‼️ There are an unprecedented number of Institute Director vacancies at the NIH and many of the application windows close this week or next, including ones that are essential to genomics research in the US including NHGRI, NLM/NCBI, and NIGMS. Please spread the word: hr.nih.gov/careers/open...

Really excited to see our new work in scaling Mumemto to any size pangenome published in Genome Research this morning. And right on cue with the great opportunity to present this work at #GI2025 this week.

#GI2025 Vikram Shivakumar from Ben Langmead's lab (@benlangmead.bsky.social) presents "MumemtoM - partitioned Multi-MUM finding for scalable pangenomics ". Now published in Genome Research @genomeresearch.bsky.social. Read full text here ➡️ tinyurl.com/Genome-Res-2...

Fantastic talk by @vikramshivakumar.bsky.social Mumemto—Scalable multi-MUM finding for pangenomes Papers biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.20.654611 & doi.org/10.1186/s13059-025-03644-0 Code: github.com/vikshiv/mume... Very efficient pangenome visualization tool, revealing synteny and variations!

Proud to announce our paper ‘Transcriptomic Analysis of the Human Habenula in Schizophrenia’ from @lieberinstitute.bsky.social is the cover article for the November issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry! 🧠 #HabenulaLIBD #snRNAseq #Habenula doi.org/10.1176/appi...

Check out the cool work being presented by our students at Genome Informatics! This year’s event was co-organized by @benlangmead.bsky.social, & features talks from @vikramshivakumar.bsky.social & more, plus posters from @alexsweeten.bsky.social, @maojanlin.bsky.social, & @sinamajidian.bsky.social:

As our beloved Genome Informatics 2025 (#gi2025) approaches, I'm moved to share some photos from past years at CSHL. A couple more photos coming in a reply below...

Huge congratulations to Steven Tan, a superb undergraduate junior at JHU CS whose first-author paper "Movi Color: fast and accurate taxonomic classification with the move structure" won best paper at ACM-BCB. Please check it out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... Congrats, Steven!!

I'm very happy with `sassy grep` now! If you ever need to inspect what's in your data, please try and let me know how it goes :) Of course, it's fast: >1GB/s when using multiple threads.

Come work with me! @jhubiostat.bsky.social is hiring for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position 🥳 Apps due Nov 15 🔗 apply.interfolio.com/176686 🧪🧬💻🧠 #StatsSky #WomenInSTEM

October 2025 batch of Kraken 2 indexes, including core_nt and many others, available: benlangmead.github.io/aws-indexes/k2 Coming soon to K2: a feature for querying many K2 indexes as though they're a single index. Highly useful if the index you want to query is too big to build and/or fit in RAM.

The Department of Computer Science is pleased to welcome nine new tenure-track faculty to its ranks this academic year! Featuring @anandbhattad.bsky.social, @uthsav.bsky.social, @gligoric.bsky.social, @murat-kocaoglu.bsky.social, @tiziano.bsky.social, and more:

Very excited about Movi 2! Excellent work by Mohsen here. FYI, I have a series of 5 videos on the move structure starting with this one: youtu.be/REniD2dKf6A?...

1/6 Movi 2 is here: faster and more space-efficient for pangenome queries. Its fastest mode uses half the memory of Movi 1 while running ~30% faster. github.com/mohsenzakeri...

We're looking for an instructor for the algorithms course in our Bioinformatics MS program. The course assets have already been made (by me) and used in several previous offerings, but we need an instructor! If you're in the DMV area, check it out: www.linkedin.com/posts/robert...

New tool "bwt-svg" for making illustrations of the BWT and the many auxiliary arrays and other structures related to it. Pyodide-based no-installation-necessary interface here: benlangmead.github.io/bwt-svg/. (H/t to @robert.bio for pointing me to pyodide!) Full repo: github.com/benlangmead/....

Have you recently completed (or finishing soon) a PhD in CS or a related discipline? Do you want to do research advancing the theory & practice of algorithmic genomics & build tools that people love to use? I'll be looking to hire a postdoc! Official ad coming soon: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Just published an interactive article about a magical algorithm known as the Burrows-Wheeler Transform, which powers sequence alignment tools like bowtie and bwa: sandbox.bio/concepts/bwt It's also notoriously unintuitive so I'm hoping this article helps you build that intuition.

10 new CS professors! 🥳 @anandbhattad.bsky.social @uthsav.bsky.social @gligoric.bsky.social @murat-kocaoglu.bsky.social @tiziano.bsky.social

And it's posted! If you're interested and eligible, please consider applying through the UMD portal: umd.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/UMCP/j.... If you're a PI working in algorithmic genomics (& you can recommend my lab to your top graduating students ;P), please let them know!

I've added 7 videos to my Burrows-Wheeler indexing playlist (www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...), rounding out the r-index series and adding a 5-part series on the move structure. Now 27 videos in that playlist. I aim to add videos on prefix-free parsing, PBWT, Wheeler languages/automata in the future.

