I'm looking for a PhD student to do some trailblazing at the frontier of personality genomics and lifespan gene-environment transactions (start Fall 2026)! If you want to work with me: psychology.msu.edu/graduatestud... (PS @drmeltemyucel.bsky.social is taking a student too, in moral psych/dev!)

Latest processing of UK Biobank brain imaging data - now with 82,000 usable first-scan datasets. Correlating brain IDPs with 13,000 non-imaging variables gives a rich manhattan-stye plot. 324,000 Bonferroni-significant associations.

⏰Volume 55, issue 4 of Behavior Genetics is out, with studies exploring 🧵⬇️ link.springer.com/journal/1051...

📱 The association between social media use, wellbeing, and depressive symptoms, and the extent to which genetic and environmental factors contribute to this association by @selimsametoglu.bsky.social and colleagues

"...there is the possibility of real damage if selecting for one trait turns out to create risks for others." (On the top of all other ethical issues begin with).

GPT-5 regularly asks you why you are not citing its work. GPT-5 always believes your estimator is biased. GPT-5 has more of a comment than a question. Sometimes GPT-5 tells you stories about grad school and expresses regret about getting a PhD. GPT-5's mom wonders when it will start making money.

How much do people know and understand what their administrative and health data is used for? Another story of consent for genetic data use this week.

Next on my reading list.

Not sure who came up with "Manhattan Plot", but in 2014 I coined the alternative term "Nijmegen Plot" (inspired by the Dutch town where I live) to describe underwhelming results from our earliest genome-wide association scans of language/reading traits.

We have a new preprint: this work is especially dear to my heart, as it results from the data collection pipeline we established at the Netherlands Twin Register, which enabled us to collect Facebook posts and likes (paid for with plenty of blood, sweat, and tears...) osf.io/preprints/ps...

This evening on my way back home, listening to the audiobook version of 'the Last Question' from Isaac Asimov. Today It inspires very differently than before considering the current rise in the use of LLMs by lots of us.

🧵 Just published! (And yes, it has something to say about the social media use + wellbeing debate 👀) Are the links between social media use (SMU) and wellbeing (WB) or anxious-depressive symptoms (ADS) partly driven by genetics? Just checkout this thread:

What is common knowledge in your field but shocks outsiders? There are two children in your child's classroom with a Developmental Language Disorder ... but probably no one, not even the teacher, knows who they are. kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10....

I am very pleased to encounter with this work today! A very smart approach to leverage LLMs power to study psychopathology...some good motivation to dive into the old shelves to see if any of my old projects involved open ended questions...!

Does anyone know of a cohort that has data on the personality or temperament of parent-offspring trios? Genotyped data would be a plus!

Our new study in Molecular Psychiatry, in 1528 children and their parents (@ntrbiopsy.bsky.social) shows that indirect genetic effects—where parental genetics shape offspring traits via environmental influences (genetic nurture)—impact DNA methylation of children. doi.org/10.1038/s413... (1/5)

I am writing book(let) beginners guide (as in I also started as a begginner) on DNA/Protein language modeling/neural networks. I am 12 chapters in. I'll publish it, data, models, scripts, notebooks freely online. I need ppl to read/critique/review chapters, you'd be credited as editor/author obv.

Brilliant work

Want to get out of Dodge? Do a postdoc @uio.no! You will be using the MoBa study and registers to study intergenerational transmission and GxE for #MentalHealth and #education using @behaviorgenetic.bsky.social and @pgcgenetics.bsky.social approaches. Please share! www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Very comprehensive meta-analysis and methodologically rigorous study. Also, it is a good resource for people like me who wants to have a smoother start on the subject (first language development and parent input)

Deep neural networks and humans both benefit from compositional language structure. New paper by @lukasgalke.bsky.social, Yoav Ram, and @limorraviv.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1038/s414....

This great paper shows how controlling for genetic confounds can reveal *true* environmental effects, which we can then target effectively for intervention.

🔊Next conference of the European Social Science Genetics Network (ESSGN) in Bristol, 22-23 May. ✅Keynote by @michellemeyer.bsky.social ✅Panel on the current frontier of MR w/ George Davey-Smith (Bristol), Dalton Conley (Princeton), and Alice Carter (Novo-Nordisk). essgn.org/essgn-confer...

If you didn't know this, please read the article and then use it to refute the delayed language myth every time you hear it. For me, that was just last week - it just refuses to die...

I wrote about bridging ideographic (dynamic systems) theory in psychology and genetic epidemiology when I couldn't sleep. its about trying to bridge scientific worlds, getting ppl to recognise shared goals, and trying to take English ppl to a good bar in Amsterdam and failing (spelling quality: 3am)

This sounds brilliant