Excited to highlight a new paper from my graduate student Sergio Bernal Garcia who, together withLuke Hammond, developed RESPAN, a new deep-learning pipeline automating the segmentation of neuronal morphology and dendritic spines from fluorescent microscopy images: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Weird vans with business names I don't know, palm trees next to a classic brownstone, spaceships on the lawn, Elvis blasted at all hours of night. The Roku City I knew and loved doesn't exist anymore.

New preprint alert! The uterus expands ~500-fold in pregnancy, yet we know little about how pressures are sensed. Led by @yunxiao-dr.bsky.social, we show PIEZOs are required for contractions and birth in mice, with dual roles of PIEZO1 in muscle and PIEZO2 in neurons www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Newest paper from the lab, looking at how somatosensory neuron development and function is altered in a Pten haploinsufficient model of ASD. Work was all done by @alefdzphd.bsky.social, who just started an independent position at UTRGV. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

“HSIs enroll over 5.6 million students nationwide, including two-thirds of all Latino undergraduates in the country.” hacu.net/cutting-350m...

Back when I was trying to be a Kant guy and at all the talks scholars threw around first Critique passages they memorized in German and English that I hadn't, I always wished Saturday morning teen shows would come up so I could rap the City Guys theme from memory so they knew I knew stuff too.

Just heard the same from NIDA PO: “Your application will get council clearance on Sept 3, however it's unlikely the funding plan will go through in the fall, most likely funding decisions will get pushed to later in 2026, once NIH has a budget.”

Why do #StemCells have lower levels of facultative #heterochromatin, defined by H3K27me3, compared to differentiated cells? By artificially lengthening G1 phase, @4everbiochemist.bsky.social &co show that G1 length is an essential determinant of H3K27me3 landscape @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4lKfztO

🎉 Big news! 10 postdoc fellows from 5 Latin American countries have joined the 2025 class of #PewLatinAmericanFellows, and we’re proud to share that one is our own @mary-flores.bsky.social! Learn more: bit.ly/45rgN5L @cumedicalschool.bsky.social @cuanschutz.bsky.social @chrmosimann.bsky.social

I’m honored to be selected as a Pew Latin American Fellow 2025! 🐟🧬🔬 With this opportunity, I will continue my postdoctoral training in the @chrmosimann.bsky.social lab at @cupediatrics.bsky.social/ @cudevbio.bsky.social , and it opens the door for me to return and established a lab in LATAM. 🇲🇽😍

Sharing our newest study led by the incredibly talented @federicamosti.bsky.social investigating new molecular mechanisms of human brain development. We discover a human-specific enhancer HAR1984 that influences chromatin looping to promote cortical size and folding! www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

If I had whatever 'PhD level intelligence' means colloquially, I definitely wouldn't have gotten a PhD.

Very interesting study published in nature this week. Using a murine model the authors show that respiratory viral infections like flu & COVID-19 do more than inflame airways, they may awaken dormant breast cancer cells in the lung. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It’s this shit. This right here. I’ve given my entire professional life to serving this country’s educational needs. But being brown in this country means I’m less than. And will always be.

Congratulations to Dr. Katie Ranard, postdoctoral fellow in the @bruceappel.bsky.social lab, on receiving a NINDS K99/R00 award for her proposal entitled, “Impact of nutritional status on mechanisms guiding brain development”! @cupediatrics.bsky.social #zebrafish #devbio

🔬 Calling #CellBiology and #EpithelialCell enthusiasts! My new review article w @lehtinenlab.bsky.social dives into a fascinating, somewhat niche, but critical secretory mechanism by the Choroid Plexus (ChP) that's been historically confusing: apocrine secretion! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

My first journal cover :) @natneuro.nature.com @lehtinenlab.bsky.social www.nature.com/neuro/volume... Volume 28 Issue 7, July 2025

4% payline demoralizing for reviewers - review 9 grants each taking 3-4hrs (total reviewed by all is 90) flying to DC, a hotel conference room to discuss the top half of grants (45) 15 min each, 3x a year for 4 yrs. Paid $300. 4% = maybe 3/90, 0-1 that you reviewed funded. I couldn’t.

Check out our latest work co-led by @dcsoto.bsky.social and @jmuribescr.bsky.social identifying hundreds of human duplicated gene families using the new T2T-CHM13 assembly, with a focus on those potentially contributing to brain evolution 🧪: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lTQtL7PXu...

