A relatively random thread about the degrees of NIH Directors. Not surprisingly, almost all NIH Directors have been straight MD holders. However, there have been two MD-PhD holders (actually one PhD, MD and one MD, PhD, but no combined MD-PhD holders) 1/13

Super excited we made the cover of @natcardiovascres.nature.com! Work represents ADAR1 RNA editing within the vascular wall

Excited for a major milestone in our efforts to map enhancers and interpret variants in the human genome: The E2G Portal! e2g.stanford.edu This collates our predictions of enhancer-gene regulatory interactions across >1,600 cell types and tissues. Uses cases 👇 1/

Hard to understate how wonderful it is to see our manuscript in print today @natcardiovascres.nature.com. We discover ADAR1 to control dsRNA sensor MDA5 in atherosclerosis, creating a new paradigm of endogenous dsRNA sensing as a causal mechanism of disease. Let's get into it 👇 #RNAsky rdcu.be/eGEyu

I am tremendously excited to share our work revealing the epigenomic landscape of single vascular cells. We discover that enhancers are not only cell type but vascular site specific and regulate the genetic drivers of disease risk. Let's dive in! 🧬👇 #epigenetics www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

www.cbsnews.com/video/saving.... This video shows the real and devastating impact of the cuts to the NIH funding. My heart aches from hearing the story of Natalie Phelps who has stage 4 colorectal cancer and how she and her family are being impacted.

Senate committee endorses NIH budget increase, rebuking Trump administration’s proposed 40% cut www.statnews.com/2025/07/31/n...

This is the stupidity of it all—carve outs for AK make no sense for the people of Alaska when the UW/Harborview/Seattle Children’s system is the referral destination for anything too complicated for Anchorage

National Science Foundation staff were notified that their office space will be taken over by Department of Housing and Urban Development. It's unclear where the 1,800+ NSF employees will work. Renovation plans apparently include a personal gym for the HUD secretary & family eos.org/research-and...

Atul Butte died yesterday. The world lost a giant. A big bear of a man. With a huge smile. With love for everyone. With energy that could power a room. I loved everything about Atul. I loved how he was always happy. I loved how excited he was about science and helping people.

If you weren't angry enough already, here are the rates of non-competitive renewals through May. 4008 Non-competitive renewals were due to be funded in May. The total funded was 99! Some is due to terminations, but most is due to slow grant making due to DOGE review and other impediments. 1/2

The NIH represents incredible value for the US economy and for the people of the world. We need to safeguard its future and that of our students and trainees. @rachelkeranen.bsky.social and I share our thoughts in today’s LA Times. www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

Senator Durbin noted that some (I believe Republican Senators) had indicated the US had been doing more than its share of biomedical research and it was time for other countries take a turn. I felt I had to interrupt to respond...

Delighted to share our latest work deciphering the landscape of chromatin accessibility and modeling the DNA sequence syntax rules underlying gene regulation during human fetal development! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Read on for more: 🧵 1/16 #GeneReg 🧬🖥️

Even as someone who has followed everything going on at the NIH very closely, this story made my heart sink. I hope Americans watch this and see the impact of shutting down science. This effects everyone.

Tons of fun at our annual #MyHeartCounts 5K! Amazing event and the one time a year I remember that racing a 5K is….hard, lol. Hit my goal time and looking forward to next year! @stanfordmedicine.bsky.social

Please join us next Tuesday April 29th at 1 pm EST for our next Symposium on Precision Genomics: CRISPR and Single-Cell Technologies in Vascular Biology, featuring #AaronJames @bgcoonlab.bsky.social @chadweldy.bsky.social and moderated by @vsleekim.bsky.social ! Register here: tinyurl.com/yhcdr68a

Here is the formal announcement. Jay Bhattacharya and RFK Jr. need to explain. Who exactly are they trying to "make healthy?" www.whi.org/md/news/whi-...

Happy to be part of this NAVBO Symposium on precision genomics (Tues, April 29, 2025). Excited to present on the epigenomic landscape of single vascular cells-ranging from single cell, regulatory networks, and ML prediction of variant effect, so much to talk about! members.navbo.org/calendar-of-...

Sigh. This study claiming a lack of association between ApoB & plaque has blown up in the media with the typical podcaster/youtuber grifters jumping on it. Beyond the obvious (small N, non-randomized), here are a few reasons the study doesn't show what people claim 🧵: www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/...

Thrilled to share the🥇paper from the lab @ahajournals.bsky.social. Here we continue to unravel the mysteries of the 9p21.3 CAD locus showing it drives VSMC transition into an osteochondrogenic state, promoting calcification. @clintomics.bsky.social @UWMadison CRB. www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/...

From an operational security perspective, this is the highest level of fuckup imaginable. These people cannot keep America safe.

