Matt Rockman

What the heck is this?? It’s beautiful and I need to know! It was in my marine plankton sample this week. #marineplankton 🦑🔬

I’m looking to hire a bioinformatics postdoc! The broad goal of the lab is to understand the genotype-phenotype map, with a focus on how variation in gene expression and chromatin modifications can drive differences in phenotypes. (1/3)

This explains why I enjoy George Elliot so much. [touches earpiece] What? Oh for real?

New Perspective w/ @petrovadmitri.bsky.social and Paul Schmidt! We ask what evolution-in-action studies tell us about an old question: what genetic variation matters for fitness, and what maintains it? ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

How much of the tree of life did you eat? Phylodiet scores a meal by phylogenetic diversity: type what you ate and it builds the dated tree of the organisms in it, from ~3,300 edible eukaryotes, back 2 billion years. Last night's dinner, below. 🧵 mjhickerson.github.io/phylodiet/app/phylodiet.html

An hour ago I just wanted to open Adobe Acrobat but now I want to open Adobe Acrobat and for bad things to happen to Adobe executives.

Is there a word for this kind of naturally occurring data viz?

We have a tenure-track faculty position in Evolutionary Biology in Columbia's E3B Department. Application deadline is October 15. Come be our colleague. Please RT! apply.interfolio.com/193016

The Goodheart Lab is seeking a full-time Postdoctoral Fellow on an NSF-funded project to study the process of kleptocnidy, the theft and storage of nematocysts, in nudibranch mollusks. Project link: www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...). Application here: careers.amnh.org/postings/4908.

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

Interesting sea cucumber with a collector's behavior! in the Atlantic, a similar genus, Oloughlinius does something with pteropod shells! 1365m North Tutuila Flank, american samoa

Richaud et al. report loss-of-function alleles of the gtnt-1 orthologs are found at low frequency in C. elegans and C. briggsae, demonstrating repeated molecular evolution leading to parallel evolution of viral resistance. 🔗 academic.oup.com/mbe/article/... #societyjournal #celegans

New collaborative paper from the lab on gecko sex chromosome and genome evolution! 🧪🦎 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Now out @molbioevol.bsky.socialGenetic correlations summarize how traits covary, but they can hide different underlying architectures. Distinguishing those architectures can reveal distinct mechanisms generating—and potentially constraining—trait–trait relationships. academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-...

For folks interested I just posted my keynote on ARGs from #PEQG26 on youtube (with permission). Thanks again to @genetics-gsa.bsky.social and organizers for what was a wonderful conference (except for the 24hrs prior to my talk when I was too nervous to sleep or think straight) youtu.be/ntJOdZd0mwc

Jersey City >>>

Foggy morning worm collecting in Bayonne, NJ

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...

Skill issue

Interested in genetics, diversification, and speciation? We're hiring a Research Associate to help with our projects, including the convergent evolution of fruit color. Come and work with us! Feel free to contact me with questions. (Reposts appreciated!) Link: indiana.peopleadmin.com/postings/33973

How do you do, fellow kids?

I find this new discovery of a transmissible cancer in catfish fascinating. As it’s described as the fourth example of contagious cancer, let me share this phylogenetic tree of species infected by such rarities.

Excited to announce that this fall I'm starting my lab at the University of South Carolina! Our hybrid wet/dry lab will explore fundamental topics in animal evolution, looking at how different evolutionary processes combine quantitatively [pleiotropic conflicts, mutation bias, etc.].

I had a wonderful time at @northamptonshirenhs microscopy group meeting today, where I had the privilege of doing a presentation about marine plankton, and sharing a live sample with them! Here are some of the organisms we saw. #marineplankton 🦑

Hey look, our paper about the Single-cell Pediatric Cancer Atlas that we at @cancerdatalab.bsky.social have been working on for a while is out! www.cell.com/cell-genomic... It's a pretty good resource, if I do say so myself, and we are expanding: if you have data you want to share, get in touch!

I just walked across Woodside and Astoria, and Queens is absolutely not beating the allegations (greatest city in the world)

Francophone worm evolutionary biologists lighting it up at evoworm2026 in Hamilton Ontario Canada

We are excited to share our pan-pangenome paper! This is a long time coming work of my postdoc with the incredible @psudmant.bsky.social, and a stellar group of people! I hope you enjoy reading it! And I am excited to talk more more about it this week at #PEQG26!! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

As a skeptical Australian might say, nor way! (Taking the scenic route to the Michael Sars Symposium in Bergen)

Very happy to announce a big new paper from the lab, led by grad students @smishra677.bsky.social and Laia Pomar-Pallarès (in collaboration with @roblanfear.bsky.social). We introduce a new way to study introgression, with accompanying software (DAFT) 1/n 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

There's something mesmerizing about the way this marauding Acotylean flatworm flows over the across the terrain, like a liquid with frills.

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

this is a great book — highly recommend it

Researchers writing about their work frequently rely on clichés. Yet, little is known about how such clichés affect

Come work with us!

It's looking increasingly likely that I'll be hiring a 3-year computational pop-gen postdoc/PhD-level scientific programmer to start this Fall (2026). If you or someone you know is defending soon, and looking for a position, please DM/write to me! Thanks!

No Kings New York

Now published @genomebiolevol.bsky.social: our paper showing that the genes for critical, ancient components of protein synthesis machinery - tRNAs - are bombarded with mutations, leading to remarkable allelic diversity that likely has functional consequences! academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

Really excited to see this work out now in Ecology Letters! May be particularly interesting to those thinking about life-history trade-offs and eco-evolutionary feedbacks, and how those may interact to maintain variation within natural populations. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Applications are open until Mar 31! Spread the word

I defended my PhD 10 years ago today. That was the least remarkable thing that happened that day. Sharing something I wrote about it last year. Since then "the horrors persist but so do we." And with dignity.

I am SO THRILLED to share our first fully-lab lab paper!!!!!! Led by @hybridzones.bsky.social & @hagarsoliman.bsky.social, w/ a major assist from @pfschwarz.bsky.social!!!!!!!!!!!!! Read more below, if you're curious (you should be- it's AWESOME!!!!!!!) link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Our paper is out in @Science! The Atlantic silverside spans Earth's steepest latitudinal gradient in coastal sea-surface temperature. Despite high gene flow, populations show clinal genetic variation in multiple locally adapted traits. doi.org/10.1126/scie...