Snow in the San Francisco Bay Area. Pictured here is Mount Diablo

We are very happy to see our study finally appear online @nature.com! This has been work of nearly 10 years in collaboration with the National Institute of Genome Medicine 🇲🇽, the National Cancer Institute 🇲🇽, the @sangerinstitute.bsky.social and others ⬇️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Blue sky needs to improve its suggested accounts feature. Now that the starter packs have dried up, there is no easy way to find scientists with dozens to hundreds of followers. All my suggestions are for large media accounts.

I found the prime use for AI tools -- understanding tax law!

Grant rejections are a part of the job, but it is so painful to have a grant administratively rejected, especially for unspecified reasons. www.statnews.com/2026/02/11/n.... I feel for the poor students. This has happened to me three times (thread below)

Oncotarget has fallen hard! I remember when it first came out, it was popular journal, known for its quick review. It reached an impact factor of 6.7 in 2012. To put this in perspective, Cancer Research had an impact factor of 8 in that year. I just checked, and its IF is down 1.6!

Is the NIH welching on the new biosketch format? They still use a template from 2021 as an example biosketch. grants.nih.gov/grants-proce...

Grants should have page limits on letters of support. If you need more than 3 pages (1 page per letter x 3 letters), then maybe you should not be leading the grant.

I am just reading this paper, and it is absolutely wild. Tumor cells acquire mutations in mitochondria, and then transfer them to T-cells, and the mutant mitochondria drives dysfunction in the T-cells?! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Recent review from HTAN. Linghua Wang with a timely review on spatial omic technologies Cancer Cell. www.cell.com/cancer-cell/...

A new perspective is out by Kai Tan and Lichun Ma from the Human Tumor Atlas Network discussing the emerging concept of the cellular neighborhood. www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Keaton Wagler with the best college basketball game of the year and ESPN doesn’t even have a picture.

A new preprint from the lab, with postdoc @deboraycb.bsky.social and collaborators @aidaandres.bsky.social and Tim Connallon: “Characterising the detectable and invisible fractions of genomic loci under balancing selection” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Thinking about the soft money problem in science. My institution will send 100 emails to faculty list serves guilt tripping someone to volunteer to teach before offering a dime of compensation.

Reading the Mike Lauer interview. A very informative take from an insider on the state of NIH. www.statecraft.pub/p/whats-wron...

Likewise, Congressman Cole from Oklahoma is the chair of the overall House Appropriations committee. If you can, reach out to his office as well. It is noteworthy that OMB is willing to veto a bill over a minor-seeming NIH operational issue. This makes me think this is part of a bigger plan...

The Luka Doncic for Anthony Davis trade looked bad from the get-go for the Mavericks, and it is aging even worse.

I think I have reached the point in my career where I have reviewed more grants than I have had grants reviewed.

This is probably overkill, but when reviewing grants, I randomize the order in which I read them. I worry that order matters. E.g. for the first grant, you do not have an overall sense of the quality and possibly err on the side of an average score.

We (U.S. citizens) literally pay the tariffs. I bought something from Etsy from an international seller. UPS guy came to my door holding the package and gave me two options. 1. Write a check to UPS for the tariff or 2. refuse delivery and send it back.

Great to see research on tanning bed and cancer risk from @bishaltandukar.bsky.social @shainlab.bsky.social on today’s @ucsanfrancisco.bsky.social Town Hall www.ucsf.edu/news/2025/12... #UCSFCancerProud

I know for me sports talk was the only thing I missed about Twitter until I found this list. If you're missing having NFL memes and analysis in your feed in-between the politics and whatever reason you made a Bluesky account in the first place, Mina has an A+ list of peeps to follow.

Proud to share our new paper in Science Advances. We show that indoor tanning beds cause widespread mutational damage across the skin to increase melanoma risk, especially in body sites that rarely see sunlight. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #Melanoma #SkinCancer

Hitting 1800 elo in style with a smothered mate!

What drives the earliest steps of skin cancer development? In keratinocyte cancers, the first selected mutations almost always hit TP53 and NOTCH genes—plus occasional hits in chromatin remodeling genes or the Hippo pathway.

I remain stunned by this finding -- melanocytes have 5x more mutations than keratinocytes, despite the fact that the cells are next to each other in the basal layer of the epidermis, [theoretically] experiencing the same doses of UV radiation.

I am thrilled to share the latest manuscript from the Shain lab, describing the genetic changes that transform a keratinocyte into cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (and everything in between). www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Too small!

Today at 4pm: Cancer Center Friday Seminar | Ashley Kiemen, PhD, Johns Hopkins Inst for NanoBioTechnology "Integration of histology and multiplex imaging for targeted understanding of pancreatic cancer progression" cancer.ucsf.edu/seminars Host: @shainlab.bsky.social @ucsanfrancisco.bsky.social

Nancy Pelosi is retiring after decades of service. I still remember when I received my first R01, and she sent me a congratulatory letter!

1/ Should you get feedback on your grant proposals? Sure — but do it right. And take positive feedback with a grain of salt. 🧂

What is your favorite gene expression deconvolution software?

Hey @bontahill.bsky.social , who are you rooting for? Stanford or FSU?

A summary of training, fellowship, and career development awards Fiscal year 2025 (compared to fiscal year 2024) 1/12

Best team.

A bundle of interesting papers just dropped on Nature. Collectively, they describe the somatic mutational landscapes normal tissues.

🚨 New paper alert! Sex and smoking bias in the selection of somatic mutations in human bladder www.nature.com/articles/s41... by @raquelbmi.bsky.social, @ferriol.bsky.social et al (in collaboration with Rosana Risques lab in @uwmedicine.bsky.social)

Dear collaborator, I am writing to confirm support for your grant. Before I write one sentence describing my tiny role on your project, please read 3 paragraphs about how awesome your grant is, which I definitely wrote myself.

What a satisfying mate!

Can Nicotinamide Lessen the Risk of Skin Cancer Development? ascopost.com/news/septemb...

I felt it #moderate

Earthquake! Bay Area

RFK said he would determine the cause of autism by "September" and Trump has pre-announced a major announcement on autism to come on Monday. 🍿

STmut is now working on Visium HD data! Infer copy number from spatial transcriptomics data at unparalleled accuracy and resolution

Does anyone else have dogs that ruin their sleep score? I was all good till 7am, but then an intermittent Mastiff with a HrV of 300 took over

After clearly saving changes to an NIH RPPR form, the system inevitably gives this warning.

Serious question for the crowd: has a K-awardee ever actually done the coursework/mentor meetings they promised in the training plan? Or is it just a rite of passage?

1,333 Notices issued by the NIH in the past week. Including 116 new R01 projects. reporter.nih.gov/search/6lVq4...