Scientific figures can strongly influence how research findings are interpreted. This ‘How to’ Comment article in Nature Human Behaviour outlines a practical strategy for creating figures that communicate clearly across audiences and scientific contexts. go.nature.com/3R00b1t #Academicsky 🧪

New post on the blog! We discussed why artificial cells could be a good candidate to engineer artificial tissues. Click the link below, and translate the page! 52haftabilim.wordpress.com/2026/04/21/y...

Yay🎉 I won my first-ever poster prize at (possibly) the last conference I attended as a PhD candidate 😁 You can see the study I presented on my (prize winning 🙃) poster in the link below; I 3D printed organelles in synthetic cells. pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

This is totally worth 5 minutes of your time and probably should be in every biology class. Nature is awesome. neal.fun/size-of-life/

I was at Ghent to talk about our project where we use a special printer to pattern artificial cells at Imperial College London @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social. It's a collaboration between me, Jorin, Rav, and Alex. Cannot wait to share the results! @ravinash.bsky.social @biopatternlab.bsky.social

It's an interesting short thread here, starting a discussion about how the scientific figures are becoming more and more monotonous due to everyone using the same scientific illustration softwares more often.

Our latest paper is out! We froze complex multiphases in time to study them in coacervates! Check it out here: doi.org/10.1002/advs...

Check out our latest paper! We not only prepared artificial cells but also 3D printed artificial organelles inside of them. This is one of my favorite projects from my PhD, and I am so happy that I can share the published version now. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Getting an email in the early morning, saying that they accept your manuscript for publication is one of the greatest ways to start your day! 🥳

The results of brain drain couldn't be more clear. One country's loss is another's win. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The 2025 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi for their groundbreaking discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance that prevents the immune system from harming the body 🧪 www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medic...

Yingtong just published a very nice article, and I contributed to that with SEM micrographs! In the paper, he introduced a strategy to optimize the optical absorbance of organic photothermal agents (OPTA) by adjusting the morphology of polymer assemblies. Check it out here: doi.org/10.1021/jacs...

Ah well... I only post academic stuff but the passing of Ozzy Osbourne is significant enough to break that. Such a massive name...

Writing a manuscript takes time, and organizing figures covers a large portion of that time. Each time I export a figure, a suffix is added indicating the number of previous versions. You see it's the 50th version of the same figure and I'm not even sure whether this will be the final version.

Watch the latest Blackboard Lunch talk on "Liquid-liquid phase separations and condensates in and out of equilibrium" by Shura Grosberg (‪#NYU), from the ongoing #KITP Program: Physical Principles Shaping Biomolecular Condensates #biomol25 buff.ly/Qmu5521 🧪

In the context of our @reviewcommons.org revision process, I'm happy to announce Microscopy Nodes v2.2.0! This packs lots of new fun features, including new color management 🌈, clearer transparency handling 🫥, custom default settings 🔧 and more! Preprint at doi.org/10.1101/2025...

We attended the annual symposium of @synbionl.bsky.social #synbionl2025 with Madelief, and presented some cool stuff from our projects related to controlled formation of subcellular structures within our artificial cells. It was a fun day!

I came here from a country where they were actively making it hard to do scientific research. Now, the Netherlands is doing a similar thing. They're ruining higher education actively and passively. Why do governments sabotage their future like this? Isn't the cost of such an act obvious?

As a scientist, I have tattoos about my MSc and PhD theses, and I love them!

Interestingly (!), they saw that when they paid the reviewers, the review quality did not get worse. It's good to see paying peer reviewers is under trial by some publishers. www.nature.com/articles/d41....

I wrote something... about writing. #ScientificWriting to be exact, but I think it applies to all kinds of #writing.

Please someone correct me if I got this wrong: the recent Dutch government made it clear that they don't want foreign students anymore and said that the money being spent on them was too much. They also decided that money being spent on research was too much in general. 1/3

💡 Looking for #FacultyPositions in Europe? The search can be a maze! I shared my personal journey in this @cp-matter.bsky.social article, thanks to an invite from @cranfordmatter.bsky.social. 🔓 Free access here 👉 authors.elsevier.com/c/1kZ4b9Cyxd... #chemsky #AcademicLife #CareersInScience

I'm sure everyone has been telling you this but let me do it as well: getting a PhD is an emotional rollercoaster. You live by those small glimpses of successful experiments in between a ton of failures. Everyday is a new journey and you try to keep it stable.

Watch out for those bastard professors

By mapping the meanings of the words used to communicate emotions across more than one-third of the planet’s spoken languages, a study in Science found that there is significant variation in how emotions are expressed across cultures. #ScienceMagArchives scim.ag/41X6dDk

Instead of listing my publications, as the year draws to an end, I want to shine the spotlight on the commonplace assumption that productivity must always increase. Good research is disruptive and thinking time is central to high quality scholarship and necessary for disruptive research.

I had the great pleasure of coordinating our annual "35 challenges in materials science". Was super fun to organise and engage with all these brilliant scientists! Take a look at what this year's cohort of materials scientists are working on! #Matter www.cell.com/matter/abstr...

Even after you finish you keep thinking "I could've done this and that"...

Bioart, courtesy of the NIH. All images are in the public domain and available for download as high-quality SVGs. bioart.niaid.nih.gov

What's your favourite example of a basic science discovery yielding practical results later on — but that one didn't know it would be used for at the time?

🧵 I'll talk up a recent paper I loved working on. We show why meaningful replications need to be based on deeper theoretical understanding & stronger empirical foundations. It's a theory paper like our other metascientific work. 🧪 #metasci #philsci #stats royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

Fluorescently labeled proteins are essential to research. But we should never forget how messed-up their behavior can be. An example from condensates:

Timescales in Cell Biology

Last year we met with about 60 scientists for 2 weeks to discuss what it means to synthesize life. Here is the summary of our discussion: https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/668b9aaf01103d79c55e9fab We hope it represents diverse views and serves as a roadmap towards...

Hello world! I'm here, too!