day 3 of postdoc: got asked several thought provoking and interesting scientific questions by some very smart trainees. Immediate response was “oh I am definitely not the person to ask about that”, only to realize I literally now am the person to ask about that 😬😬😬

tag urself I’m the mutation in a single gene that causes one of 5000 human diseases lol

First day of work!! Got my ID card and my email and scheduled meetings so I’ll call it a win. lucky to be here, honored as always to represent the #RareDisease community 🥲 #CRISPR

Okay so why was I the only one in the theater tonight who gasped when Ryan Gosling ran a centrifuge with two tubes in the whole thing, sitting right next to each other? Sorry was I the only scientist in the film society theater tonight??

showed up to my little apartment in Berkeley to discover it was covered with hundreds of flies 😭 thankfully it was deep cleaned today and it looks great now but I was making SO many TH Morgan/fly genetics jokes for the last 24h 😭 I’m calling apartment “the fly room” for obvious reasons

folks are forgetting jay bhattacharya’s reaction to the CDC attack. says a lot more than his empty words. these lies were cited by the shooter as his motive for firing 500 rounds at CDC staff and killing a police officer

Today is my last day in Philadelphia after five incredible years. Saying goodbye to my friends over the past week has been heartbreaking. I’ve developed a life I really love here. Here’s hoping I’ll be back some day.

took 11 hours but WOOHOO

wake up babe new *inheritance pattern for #MarfanSyndrome* just dropped! SO interesting. Familial #Marfan syndrome with an unaffected parent. The potential for trisomy FBN1 (would aorta and joints be extra strong?!) I love old-school #HumanGenetics. #Genetics pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Now that I am packing up the last of my moving boxes, I am excited to share that I will be joining the @urnov.bsky.social Lab at the CZI-IGI Center for Pediatric CRISPR Cures at UC Berkeley @innovativegenomics.bsky.social as a Postdoc/Team Lead in just a few weeks!

We're collaborating with the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network to create the Center for Pediatric #CRISPR cures, which will bring personalized genomic medicines to children with rare diseases. Learn more https://ow.ly/X60p50YnzgT#CRISPR #RareDiseaseDay

easiest way to boost my mood is to call me Dr Lauren Testa, btw 😂 Thanks to all for your kind words about my talk. I felt so supported by the #RareDisease community today. #RDDNIH

This week's cover @thelancet.com

Emotions have been running high lately. Yesterday was my last day in the Musunuru Lab, and saying goodbye to my labmates and friends was heartbreaking. Our group is full of so many kind, brilliant scientists who made me a better scientist and person.

This piece by @jeneeninterlandi.bsky.social is one for the ages. The damage Donald Trump (under the guidance of Russell Vought) has done to biomedical research is profound and will be long-lasting. It is a national tragedy to be measured in the sick and the dead. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/o...

Update, my #RDDNIH talk is now at 2:20PM instead of 10:50AM this Friday, Feb 27! Live-streamed and in-person. Looking forward to it! #RareDisease #Marfan #CRISPR

as a #raredisease patient and as a biomedical scientist whose salary depends on NIH funding, i do not agree with 99.99% of the folks at HHS. but the plausible mechanism pathway announced today is a promising first step toward meaningful therapies for devastating genetic diseases.

excited to be giving a Rare Story at 10:50am at #RDDNIH! I don’t get to publicly speak about what it’s like to be a #RareDisease patient working on genetic therapies very often so I’m quite excited!

hola from paradise 🩷✨

the rollout of the mRNA vaccines was one of the greatest public health triumphs in history and the end result has been the all-around triumph of the antivax movement and I will never get over it

For both #RareDisease month and #MarfanSyndrome awareness month, I thought I'd share this article I wrote for the @ahajournals.bsky.social about being a patient-scientist working on developing genetic therapies for my condition and related conditions.

happy Marfan awareness month from me and my now partial weight bearing left knee almost stuck the move though, but my leg completely crumpled in the fall

The scale of the loss is unimaginable. www.science.org/content/arti...