There are days in life that shake you. I’m shattered 💔 to share that I just found out that the US Government terminated my 2024 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (~$2 million), threatening my long-promised assistant professor job at Columbia University & academic career... 1/🧵

Yeah nice work @shoaclarke.bsky.social and team! Great to see this out in print!

I am not going to call this a Bluetorial, because I do not want to sully that term (which, at least I, find joyful). Let’s call it a Orwellial.

Francis Collins, the NIH Director for 12 years, led the Human Genome Project and other NIH efforts for 32 years, resigned today. Key words from his resignation letter www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/u...

Stanford's president has announced that the university is enacting a staff hiring freeze, citing NIH funding cuts to "indirect costs" of research, as well as a proposal to Congress to increase endowment tax universities pay. "Taken together, these are very significant risks to the university."

The Trump administration's efforts to slash research funding have US graduate students, postdocs and other early-career scientists fearing for their careers. Some might leave the country -- or abandon research altogether. https://go.nature.com/43ao2zq

Almost all grant-review meetings under Trump 2.0 remain suspended at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), preventing the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research from spending much of its US$47 billion annual budget. https://go.nature.com/4gM6oW4

Proud to share this new pub from my lab - “Novel Therapeutic Approach Targeting CXCR3 to Treat Immunotherapy Myocarditis” www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/.... Congrats to first authors Vivian Huang and Yin Sun. Our first foray into targeted therapy for this devastating autoimmune condition

Yes

Instead of cutting costs for working families, Donald Trump is slashing the federal investments that fund their lifesaving care, fuel their local economy, and lower their health care costs. It’s cruel, short-sighted, and will cost jobs and devastate millions of families.

This is what amounts to an ILLEGAL & indiscriminate funding cut for research centers everywhere. It will mean shuttering labs across the country, layoffs in red & blue states, and derailing lifesaving research on everything from cancer to opioid addiction. We all need to speak out to save lives.

Science is absolutely key to the US's success but this government's intention to now dramatically reduce the part of the federal grants that go to the university (in addition to the researchers; the "indirects") is like removing the unseen roots of a tree and expecting it to continue to flourish.

1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%. I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Raining and 20+mph winds on the coast? Perfect for the SF half marathon! @stanforddeptmed.bsky.social Cardiology improving their VO2 max this morning. A sign from a spectator read “Seems like an ineffective way to warm up”, true very true

Our new paper in Circulation shows how #ADMET-AI predicts cardiotoxicity of drugs and generates interpretable insights www.ahajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1...

This isn't mine at all, but the Magic School Bus TV cartoon, which inspired untold millennials including myself, originated as an NSF grant 🧪 www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...

Modern GWAS can identify 1000s of significant hits but it can be hard to turn this into biological insight. What key cellular functions link genetic variation to disease? I'm very excited to present our new work combining associations and Perturb-seq to build interpretable causal graphs! A 🧵

Just in time for new year's resolutions, @euanashley.bsky.social and @pbs.org share insights into just how profound #exercise can be for the human body. #newyear2025

Extracellular matrix in vascular homeostasis and disease by Lu Zhang, Jing Zhou & Wei Kong: rdcu.be/d5oD9

Bringing in the new year on the coast! So much science to do in 2025, ready to get after it!

A coding variant in BAG3 protects against dilated cardiomyopathy but increases risk for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and is found to modify the effects of pathogenic TTN variants jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Our ChromBPNet preprint out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Huge congrats to Anusri! This was quite a slog (for both of us) but we r very proud of this one! It is a long read but worth it IMHO. Methods r in the supp. materials. Bluetorial coming soon below 1/

Spatial omics of human arteries to understand what drives atherosclerosis: highlights role of the microvasculature (vasa vasorum), adventitial inflammation, migration of vascular smooth muscle cells (and more) nature.com/articles/s44...

“In the end, science doesn’t move one paper at a time; it moves one inspired person at a time. That’s really our currency as scientists—and it’s our duty to pass that inspiration along to the public. We need to make science a much more human endeavor, because one inspired person…

Titin is massive in size – at 3,800kD it’s the largest protein in your body and really important for heart function. In a new paper, led by Yuri Kim and the Seidman lab, we describe an enhancer critical for normal Titin expression. Here is the overview (1/n) Paper: www.jci.org/articles/vie...

What do GWAS and rare variant burden tests discover, and why? Do these studies find the most IMPORTANT genes? If not, how DO they rank genes? Here we present a surprising result: these studies actually test for SPECIFICITY! A 🧵on what this means... (🧪🧬) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🎆4 years in the making! Thrilled to share the 1st spatial single cell aging clock ⏰ www.nature.com/articles/s41... We use #AI + spatial transcriptomics to discover what makes some cells age faster/slower in the brain 🧠 Led by Eric Sun and awesome collaboration w/ @brunetlab.bsky.social🧵

Head into next week with the confidence of a crow. 🪶