In these dark times, it comes as a rare pleasure to highlight @natanaels.bsky.social ‬ & @marcdemanuel.bsky.social's work on germline and somatic mutations in humans. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

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.

The university of California is a powerhouse of innovation, healthcare, and social mobility for California and the US.

I'm excited to announce that I'll be starting a lab at UCSF in the @ihgatucsf.bsky.social and @ucsf-epibiostat.bsky.social in July. We'll work at the intersection of statistical genetics, population genetics, and machine learning.

Jennifer Blanc and @jeremyjberg.bsky.social use theory and simulations to study the process of testing for an association between polygenic scores and axes of ancestry variation when confounding factors are present. Learn more about their findings in #GENETICS: buff.ly/EmKpXyP

Welcome to the Modeling and Theory in Population Biology workshop! We’re excited to have you join us at NITMB for this week’s event. More information on the workshop and today’s schedule are available at www.nitmb.org/modeling-and...

Harvard has just under 6,800 foreign students enrolled. Every one of them would have to give up their dreams of an education in the US or transfer elsewhere, if Noem's attack on Harvard is upheld. None of them have done anything wrong, they're just collateral damage to Trump.

Excited to share our work on using pathway-specific polygenic scores to discover gene-environment interactions www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Yesterday, the NIH R35 “Outstanding Investigator” grant to fund scientists in my lab studying antibiotic resistance was terminated for reasons not related to the content of the science, or any actions taken by me or members of my lab

Amidst all the terrible and terrifying news, so lovely to hear of @jkpritch.bsky.social's election to the National Academy of Sciences. Congratulations!

In population #GENETICS, Q-ST and F-ST calculations help compare the amount of trait differentiation on one or more traits in genome-wide genetic variants. Using simulations Liu and @docedge.bsky.social, show the effect of various choices made while computing Q-ST. Read more: buff.ly/OwrU9oB

In a new #GENETICS research, @dandanpeng.bsky.social, Mulder, and @docedge.bsky.social evaluate the performance of several ancestral recombination graph (ARG) estimation methods used for determining the historical time course of a population-mean polygenic score. Read more: buff.ly/ztrRU83

I am recruiting a quantitative/computational postdoc to my group at UCLA. This is a great opportunity to work on foundational theory, methods, and software in statistical genetics. Link to apply: recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF10275. Please repost!

I'm honoured to have been elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It's a wonderful recognition of all the hard work by the amazing folks in the lab over the years. A huge thanks to them all.

My paper about type I error rates in Qst/Fst comparisons is now published in @genetics-gsa.bsky.social. Check it out here: academic.oup.com/genetics/adv...

I don’t care whether he’s innocent. I care that he was denied the fundamental human rights of due process and equal protection under the law. Until those conditions are satisfied he is accorded the presumption of innocence.

Inspired by others on here I wrote a short op-ed in support of federal research funding for a local newspaper in small town PA where I grew up

An update to our preprint led by @jinguohuang.bsky.social and @nicole-kleman.bsky.social on interpreting SNP heritability in admixed populations, now with HE regression and LD Score regression in addition to GREML.

Editing a genome to Ernst Mayr's genotype so that when clone Ernst grows up, he can tell us whether these are dire wolves

Really excited to see this work, led by Mike Grundler, published! It's a new method for inferring the geographic locations of shared genetic ancestors. In the paper, we and use it to infer the geographic history of human genetic ancestry www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A stunning assault on the First Amendment Before Rubio's confirmation, senators and pundits acted as though he was a "sane," "rational," "normal," "moderate" nominee. He's constantly showing himself to be a right-wing extremist.

One problem with the idea of reserving due process for law-abiding people is that due process is how we figure out which people are law-abiding.

