areas of interest include: 1) polygenic signals of selection from time series, ARGs, GWAS, etc 2) The interpretation of GWAS, polygenic scores, & sources of confounding

Today, we at the @arbelharpak.bsky.social & @docedge.bsky.social labs are excited to share our updated manuscript for PGSUS, a tool for diagnosing confounding in polygenic scores (PGSs).

I'm excited to release the newest version of my free applied biostats textbook. It's tidyverse style, clarkia inspired and loads of fun Im putting this down until the end of the semester, when I'll add and polish additional chapters, but the 1st 21 are pretty solid yanivjb.github.io/biostats-book

This is the letter kids got at the end of Dolly’s Imagination Library. I defy you to read this and not cry.

The first manuscript from my postdoc is out (doi.org/10.64898/202...)! We introduce 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞-𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 for studying population structure change over time, with the temporal resolution of Ancestral Recombination Graphs (ARGs). Joint with @jkpritch.bsky.social and @jeffspence.github.io. 1/n

Excited for @gabrielesgarlata.bsky.social’s new preprint on the Genome-Wide Effect of Drift and Selection over a Single Generation 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

For Fall 25, I made a number of in class activities very much on the theme of "Here is Chat-GPT's terrible answer to material we've just covered in this intro bio class. Tell me what's wrong with it". Well, it's a year later, and new models have been released. So let's see how it fares now:

Avocados come in 2 varieties - A-types start each day female and switch to male midday. B-types do the reverse. In work just published from the last chapter of my PhD, we show this system evolved 40+million yrs ago and is regulated by alleles of 1 transcription factor www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I've had "What's up, Doc??" thrown at me winkingly so many hundreds of times that I no longer hear it

The anatomy of an AI-supported academic article is becoming more apparent. I desk reviewed ~70 manuscripts this week for our journal. Reckon 20ish had significant AI assistance. On top of hundreds of others recently I'm starting to see patterns. Are other editors are seeing the same or similar? 1/

I’m looking to hire one or two postdocs - possible projects include pop gen theory, methods development, and human evolutionary inference. Please share, and email if you are interested. More info: evoldir.net/brian/evoldi...

It’s truly astonishing to see how comprehensively the US government is tearing down every part of the system that has made it up until now a world-leading power in science, research, and technological development. The entire world will suffer from this wanton destruction.

I am beyond excited to announce that I will be joining the Dept. of Biosciences at Rice as an Assistant Professor this summer! I’m incredibly grateful to my mentors and colleagues for their guidance and encouragement throughout this journey. More soon—I’ll be recruiting students and postdocs!

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)

I am excited to share my first paper, our new preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... with @arbelharpak.bsky.social and @docedge.bsky.social. Family GWAS provides direct genetic effect estimates and is increasingly important. But how much can we trust these estimates? (1/15)

Re-upping this: applications we get by next week will get full consideration

Super excited to see this out! Fantastic collaboration with Luke O'Connor and trainees Amber Shen and Xinran Wang. Thread with details will come soon, but linear ARG provide a HIGHLY efficient representation of genotype data that can be treated as a linear operator www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Absolutely fascinating how nearly every teacher and professor I know is now overhauling their pedagogy to put everything on old-fashioned paper, while (and in large part because) massive investments in AI like this roll in. I have no idea what will come of this. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/u...

Last weekend I received the Troland Research Award from the @nationalacademies.org. I’m so grateful to the communities who made this work possible. It's strange to receive this award at a time when much of the work being recognized is not eligible for federal funding. My remarks 👇 and a 🧵>>

Congratulations to @jrossibarra.bsky.social on being elected to the National Academy of Sciences! We'll be popping some corn in his honor www.ucdavis.edu/news/nationa...

Over the moon for @jrossibarra.bsky.social ! A great scientist, colleague, and friend. Still terrible puns though.

This is so unbelievably pathetic

Great postdoc opportunity!

I am hiring a popgen postdoc! Looking for a creative scientist to join us at USC to investigate recessive variation and complex traits in model or non-model species. The project is funded by a multi-year NIH grant, contract can be renewed. Job add & details 👇🏽 usccareers.usc.edu/job/los-ange...

Genome-wide genealogies reveal deep admixtures forming modern humans https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.17.719197v1

For an update on our preprint about the mysterious signature SBS5, see: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... New analyses throughout, but see Figure 5 in particular.

Thrilled to have been able to review 'The Paradox of the Organism: Adaptation and Internal Conflict', a volume edited by @arvidagren.bsky.social & Manus Patten. "...the reality that complex organisms function at all feels like pure magic, with the powers of molecular evolution behind the curtain."

General, orders-of-magnitude faster whole-genome analysis with genotype representation graphs https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.10.717786v1

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 🧵👇

Brian Donovan had persuaded high school teachers and education researchers that prejudice might be ended by changing how genetics is taught. www.statnews.com/2026/04/07/b...

Brian and I were grad students together. He's a mensch, and the goons who torpedoed his funding and his livelihood are contemptible.

We're already losing a generation of scientists because of the things this administration has done. Grad students not admitted, faculty jobs not available. It's a crisis we won't see the cost of for 10 years but we'll feel it

Why do schizophrenia GWAS signals look so flat across the genome? In our recent preprint, we explored why psychiatric disorders — and, more broadly, brain-related traits involving the central nervous system — appear to have unusual genetic architectures. 🧵1/n