Glad to have a paper in this volume about Matt Brown's work (@thehangedman.com). Following up on something Matt mentions in his book, my paper is about noncognitivism and some arguments from the 1950s and 1960s for and against a role for values in science. #HOPOS link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

How do RGCs in the neocortex 'know' it is time ⌚ to start making oligodendrocyte precursors cells? Check out this great work by my colleagues @luulitran.bsky.social & @thefrancolab.bsky.social to find out!! Congratulations! 🧠

In this study, Tran et al. show that Notch signaling controls the switch from neuronal fates to oligodendrocyte fates—in response to Sonic hedgehog signaling—during late embryogenesis. Learn more here: ➡️ tinyurl.com/gd352555

Nique!!!

Myelin–axon interface vulnerability in Alzheimer’s disease revealed by subcellular proteomics and imaging of human and mouse brain www.nature.com/articles/s41...

After spending most of the last 5 months writing grants (x6) and reviewing grants (x23), I finally escaped to the mountains this weekend. We hiked to waterfalls, explored caves, rode horses, and soaked in hot springs. And I didn’t open my computer for 4 glorious days.

PDGFRα is required for postnatal cerebral perivascular fibroblast development https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.07.658411v1

Congratulations to Christian Torres Lopez on giving a fantastic final PREP presentation! Christian is an amazing postbac scholar in my lab who will be starting his PhD @cuanschutz.bsky.social this fall! We still have him for another month or so, and then he’s off on an amazing adventure! 🤩💫

Another amazing discovery from @lehtinenlab.bsky.social about how the choroid plexus shapes brain development. 🤩

New Neuron issue! Discover methods for accessing neuronal and non-neuronal cell types in the CNS from the BRAIN Armamentarium Consortium. 🧠🔧 Read insights from Bosiljka Tasic & @gordfishell.bsky.social: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... Explore the full issue here: www.cell.com/neuron/current

An enhancer-AAV toolbox to target and manipulate distinct interneuron subtypes

CCN1 forms a complex with GPC4 and heparin to fine-tune signaling activities for embryonic cortical neural stem cell maintenance https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.16.654402v1

Brain mechanisms underlying the inhibitory control of thought www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I am an adjunct professor (for a living if you can call it that), and I am more working-class than a hundred fucking car dealership owners because I'll work until I drop dead, I'll probably never own a home, and spend like six of my ten-hour work day on my fucking feet talking to people nonstop.

Neuronal activity influences the growth of #myelin sheaths along axons by signalling through metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 (mGluR5) on oligodendrocytes 🧪🧠 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thrilled to share our latest study out in @natureportfolio.nature.com led by the fantastically talented Jing Liu. Our study provides insight into a long standing question in biology: What molecular features make us uniquely human and how do these function? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The canceled grants aren't a perfect 1:1 with DEI-related projects, but what a reminder of who is and isn't doing the work to make science more equitable.

4/10 Using experimental manipulations, we found that PV interneurons scale the inhibition they receive to maintain stability. When the activity of a PV interneuron increases, it “requests” more inhibitory inputs from other PV+ interneurons, effectively rebalancing its activity

1/10 Our latest research, led by @martijnselten.bsky.social, identifies a mechanism through which Parvalbumin (PV) interneurons regulate their activity in the #cortex. This is the story @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41... ⬇︎ 🧵 @devneuro.bsky.social @kingsioppn.bsky.social @erc.europa.eu

Pre-game fuel before #SWSDB2025. Always have to get a burrito de carne desebrada at El Modelo when in Burque. @bruceappel.bsky.social behind the camera. #SWSDB.

#SWSDB2025 at @unm.edu is about to kick off! #devbio @socdevbio.bsky.social

O Captain! My Captain!

It’s been a hectic few days, here’s a quick thread on our latest endeavour exploring GABAergic neurogenesis in the human cerebellum published in @pnas.org. Key takeaways: Purkinje cells are born very early in human development — much earlier than previously appreciated. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A colleague at Stanford’s business school used The Stanford Daily to argue—poorly—against DEI. The piece was riddled with historical errors and left one searching for fact, so I broke my public writing hiatus to respond. I hope you’ll read and share the piece. stanforddaily.com/2025/04/22/w...

The Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) has been ended. drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2025/04/14/t...

You can stream Landeskog playing with the Colorado Eagles tonight for free.

The NIH-funded Haskell-KU Bridges Program was terminated. It was one of the longest running programs of its kind, placing >130 Native American students into STEM labs over the last ~25 years. So many alums spoke of this program as being the entry point to their interest, and later, careers in STEM.