Seconded!!! And that’s even if an email address was included on that paper. Add your email to your orcid, lab webpage, bluesky, or use GitHub to host a really simple (and free) website with your contact details.

"Most top achievers (Nobel laureates and world-class musicians, athletes, chess players) demonstrated lower performance than many peers during their early years. Across the highest adult performance, peak performance is negatively correlated with early performance" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I am not sorry. This is simply true. Academics should be able to write fluently and express themselves clearly and academics should do their own work. It’s literally our job. It’s what we trained until 22nd grade to do. This is a simple observation that should require no explanation or defense.

Today I am very proud to announce the release of the Antibiotic Resistance Microbiology Dataset - Mass General Brigham (ARMD-MGB; physionet.org/content/armd...) , as part of an NIH-funded collaboration led by Jonathan Chen at Stanford. (1/6)

Defunding scientists for the nationality of who they co-author with or who they train. One of the most radical attack on freedom of speech in US history. A far right nationalist destruction of US science. Such a shameful time to be an American that this racist stupidity has become mainstream.

Hi, I'm setting up a peer support platform for ECRs in ecology & evolution in China, aiming to address a huge problem --- academic burnout driven by hyper-competition and a system that often prioritizes elite background/title over actual research. #ECR #AcademicSupport #科研互助 #ecology #evolution

Service of Remembrance in Liverpool this morning.

Apart from the AI junk part… the notion that one should not offer a potential mechanistic explanation for an observation, without first spending years & (unavailable) $$ trying to test possibilities before sharing the observation with others (who may be better equipped to investigate the mechanism)…

Belgian AI scientists are advocating *against* the use of AI in academia. “If independent thinking is no longer encouraged at university, where would it?” apache.be/2025/10/24/b...

Our pipeline for years has used PoreChop for adapter clipping because dorado doesn’t remove all barcodes. Mainly troubling if the Dorado demultiplexing/trimming leads to an appreciable % of reads demtiplexed into the wrong sample before PoreChop, but doesn’t look like that happens at a high rate.

Celebrating the first wet-lab experiment in my group. Successfully carried out by Sophie, my first MRes student and research assistant in Liverpool @liverpooluni.bsky.social, and me. Thanks to colleagues in the APT group of ISMIB @livuni-ismib.bsky.social for sharing their experience. #nanopore

The Art of Data Visualization with ggplot2: A free online book by @nrennie.bsky.social that guides us through the entire process of creating plots, including why certain decisions were made, using real datasets that have been part of #TidyTuesday. Very excited to get stuck into this one. #rstats

Here we go! 📝📝📝 🚽 Scrap the Bathroom Ban🚨🏳️‍⚧️ Our work so far is already working (see here: archive.ph/gaCN4) Now we’re demanding that any new Code must outline how providers can lawfully *include* trans folk in their services. ✍️ Write to your MP with our easy tool: actionnetwork.org/letters/scra...

Delighted to see our paper studying the evolution of plasmids over the last 100 years, now out! Years of work by Adrian Cazares, also Nick Thomson @sangerinstitute.bsky.social - this version much improved over the preprint. Final version should be open access, apols. Thread 1/n

Excited to share our latest preprint on agtools, an open-source Python framework for analysing and manipulating assembly graphs. (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #Bioinformatics #genomics #assembly #assemblygraphs #software

For anyone who has used pling for comparing plasmids using rearrangement distances ("how many structural events apart are these plasmids"), here's how to tweak parameters, and integrate it with typing info, and the host phylogeny www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... github.com/iqbal-lab-or...

I am so glad to see our paper on two nationwide healthcare-associated outbreaks of Burkholderia cepacia complex linked to product contamination in the UK and Ireland, 2010–2023, is finally published. The UKHSA team has exhibited great resilience in the delivery of this work. doi.org/10.1017/ice....

Delighted to share our recent publication on group B Streptococcus: Evidence of a novel sublineage of Streptococcus agalactiae in elephants from zoo populations in Germany. It is a great pleasure to contribute to this collaboration. doi.org/10.1099/mgen...

Plasmids can be lost from a bacterial community even under positive environmental selection: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

My latest blog posts: The abilities and character traits required to do well in a PhD program. blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/phd-level-...

Along with this: it's tempting to collect technical skills like pokemon, and there certainly is focus on work with breadth that rewards this. But don't forget about the value of depth. Hard to do good science without deep understanding of what you're doing. That only comes from years of immersion.

🧵 So you want to be a computational biologist? 1/ It’s not about pushing buttons. It’s late nights, failed scripts, breakthroughs, and detective work with data. Let’s dive.

Sefton Park, #Liverpool

Fun fact: In reference 28 here, I used the word strain to mean something similar to the lineage level because a reviewer refused to let me use the word lineage. There is still a lot of confusion in this space, and I strongly recommend defining whatever terminology you use.

New paper out! 🔈🔈📣📣 Plasmids promote antimicrobial resistance through Insertion Sequence-mediated gene inactivation. Combining experimental and computational approaches, we unveil how two of the most prevalent bacterial MGE accelerate the evolution of AMR. 🧵👇🏻 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The iconic Victoria Gallery & Museum at the University of Liverpool, 8 August 2025

Jesus, I thought we were past this. The only measure of success we have in academia is authorship. I don’t assess tenure, but in my view authorship should be given to anyone who made the study possible. Every paper is a huge collaboration. Authorship costs you nothing, so best to acknowledge it.

