Leipzig U and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) have an open faculty position (W2) in evolutionary population genetics! This position is tenured and comes with generous core funding. We are eager to welcome a new colleague! Deadline March 11.
www.uni-leipzig.de/en/newsdetai...
I once did 2 study sections week after week. Never again
Got 5 NIH study section invitations in one week. For 5 different panels in May. Never happened before. Not sure what's going on but feels like there is a serious strain on the system.
AI has huge promise for genomics -- but it has consistently failed at microbiome-based prediction.
My new post on why simple models keep winning, where deep learning actually earns its place, and where the field is headed
blekhman.substack.com/p/ai-keeps-f...
Last week I took one of my favorite Chicago photos of all time. This city is LONG
Our latest is out today in @plosbiology.org:
"Metabolic modeling reveals determinants of prebiotic and probiotic treatment efficacy across multiple human intervention trials"
@isbscience.org @uwbioe.bsky.social @uwgenome.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Yes, they can hallucinate papers that don't exist, discuss results that seem to be imaginary, and can be confusing and inconsistent. But talking to tenured professors may still be helpful
Terrible. Still need to see a bit more of the timeline, but based on this trend I don't see how the NIH will fund even 10,000 new awards this fiscal year. Maybe closer to 8000
In 1800 (not that long ago!) the average life expectancy was ~30 years.
Same here - straight forward, took about 15 minutes. Could be because I've had experience with using this for an NSF biosketch some years ago?
I've been hearing from more and more people who received peer reviews that were clearly written by AI. It's frustrating, and no one knows what to do. I have some thoughts.
blekhman.substack.com/p/so-your-pa...
Good morning from Chicago
The problem is proving with certainty that the review was AI generated. I guess it is up to the editor to decide what to do. In my experience, it might be fastest to just respond to the review as is (these AI comments can actually be easy to address/refute)
A different field, but relevant reading: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
I am seeking a postdoc to join my group at UCLA -- ideally the candidate would have some experience in either population genetics or microbes/microbiome (computational background needed). We have a range of projects and are happy to tailer to your interests. Please dm/email me if interested.
As a research university, grad students are the driving force of your research mission. They generate the data, papers, and prelim results for future grants. You will be less competitive when funding recovers (and it will). You are also creating a pipeline gap that will take 5 years to rebuild
This is also bad for labs: there are many PIs who have secured funding but can't find students. Research programs and careers will stall, not from lack of money but lack of people
This is bad because excellent students who would thrive in research careers will get shut out. Many candidates won't reapply next year, and we will lose them permanently to non-research fields
We should talk more about the graduate admissions crisis that's taking shape in the US.
Talking to colleagues across universities, many graduate programs are slashing admission numbers and reducing class sizes substantially for the upcoming academic year.
This is shortsighted
if you're in line to sack drake maye, STAY IN LINE
Work led by Katja Della Libera and Beth Adamowicz in my lab, in collaboration with Francesca Luca's lab at UChicago
Our new paper, where we use metabolic modeling to show Fusobacterium grows faster in colorectal tumor vs normal tissue microenvironments, and use computational + experimental approach to find specific metabolic pathways driving host-microbiome interactions in cancer
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
I can't talk about the details of the specific case you're describing, of course. But I think it's common that as a reviewer, one can find flaws in any paper, and list improvements that will make any paper "stronger". But the authors can disagree, and have the right to decide not do the work.
This is not heartbreaking. Keep in mind that the authors perspective: they probably disagree that their paper "needs a lot of work". Instead they find another journal (and another set of reviewers) that agree with them, and save months of expensive, time consuming, unnecessary work.
Work led by @pamferretti.bsky.social, with collaborators including Mattea Allert, Kelsey Johnson, Cheryl Gale, Ellen Demerath, Frank Albert, and David Fields.
See Pamela's thread below:
bsky.app/profile/pamf...
Breast milk isn't just nutrition – it delivers live bacterial strains that colonize the infant gut and persist for months.
Happy to share our new paper, where we used metagenomics to track bacterial strains between 195 mother-infant pairs over the first 6 months of life:
doi.org/10.1038/s414...
Thanks Willem!
I just signed up and read the first of Ran's posts. Excellent stuff, highly recommended.
Indeed - the advantage here (as I write in the post) is that Scholar Labs gives you a link to the text of each paper, which you can read and evaluate. But so far, based on a few weeks of almost daily usage, it hasn't returned any noise.
This is my new blog where I write about microbiome research and academic science. Would love to have you subscribe: blekhman.substack.com
