Save the date! #PEQG26 June 9-12 2026 in Asilomar, CA. Happens only every 2yrs, but is my favorite conference. Full website coming soon, and registration and abstract submission opens November 14, but I'm allowed to tease that keynotes will be @jnovembre.bsky.social @jennytung.bsky.social and me!

The ethical, legal, and social implications program successfully protected society from many risks of harm in genomics. Alondra Nelson argues we need such a framework - post haste - for AI in this thoughtful letter to Science Magazine : https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aeb0393

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is stepping up to fund some of the health equity grants that were fed to the wood-chipper. If your racial/indigenous health equity grant was funded, then that funding was rescinded, consider applying! 🧪 www.rwjf.org/en/grants/ac...

BREAKING: The Supreme Court, on a 5-4 vote with Justice Barrett as the deciding vote, allows the Trump administration to cancel NIH grants as part of the administration’s attack on “DEI” while litigation proceeds. Five justices write. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p...

happy to say my new department is hiring an associate/full professor: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30328 please apply!

A United States Senate investigation has identified more than 500 credible reports of human rights abuses in US immigration detention since January, including alarming allegations of mistreatment of pregnant women and children.

We're seeking our next EiC! Are you passionate about human genetics & open science? Apply at apply.ashg.org/a/page/hgga-...

A postdoc position in genomics available at our infrastructure in Uppsala, Sweden! An interesting R&D role a bit outside the traditional academic environment, great colleagues, work at the forefront of (long-read) sequencing. www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

Shannon was a PhD student at UC Davis, you can read their story here: www.instagram.com/p/DNgLXeBJF5x/

happy to say my new department is hiring an associate/full professor: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30328 please apply!

@jeremymberg.bsky.social on last night's @standupforscience.bsky.social action hour: "You can always get another job. You can't get another soul." I am proud to know scientists who are digging deep into their values and linking hands. We will not leave anyone behind in this fight.

Incredibly proud of this work where we developed a method for understanding the information contained in millions of genomes. Another example of NIH funded research.

🚨 Science is under attack 🚨 Trump wants to slash NIH by 38% + NSF by 55% & has already withheld $8B. Join us Aug 14 @ 6 PM ET to call South Asian voters in swing districts & fight back. RSVP: zurl.co/qMFOc

Please repost and amplify ! We are hiring a faculty position in Evolutionary Genetics in the Biology Department at U of South Carolina! Check us out and come be our colleague! sc.edu/study/colleg... Deadline for applications is Oct 1 #AcademicJobs #EvoBio

"Women letter writers use less doubt language, fewer personal pronouns, more other pronouns, and a more positive tone than men."

If someone you know buys into claims about "genetic optimization" of embryos using polygenic scores of cognition, just send them our 2024 paper on Beethoven & musicality. We wrote it to help communicate limits of individual-level genetic predictions & complexity of links between DNA & behaviour. 🧪👇

🚨 Our parent-of-origin study is out in Nature! 🧬 Maternal and paternal alleles can have distinct — even opposite — effects on human traits, revealing a hidden layer of genetic architecture that standard GWAS miss. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... Highlights below!

Assistant Professor position in Traditional Ecological Knowledge at Stanford University. Applications due Sept 30, 2025 facultypositions.stanford.edu/en-us/job/49...

And, of course, the fact that it's not really possible should be a good reason not to sell it!

Another uncritical puff piece that lacks the bare minimum in checking the science. And to pit ethicists against parents/ kids...detestable. "Move fast and break things has not worked very well for Silicon Valley in health care (...) the things you are breaking are babies." - @hankgreely.bsky.social

or require proof of safety and efficacy, which would prevent their sale now. That's the easy solution, now and for an unknown time forward. If it did work, the discussion gets trickier, but we don't need to reach that now.

Human embryo editing against disease is unsafe and unproven - despite rosy predictions pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39779987/ - with @hankgreely.bsky.social and @shaicarmi.bsky.social

All kinds of eugenics cheerleaders quoted in the piece. Thank goodness for more sober minds, like @hankgreely.bsky.social:

A detail just slipped in towards the end, that the woman leading one of these companies (Cathy Tie) is He Jiankui's ex-wife... 🤔

Bittersweet to be leaving @docedge.bsky.social after a wonderful postdoc, but excited to share that I'm joining @uoregon.bsky.social next month as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Data Science.