Pleased to say that our preprint benchmarking Nanopore data for MLST, cgMLST, cgSNP & AMR typing from bacterial isolates is out! TL;DR you can get almost perfect results from 50x depth using live SUP basecalling with a GPU in under 20 hours #microsky#IDsky 🦠🧬🖥️ /1 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Prof Lord Ara Darzi, writing in @observeruk.bsky.social, warns that axing the Fleming Fund, Britain’s landmark antimicrobial resistance initiative ( #AMR ), would be a deadly retreat. With 5 million annual global deaths, the stakes couldn’t be higher. observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

A simple rule for better public speaking: If you’re using slides that contain text, you must read it out, word-for-word. clauswilke.substack.com/p/read-out-a...

Health research saves lives, while the wars kill people. One T-90 tank costs about $4.5 million. With the money spent on killing each other, how many research projects we can conduct to save patients? How many future skilled professionals we can support? How much healthcare expense we can avoid?

Just out: latest blog for Voices of Academia ✍️📖 "I thrive in my job, and I am good at it. However, my fixed-term contract is harming my mental health." voicesofacademia.com/2025/06/28/h...

Recommend an insightful paper: "Are reads required? High-precision variant calling from bacterial genome assemblies" by @rrwick.bsky.social et al. doi.org/10.1099/acmi...

Protect Trans Scientists. cowritten with a lot of amazing people (I tagged those I could find but there are so many more incredible folks) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @thepunkscientist.bsky.social @jlw-ecoevo.bsky.social @bfrancescol.bsky.social @drsueishaq.bsky.social

Biosciences Building, University of Liverpool

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 h\t @gmeric.bsky.social

From today, every paper submitted to Nature -if published - will be accompanied by peer reviewers comments & authors rebuttal. We started the trial in 2020; we now want to open up the review process & showcase its role in shaping & improving papers 🧪 #AcademicSky www.nature.com/articles/d41...

New Comment—Reinforcing social safety for transgender and non-binary communities amidst global legislative threats tinyurl.com/v3jvjzs5

"We are speaking on behalf of hundreds of NIH staff who are standing up together to say: WE DISSENT. I am so scared about doing this but I am trying to be brave for my kids because it's only gonna get harder to speak up." Thank you to Dr. Jenna Norton and NIH scientists for your courage!

I have signed the petition opposing the funding cuts to NASA. I have been deeply fascinated by their work since childhood and firmly believe they deserve strong support for their essential contributions to our understanding of the universe as well as the public engagement.

There has been lots of talk about this article. I agree that there are short term costs to shifting field, but this analysis does not capture the potential long term benefits. My advice: Follow your interests and instincts, not citation metrics!

Our new paper on the global epi of IMP carbapenemases. We originally called this paper: ‘Planet of the IMPs’ as IMPs are now everywhere. We found IMP variant-specific distributions across species, plasmids, mobile elements and geography www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... #amr #amrsky #IDsky

I appreciate the offers from other scientists to help Harvard (students, labs, etc) through this attack, but what would be most helpful is for you to use your position to contact your elected representatives and make it clear this fight isn't just Harvard, it will affect you, and their districts too

📰 PhD opportunity with Brendan Collins (@breconomics.bsky.social) combining infectious disease epidemiology, economics & policy modelling. 💻 Develop economic models & define cost-benefit for emerging zoonotic infections by considering trade-offs between health outcomes & macroeconomic outcomes.

Really great to see this pneumo WGS paper out www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... in Lancet Microbe @lancetmicrobe.bsky.social Shout out to all my coauthors Joshua C D’Aeth, Marta Bertran, Fariyo Abdullahi, Seyi Eletu, Erjola Hani, Shamez N Ladhani, David J Litt especially Josh. #pneumo

Happy to share this resource of 568 closed Klebsiella pneumoniae species complex hybrid assemblies, including 1416 plasmids! ⭕️🦠 We hope this will be useful - short reads, long reads, hybrid assembly or all combined - for your own tools/validations 🥳 #Microsky journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Myself and @yekwah.bsky.social are running our bacterial AMR databases and genotype prediction course again with @eventswcs.bsky.social. Completely free and study at your own pace. Check out the course objectives below and sign up before June 9th to join us! www.futurelearn.com/courses/anti...

1/12 🎉 We're excited to announce our Genome Medicine paper benchmarking 1000+ metagenomes (DNA) and metatranscriptomes (RNA) from infectious intestinal disease patients against pathogen diagnostics. The full dataset is public to accelerate pathogen discovery & surveillance: doi.org/10.1186/s130...

New preprint! Autocycler is a tool for long-read consensus assembly of bacterial genomes. It's like Trycycler but can be run fully automated (without any human intervention). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/6)

We're disappointed to see Ben Barres's powerful book "The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist" among the ~400 titles removed from the Naval Academy Library. Needless to say, we're proud to have published his book and will keep it — and his memory — alive.