Alex Pretti’s coworkers take a moment of silence this morning

This is my favorite part of my #PhD defense presentation, my acknowledgement to NIH where I started my scientific career. I am proud of myself for using my platform to speak out about the tragedy of science in this country. @standupforscience.bsky.social

Yesterday was perfect. My whole community came out to support me, and as I looked around at my closest friends and family during our four course dinner, I asked myself over and over “how did I get so lucky?” Dr. Lauren Catherine Testa, Ph.D.

I'm going to be sharing several projects tomorrow, including some unpublished Marfan work I did early on in my PhD. I learned a lot from the project, but therapeutically it didn't pan out how I'd hoped. At first I was almost embarrassed to publicly share a project like this but you know what?

it’s HAPPENING

In fencing (at least in high school and college club fencing), if the referee isn’t sure about a call, they can throw the point out. It’s frustrating but fencers tend to respect that more than making something up. I wonder if this could apply to other sports…

Look not to be all tin foil hat but idk if I like that ONE team in the nfl is acclimated to high altitude and the rest aren’t…

so proud of this team and this work!

Yeah I’m speechless not gonna lie

please let this be the season of the pitt where a young woman of completely average stature shows up to the ER with the worst chest pain she's ever had in her life and none of the doctors think it's marfan because she doesn't look like she has it, but it is and everyone examines their own biases

I am an approved adopter at a dog rescue in my city and the rescue posted three adorable black lab puppies today and I am genuinely devastated that I can't get one because getting a puppy three months before moving across the country is a terrible idea :( did i make the wrong career move

these PhD thesis defense stress dreams are something else….last night I had a dream that three girls from my college sorority changed my slides right before my talk because they wanted more pictures of themselves in my slides LOL

literally need to postpone processing the events of today because I still have not processed the trauma of the last year!!!

Defending my #PhD, “Therapeutic Genome Editing for Hereditary Connective Tissue Disorders”, three weeks from today on Friday Jan 23 at 11AM EST! please DM me for the Zoom link! Thankful to everyone whos supported me along the way🩷 I cried during my practice talk so you KNOW it’s gonna be good! 😂

Since McDermott is 7-1 without glasses I took my glasses off so now I can’t see the tv but I can hear the audio!!

not a doctor but I do not recommend that anyone with Marfan shovel snow or watch the bills game today lol

Zoe Weissman, a sophomore at Brown University, joins us to discuss the shooting on Brown's campus in Providence, Rhode Island. She was in middle school in Parkland, Florida during the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School massacre. She is now an advocate for gun control and gun violence prevention.

I just learned that a PhD student at Hopkins, Ethan Neumann, died of the type of cancer that he had been studying for his PhD. He was in the program I would have been in if I hadn’t gone into Penn. It’s tragic to hear of a fellow patient-scientist passing away. I admire his bravery on his journey.

ARE YOU JOKING

I got home at 10pm last night after one of the craziest weeks of my life: five flights in seven days, including two cross-country flights (one at 6:30am), and within 48 hours I boarded 3 flights in 3 different states! It was HARD but it was absolutely incredible and I am thankful for every moment!

fun climb today that put juuust enough pressure on my hip joints 😅 Lauren 1, Marfan 0!

happy thanksgiving from the WINNER OF THE COOKIE BAKING CONTEST

my team vs my PI’s team today. David vs Goliath. This is my Super Bowl 🫡

ngl i kind of regret sharing work i am extremely proud of on the same day that the epstein files were released 🙃🫠

Excited to share the second half of my #PhD work, "Liver-directed base editing of ABCC6 prevents ectopic calcification in a variant-humanized mouse model of pseudoxanthoma elasticum", published recently in Molecular Therapy: Nucleic Acids! @moltherapy.bsky.social 1/

Can personalized treatment become the standard of care? Just published in @ajhgnews.bsky.social, @kiranmusunuru.bsky.social, MD, PhD, and @ahrensnicklas.bsky.social, MD, PhD, explore their vision for the future of interventional genetics: www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltex... #ASHG #HumanGenetics

🧬Proud to share "Improved specificity and efficiency of in vivo adenine base editing therapies with hybrid guide RNAs" my 1st first-author paper of my PhD, co-first-authored with the brilliant Dr. @mnwhittaker.bsky.social, is out today in Nature Biomedical Engineering! www.nature.com/articles/s41...