BREAKING: WE WON!!! 💥 💥 💥 Federal Judge William G. Young ruled today in our lawsuit against the Trump administration that the policy of arresting, detaining, & deporting noncitizen students & faculty members for their pro-Palestinian advocacy violates the 1st Amendment. Full ruling here:

#RECOMB2026 will be in Thessaloniki, Greece on May 26-29, 2026. Satellites on May 24-25. Save the date! Το συνέδριο #RECOMB2026 θα πραγματοποιηθεί στη Θεσσαλονίκη, στις 26-29 Μαΐου 2026. Οι δορυφορικές εκδηλώσεις θα διεξαχθούν στις 24-25 Μαΐου 2026. Σημειώστε την ημερομηνία!

Please share with anyone who cares about NSF support for graduate students and take 30 seconds to sign and leave a comment. The deadline for the 2025 Graduate Research Fellowship Program is about one month away and literally no one can apply. #NSFGRFP jasonjwilliamsny.github.io/grfp2025/

The next 48 hours may be a critical time to get attention and awareness on this before the next crisis lets this fade into the background. Everyone holding similar #NSFGRFP writing workshops takes time to sign this letter and reach out to officials.

Delighted to finally announce a preprint describing the Q100 project! “A complete diploid human genome benchmark for personalized genomics” For which we finished HG002 to near-perfect accuracy: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵[1/14]

EvANI benchmarking workflow for evolutionary distance estimation academic.oup.com/bib/article/... An great teamwork by @mohsenzakeri.bsky.social, @stephenhwang.bsky.social and me, with the excellent mentorship of @benlangmead.bsky.social

Donald Trump is way less popular than he wants you to believe. And you are significantly more powerful than he wants you to think.

That’s me in the video. And a Fox News host just celebrated me being assaulted by ICE. If ICE will do this to a congressional candidate with a big platform, just imagine what they’re doing to the people they’re kidnapping.

A huge shoutout to all the dedicated grants management specialists at the NIH who are working around the clock to push grants out before the Sep 30 deadline. And also to the POs responding to frantic emails. Not an easy job under the best of circumstances and right now it's the pits. Thank you!

New blog post – A quick look at Roche's SBX lh3.github.io/2025/09/11/a...

More youtube videos coming soon to www.youtube.com/BenLangmead! New recording setup. I've got a couple videos in the editing phase and hope to keep up a rhythm of 1 new video per week.

Today is the day! We eagerly await your abstracts.

As book banning sweeps across the U.S. at an unprecedented rate, brave librarians emerge as first responders in the fight for democracy. A film by Kim A. Snyder. Opens UK 9/26 @berthadochouse.bsky.social, US 10/03 @filmforumnyc.bsky.social, rollout to follow. Tix: TheLibrariansFilm.com/screenings

The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn't a strongman, he's a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.

This is an actual exchange from a VP who took an oath to defend the constitution and, as a citizen, is expected to abide by the law. May we one day have accountability for the grotesque lawlessness of this regime.

9 CDC Directors going back to 1977 speak out. What RFK Jr has done to our nation’s public health system "should alarm every American." It "is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...

This should be the lead story in all major national news outlets. Public health people prefer to stay out of the limelight unless there is no other choice. I can’t overstate how bad things have to be for 9 former CDC directors to band together and pen an op-ed in the NYT warning the entire country.

More foundations should do this: "Funding is exclusively available to applicants who have already received federal funding (e.g., from the NIH, CDC, NSF) for their health equity research, but have since had their funding rescinded due to federal administrative actions" www.rwjf.org/en/grants/ac...

Scholarships available for Genome Informatics - just include a brief summary on your open science work plus your conference abstract. If you have already paid to register, we will work with CSHL to refund you the $$$. Apply today! jxtxfoundation.org/news/2025-6-... @jxtxfoundation.bsky.social

📢🚨📢🚨 Genome Informatics deadline extended to September 8! meetings.cshl.edu/meetings.asp.... Please spread the word. If you are like me and had at least one abstract that wasn't quite ready by last week's deadline, you get another swing. See you there!

In order to form a more perfect protection racket

The Genome Informatics conference (@ Cold Spring Harbor Lab, Nov 5 - 8) abstract deadline is **today**. We welcome your submissions! Topics include: - PanGenomes - Genome Assembly & Seq. Algos. - Algorithmic Evo. Bio - Single Cell & Spatial Omics - Microbial Genomics - AI/ML & Integrative Omics 🙏🙏🙏

Starting of day 2 on a high note with Christina Boucher's keynote "Recursive Parsing and Grammar Compression in the Era of Pangenomics"! #WABI2025

The 25th iteration of the excellent Conference for Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI) starts tomorrow at UMD @umdscience.bsky.social at the Brendan Iribe Center. You can find details at the website wabiconf.github.io/2025/. We'll use the tag #WABI25 for the meeting!

Clearly this is not about making DC, or any of us, safer.

Manufactured crisis + militarization of domestic law enforcement + bypassing normal governance + framing for political gain (or distraction). Fascism in America. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08...

Trump deploys Federal agents across D.C. streets amid vow to crack down on crime. The facts contradict the pretext: Washington, D.C. has seen declining crime rates in recent years, violent crime hitting a *30-year low* in 2024, according to the U.S. Justice Department. www.npr.org/2025/08/11/n...

This is not just HHMI. All Chan Zuckerberg Initiative funding calls are CLOSED. The Gates Foundation has no Grand Challenges funding opportunities. I've never seen anything like this. Private foundations have just decided to stop supporting biomedical research.