1/ Hey y'all, I'm excited to share my latest paper, which is out now in PNAS! We introduce FAVA, a statistical framework to measure compositional variability across microbiome samples. If you want to measure variability across a stacked bar plot, FAVA is for you! Paper: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

VERY excited to announce a pre-print that represents the culmination of several years of work*: “On ARGs, pedigrees, and genetic relatedness matrices” doi.org/10.1101/2025... Led by Brieuc Lehmann with contributions from @epigenci.bsky.social Luke Anderson Trocme Jerome Kelleher and Peter Ralph

Unless these are stopped this is the end of the post-war university

I'm excited to share our new preprint on the molecular evolution of heterodichogamy in two wingnut genera of Juglandaceae. Heterodichogamy features two morphs synchronously alternating male and female flowering phases in time to generate disassortative mating. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Look, folks, this is it. The entire ballgame. Either we're a Republic of laws & the Constitution, or we have a dictator. This is fascism, & the impeachment vote should be happening today. Every single university president in the country should be out, in front of microphones, condemning this.

This is unconstitutional and unprecedented. But it's consistent with Trump’s desire to stifle protest and silence views he doesn't agree with. With such little regard for the Constitution and case law, it's no surprise that the Trump administration prefers to see what it can get away with.

I feel weird posting about this given...well, everything...but very proud of this work. Fun fact: I completed most of this project while working at Rutgers as a DEI hire (first-gen college student). www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Dear Manager 1) I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, 2) I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, 3) I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, 4) I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, 5) in short, I was afraid.

Dear manager: 1. We ride with kings on mighty steeds across the devil's plain 2. We've walked with Jesus and his cross; he did not die in vain 3. We've run with wolves 4. We've climbed K2; even stopped a moving train 5. We've traveled through space and time, my friends, to rock this house again

Excited to share a couple of new items (links below): 1. Our work on gene-environment interactions in the UKBiobank is up at the American Journal of Human Genetics 2. Our work on modeling ancient human population size history is up at Molecular Biology and Evolution

It’s been buried in all the news today, but every scientist in the US should pay attention to this: Mike Lauer went out on a limb for us all, sending out a memo saying institutes should start awarding grants. And it looks like Trump/Musk fired him for that. 🧪

Think of a polygenic score you care about. Are direct genetic effects driving variation among people in this predictor? Or perhaps other, confounding factors? We at the @arbelharpak.bsky.social & @docedge.bsky.social Labs developed a method to tackle this question. [1/n]

“The distribution of highly deleterious variants across human ancestry groups”. Preprint with Anastasia Stolyarova and @gcbias.bsky.social: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Congrats to @jeffgroh.bsky.social et al on publication of "Ancient structural variants control sex-specific flowering time morphs in walnuts and hickories" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I went to post about the National Japanese American Memorial in D.C., which is beautiful but usually missed by tourists. It is a deeply staggering admission of guilt and a warning to future Americans. I went to link to the inscriptions and- Well, they took the site down. www.nps.gov/places/japan...

Our daughter's wonderful teacher and her family lost everything in the Eaton fire. If you can spare a few dollars to help out, I would be grateful www.gofundme.com/f/help-the-l...

Most of the talks from our Oct meeting are now online, with a few more to come: www.precisionmedicine.columbia.edu/videos

Preparing a quiz of the year (who isn't?) and this last line is just a thing of joy www.economist.com/britain/2024...

And I-eee-I Had a feeling like Jeffrey Long I-eee-I Had a feeling that I could not reach one not reach one pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20504197/

First major paper from the lab! The work was led by super talented postdoc Maria Akopyan. She explored how reference bias skews estimates of diversity, demography, divergence & recombination rate with help from @elliecat.bsky.social & awesome ungrad Matthew. Full thread coming soon 🤓

Optimist: the cup is 1/2 full Pessimist: the cup is 1/2 empty Theoretical population geneticist: I keep getting that the cup is actually completely full?

Gould and Lewontin (1979)

New work from my lab, led by graduate student Janis Liu. Janis studied type I error rates in Qst/Fst comparisons (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

For those in the NY area, SAVE THE DATE (& register) for a Symposium on Human Genetics at Columbia University: Oct 10-11 2024. Talks will also be streamed.

Dan is a gem!!! You should hire him.

Bo Winegard wrote an article defending "race realism" that was so bad it got me to write a blog post for the first time in 2 years. And because it's my birthday tomorrow you all have to read it, as a gift to me.

We have a new preprint up. This one is a hypothesis paper, addressing one of the bigger unanswered questions that people have been asking me for the last 15 years: why has complex multicellularity only evolved in eukaryotes, never in prokaryotes? 1/33 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...