Jeff Lewis

Today would have been my daughter's 21st birthday. It's a tough one. I miss her like crazy and would give anything to have her chaos back in our lives. What I can do today is ask for your help. We created the Sophie Burdine-Schwartz Impact Fund through the @angelmanfoundation.bsky.social /1

My lab hosted department happy hour tonight and had a fun party game

Second pre-print from the lab! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Excited to share our preprint! “Genome-scale base editing reveals the functional effects of variants in yeast” Using high-throughput base editing, we measured the growth effects of 308,461 variants, identifying 18,009 with significant effects. #Genomics #CRISPR 1/8 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/ There are a ton of cool papers coming out on evolutionary transitions in individuality right now! Here are five recent ones I've really enjoyed, spanning Snowball Earth, volvocine algae, plasmids that fuse into a new individual, the relatives of animals, and... water kefir

1/ How do cells divide when they're stuck in something squishy? Most of what we know about the cell cycle comes from yeast in liquid or on flat plates, but in nature they live in dough, mucus, soil and tissue. This new paper asks what that does to division. Love this one!

Come work with me! TT Professor opening at Purdue University; Quantitative Neuroscience! I’d love to recruit someone working on high throughput image data. It's a great place to be, Purdue is a top-30 US university (12th among public universities): careers.purdue.edu/job/Assistan...

There seems to be a bigger mystery- MYF appears to have dropped for FY2026 overall at NIH but number of new/competitive renewal have not come back to pre 2025 levels- is there an explanation? The MYF reduction is spotty at institute level @maxkozlov.bsky.social @grantwitness.org

⚠️ Another problematic NIH policy needs your attention ⚠️ NOT-OD-26-112: grants.nih.gov/grants/guide... Redefines transient expression as "genetic modification". If adopted, mRNA medicines could be forbidden. Comments close October 19! Please go comment on this! osp.od.nih.gov/comment-form...

Autonomous AI agents discover reverse transcriptases with tandem repeat arrays - Anthropic paper now on bioRxiv www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

One of my favorite papers from our lab. Not only does it show heterogeneity is important in development, but it also points to division of labor: clones divvy up tasks in the organism based on their relative ability to perform well at a given fate! I like to think of it as "embryo economics".

Please comment on "Request for Information (RFI) on Proposed Changes to Reporting Outcomes from NIH Peer Review" by Tuesday (October 13th, 2026). rfi.grants.nih.gov?s=6a2b1c22c3... Here is my comment: 1/6

This is why “presidential priorities” should be greatly curtailed. No, the White House should not get to decide the direction of US science. We should go back to the longstanding method of setting science priories before 2025: legislation, based on open debate in the sci community and public.

Correct. Vought and Bhattacharya want to do to NIH what they have gotten further with at NSF- turn it into a slush fund for their political preferences. But peer review is popular, and it is required by law. So they are slowly chipping away at peer review process in an effort to break it.

Editors and reviewers, just like authors, are quite busy and are trying their best. Being rude with us editors helps no one. Being understanding, on the other hand, goes a long way. Thank you for your patience.

“This guy’s cursing me up. I better reconsider my decision”, said no editor ever…

“no review panels are scheduled, although about 600 proposals are still pending with SBE” So 600 teams of scientists got preliminary data, did analyses, wrote up proposals, got budgets approved, etc, based on NSF saying there were funds in this area. And now their work is just sitting there

One of the coolest topics in molecular evolution

Great point made on the other site. The OpenAI math results can't even be cited. Deepmind has kept a tradition of publishing their results but OpenAI and Anthropic have been reporting these as repos and press releases.

Umm wow. Michael Lewis’s new book says what about NIH??? “He was terrified," said Brought. "He'd never been close to power. He'd never even worked with someone who had been so close to power… He was there because he’d follow orders.”

While book chapters are frequently a bear to write, it’s always thrilling to get a physical object at the end. Thanks to my coauthors Chris and Barbara! We got the intro to yeast chapters for this nice volume from MBAA.

As part of my new chair and centre @uofguelph.bsky.social , we are recruiting a new Assistant Professor through the Canada Impact+ Emerging Leaders program: careers.uoguelph.ca/job/Guelph-A...

At some level, I empathize with the idea that the amount of time spent on these is not necessarily inversely proportional to how much folks care or are interested in the lab. But the generic template, the 'telling, not showing,' and the circular statements all make it impossible to stand out.

Ran is cooking with: ‘the only data point I have about this candidate is this: “they had an important task that could determine the rest of their career, but it required a little effort and personal reflection, so they used AI to complete it.”’

We generated chromosome scale assemblies of house flies with different Y chromosomes. You won't believe what happened next!

A searchable mapping between NIH study sections and program officers that doesn't suck. (Claude one-shot) sashagusev.github.io/po-study-sec...

New paper that includes work from one of my first grad students (Aaron) and one of my most recent (Chris). Experimental evolution really is the gift that keeps on giving. Mutational bias and local genome context constrain adaptive paths in experimental evolution academic.oup.com/genetics/adv...

Thoughtful and well-informed perspective about the goings-on inside NIH. www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

New paper out with @kaylastoy.bsky.social: academic.oup.com/evlett/advan...

Early-diverging lineages provide little information about ancestors academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan... From @phylieu.bsky.social @sinkingdiatom.bsky.social @omearabrian.bsky.social

The RT was annotated in the sequence previously for sure, but what was discovered was the associated clustered repeats that are expressed and appear to associate with the RT, i.e a potential anti-viral system of unknown function but potentially programmable in some way

Science peeps: Looks like SciENcv updated the digital certificate used to sign Biosketch and Current & Pending documents without notification. The old certificate expires Saturday, September 26, 2026. SciENcv docs before that date may fail validation in eRA Commons delaying or blocking submission.

How to destroy strong working relationships, camaraderie and collaboration among staff: Create a system that evaluates staff in comparison to one another rather than based on how well they do their jobs. www.fedweek.com/fedweek/opm-...

Some random thoughts: Good science doesn't always need disruptors. Often, it needs load-bearing walls. You can't pivot away from a failed multi-year experiment or "iterate" your way out of a mentee's PhD. Science needs stable foundations, not churn. Don't break the people building on top of it.

Respectfully, raw quantity has always been a poor proxy for scholarship quality. We all know examples of great scientists who publish a small number of large papers and others who publish many more strong, concise papers. I've been beating this drum for evaluative purposes for a long while.

Ran is correct about this IMO…. There’s use and there’s abuse and there’s laziness with regard to AI and academia. And there’s no one size all answer that works for everything. I do disagree with the footnote but acknowledge old Twitter has been better for science discussions.

Okay, so, Nobel Prize for whomever figures out how to run this horrifying experiment in reverse, where penicillium mold and its cousins are forced to come up with increasingly effective antiobiotics.

The Das lab has 1-2 open postdoctoral positions. Our lab investigates the fundamentals of cell-cycle-dependent cell polarity. Boston College has fantastic resources, including a cutting-edge imaging facility with state-of-the-art microscopes. Please apply here: bc.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

1/17 Submissions are now open for the 2027 Microbial Population Biology GRC! We expect this meeting to be extraordinarily oversubscribed. If you want to come, time is of the essence--apply ASAP! June 27–July 2 • Andover, NH www.grc.org/microbial-po...