I really like CMU’s ad this year! The ‘What if…’ reminds me of ‘I wonder…’ :) m.youtube.com/watch?si=YnE...

Finally official 🥳 www.cs.cmu.edu/news/2025/ca...

The best science is similar. The best science doesn’t necessarily help us solve problems. Much more powerfully, it helps us formulate them correctly.

Have been reading more poetry lately and this one took my breath away this week!!

Serious play 🥰

Happy ❤️ day from our cells! :) Took us a long time but our designs are finally starting to work!

I have to be in Seattle end of February (for an Allen Institute thing)! As usual, I'd love to meet people or catch up with friends! Lmk if in town and want to meet up

Teaching a class on the principles of (genetic and cultural) evolution to (mostly) computer science students. What stories should I tell them? What would you be curious to learn?

Sneaked a quick visit to my DC happy place: the Rothko room at the Phillips Collection. 3 new (temporary) paintings! 🥰

My favorites (by far!) this year.

🥰 My students. Missing some people in this photo, but we are growing as a group. And hiring!

Beautiful David Whyte book on work as pilgrimage

We just got some of the best reviews I’ve ever got for a paper and I am 💪💪💪

🎉 Happy new semester! 🎉 Feeling very grateful I get to (co)teach/talk/think about some of my favorite things this semester!: From mechanistic towards less interpretable ML models, how do we go about building useful, predictive, beautiful, elegant models in biomedicine?

My first time in this part of the world for a conference (NAS and Kavli Foundation Frontiers of Science) and feeling very grateful: learned and experienced SO much! 🥰

At a Kavli/ National Academy of Sciences frontiers symposium and learning that even Lincoln wanted scientists to work for free (‘out of a sense of civic duty’) 😅

Yesss to gardens and (fake) birdsong in airports 🤗

Last summer I got curious about the immune system and a colleague gave me Janeway's Immunobiology as summer reading. (Such an amazing read!) This year I want to learn more about the brain. What should I read?

It’s a bit surreal to be in Athens and read about the lives of people from not that long ago and also read about how we can now make transparent mice :) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-023-01846-0

Other people’s friends: let’s talk about generative AI and alignment and gravitational waves! My friends: here’s a cool leaf I saw …

I really love the feeling of waking up early and just meandering around a new city as people start their daily normal (with pastries, of course!)

❤️

Sitting next to these three women who just had the most heartwarming airport reunion (Hallo, madchen! 🥰)

How do I prompt engineer ChatGPT to help me ask better questions?

Who needs a bottle of champagne when you have Leonard Cohen

I am very tired and very bored in the Vienna airport and it feels quite glorious!

Yesss to long-form texts and yess to bringing back romance in texting and yesss to words like cerebral and ethereal and yes to don’t-fuck-with-me vibes!

The guy at the Vienna airport who just ordered a full bottle of champagne at 9am: 🙌

‘Turn upside down for new perspective’ 🥰

On well posed problems

‘The pattern seems universal:’ the hard work, the prepared mind, the being stuck, the shift, the letting go.

Rainy days in the office with nothing be to do but play and science 😍

On wasting time

How beautiful:

So excited for this one! Never been to that part of the world before so any advice / reccs / travel companions welcome 🤗

To be paired with Rumi

I read this recently and ❤️: ‘Belief clings, faith lets go.’ I think it beautifully applies to science & venture into the unknown: We can venture while still clinging to the body/system of beliefs that exist (we believe the Earth is flat) or we let go and truly leap into whatever we might discover.

Feeling invincible, ama

That moment in time when the semester is over and my heart *aches* for Europe. And for my people! And by ‘my people’ I obviously mean the retired men of the Mediterranean who drink coffee and play games and watch me write and science all day :) Soon, my people, soon!

In a day

Many centuries later, I am reading what another person dreamed and thought and wrote.

My first time at the Phillips collection in DC. The wax room helped me breathe. And one of the Rothkos made me cry. ❤️!!