New additions in fellowships, industry, and academic jobs! If you've recently gotten a fellowship or a job (research, industry, PUI) please consider contributing your application materials. It's a helpful resource for those on the job market! github.com/RILAB/statem...

Stanford has not always conducted itself honorably as an institution, but I am daily awed by the levels of principle and commitment that exist among our students.

Arun Durvasula, PhD, of @uscpphs.bsky.social writes, "Lifestyle factors play a large role in determining who gets a disease and who doesn’t. But they are far from the entire story." A fascinating read about the relationship between genetics and our environment. ⬇️ 🔗 #Science #MedSky #ResearchSky

evergreen tweet but especially relevant in light of recent events

Excellent takedown of Nucleus Embryo by Arthur Caplan and James Tabery. The problem with Nucleus isn't eugenics. It is rescued from its own eugenic intentions by the fact that it won't work. It is bogus science.

New snake oil just dropped And proudly boosting the nazi approval, bold business strategy!

Columbia University has handed over its undergraduate admissions process to Donald Trump and his MAGA allies, who will now decide at their sole discretion whether the university has admitted enough white people. It's no longer an independent institution.

People often intuitively interpret genetic ancestry PCA plots as simple genetic distances, but this is not always the case. Below are random pairs of individuals that are far apart in PCA space (lines) but actually have fewer total variant differences (numbers).

A brief musical note: I’m very excited to share that my brilliant wife, a pianist and composer, has just released her debut album featuring works by Iranian women composers, including one of her own. Here is the link in case you’d like to take a listen: www.navonarecords.com/catalog/nv67...

New paper by Luke O'Connor @lukeoconnor.bsky.social and Guy Sella @gs2747.bsky.social

Coastal California is both one of the safer places in the country when it comes to avoiding climate disasters and one of the places where it's easiest to live a near net-zero lifestyle. If you're opposed to making room for a lot more people there, you're not serious about climate adaptation.

1. Kevin Gross and I just posted a new science-of-science preprint. This one explores the looming peer review crisis. As many of you know, it's becoming significantly more difficult for journal editors to find scholars willing to serve as peer reviewers for submitted manuscripts.

NEW: In an unprecedented move, the NIH will soon disinvite dozens of scientists about to take positions on advisory councils that make final decisions on grant funding. NIH staff were told to select others aligned with the Trump administration and told to expect placements by political appointees.

BREAKING: Scientists are staging a “science fair” in the lobby of a Congressional building to tell elected officials about the critical knowledge the US will lose because their research grants have been canceled.

the new york times got rid of its public editor some time ago, so I took the position out for a spin www.theverge.com/culture/7000...

Without exaggeration, the last 50+ years of biological research completely discredits every race science claim. It is the single biggest indicator of being a malicious dullard and a reactionary ideologue. The fact I’ve had to dedicate a single minute of my career to addressing it is absurd

As someone who has spent many hours teaching students about the history + limitations of the US OMB race and ethnicity categories, this is making my blood boil. The NYT should be ashamed of themselves. College sophomores can do better.

Courage is contagious. After the NIH Bethesda Declaration, hundreds of EPA staffers stood up with their own Declaration of Dissent which was sent to Administrator Zeldin a few minutes ago. www.standupforscience.net/epa-declarat...

Something I think about a lot: I 100% believe there is good teaching and bad teaching and we should always try to be better teachers. But also, learning hurts sometimes. It just does. You’re changing a mental model. You can’t just slip it into a classroom Jeopardy quiz like veggies in pizza sauce.

Have you worked with human genetics data? Consider taking this short survey to help us better understand how folks are using population descriptors! 🧬💻🧪

Socialism, tonight, defeated barbarism. After the two-decade midnight of 9/11, dawn is breaking.

There really is something special about what Zohran and Brad are showing the rest of the world what it still means to be a New Yorker and an American. A Jew and a Muslim modeling a politics of mutual respect, rejecting cynicism. Human decency has been taking a beating but she's not out just yet!

These discussions always bring me back to a remarkable passage in which artist Zoe Leonard recounts what David Wojnarowicz said to her about the importance of embracing beauty in difficult times, which I think is worth a read right now (from @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social's book "Orwell's Roses")

Rümeysa Öztürk wrote an op-ed critical of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. She was arrested by ICE and was in detention for six weeks. This white nationalist student wrote a paper that argued the Constitution applies only to white people. He won an award.