Ana Marija Jakšić
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merianelion.bsky.social
Ana Marija Jakšić
@merianelion.bsky.social
1.4K followers 3.4K following 140 posts
Group leader @ Jaksic Lab, EPFL, ELISIR scholar, Drosophila, Neuroscience, Topology, Robots, Evolution, PopGen, Cognition, Corals, she/her, Trekkie utopian 🦄🧬🪰🧠🪸🇪🇺🇨🇭🇭🇷 🌍🖖🏻 On the faculty job market
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merianelion.bsky.social
Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · Nov 6
Best moments in science are these small events of discovery when you finally get the answer to your question and when what you're doing suddenly makes perfect sense. It's like a mind fusion with the world you're trying to understand. - Dan Hartl
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
dlevenstein.bsky.social
4) “the complexity of biological phenomena is an argument for the use of mathematical methods rather than against it. In the case of a simple phenomenon we may hope to understand it without the use of mathematics, by simple inspection. But in a complex case we are left hopeless without mathematics.”
October 16, 2025 at 12:30 PM
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
bentonlab.bsky.social
I'm looking to recruit a post-doc to help push forward our growing interests in insect ecotoxicology.
Apply here by Nov 30th!
(thanks for reposting)

career5.successfactors.eu/sfcareer/job...
Career Opportunities: Posdoctoral researcher in toxin susceptibility and evolution of resistance in insects (22517)
career5.successfactors.eu
October 16, 2025 at 12:18 PM
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
francesbiophys.bsky.social
Maud Menten was born in Canada in 1879 and completed her UG and MD education at University of Toronto. As a research assistant with Leonor Michaelis in 1912, they wrote the classic paper describing the “Michaelis-Menten” model of enzyme kinetics.. #WomenInScience
October 16, 2025 at 1:02 AM
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
debivort.bsky.social
Our new study modeling selection for (behavioral) variability has been covered in a lovely @genetics-gsa.bsky.social podcast featuring first author Shraddha Lall and @ecoevogal.bsky.social

academic.oup.com/g3journal/ad...
Family-based selection: an efficient method for increasing phenotypic variability
This article introduces a model comparing various selection regimes for increasing phenotypic variability. Individuals with the same genotype, reared in id
academic.oup.com
October 8, 2025 at 4:26 PM
merianelion.bsky.social
Mouse brain, the next TopoTome step towards the holy grail
October 6, 2025 at 9:06 PM
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
jefferis.bsky.social
Exciting news for #drosophila #connectomics and #neuroscience enthusiasts: the Drosophila male central nervous system connectome is now live for exploration. Find out more at the landing page hosted by our Janelia FlyEM collaborators www.janelia.org/project-team....
Male CNS Connectome
A team of researchers has unveiled the complete connectome of a male fruit fly central nervous system —a seamless map of all the neurons in the brain and nerve cord of a single male fruit fly and the ...
www.janelia.org
October 5, 2025 at 3:40 PM
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
jpeelle.bsky.social
"[F]rom the 1940s to the 1970s, a Bell Labs job was said to be just like working at a research university, except the pay was better, the equipment was more up-to-date, the machine shop was available for all your needs and you didn’t have to spend time teaching or applying for research grants."
kevinjkircher.com Kevin J. Kircher @kevinjkircher.com · Oct 4
Sometimes I think about how from 1935-1975ish, Bell Labs produced an insane amount of revolutionary science and technology, including 11 Nobel Prizes, the transistor, UNIX, C, the laser, the solar cell, information theory, etc. The secret? Provide scientists with ample, steady, no-strings funding.
sites.stat.columbia.edu
October 4, 2025 at 7:35 PM
merianelion.bsky.social
🚨Preprint🚨
What started as an attempt to compare CT scans of diverse fly brains, ended up a new concept for analysis & segmentation of difficult tomographic data. No ground truths, no training, just maths. This is TopoTome, topological data analysis of 3D images

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Figure showing 3 panels. Panel A: workflow of a classical deep learning model vs TopoTome workflow, with marked differences between the methods, including manual segmentation of images, design and optimization of neural network and data post processing that is needed in deep learning workflow but not in TopoTome. Panel B: core concepts behind TopoTome shown connected by arrows. From left to right, there is a microCT scan of a fly brain (3D reconstruction), a persistence barcode of H2 homologies, an image of how persistent barcodes map to the original CT brain scan, and a segmentation of a CT scan. Panel C shows the concept of cubical complex filtration of 2D and 3D image data.
September 30, 2025 at 9:58 AM
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
fly-eds.bsky.social
The #EDS has the pleasure to announce that, after #EDRC2027 in Bonn, we will have #EDRC2029 in Szeged! Don’t forget these hashtags!
September 29, 2025 at 6:47 AM
merianelion.bsky.social
I wonder if the pilot was aware he just flew and safely landed practically the entire Swiss Drosophila fly community to Alicante. High pressure flying the fly people. 🪰✈️
September 24, 2025 at 5:00 PM
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
wiringthebrain.bsky.social
The paper itself (with Henry Potter) is here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... (and is the European Journal of Neuroscience's most downloaded paper over the last two years! 😊)
Beyond Mechanism—Extending Our Concepts of Causation in Neuroscience
The search for neural mechanisms of behaviour often relies on a synchronic, driving view of causation, where neural activity drives more neural activity, which eventually drives behaviour. The real c...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
September 22, 2025 at 6:43 PM
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
jmgrohneuro.bsky.social
The larger problem is the textbooks frame things in a "X does Y" kind of way. It's very hard to get people to envision a dynamic, reverberant, reciprocally interconnected system and what that will mean for where signals of different types can be observed...I don't have a good answer for this...
September 5, 2025 at 3:41 PM
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
benhayden.bsky.social
Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature
The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...
www.nature.com
September 4, 2025 at 11:17 AM
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
canaztekin.bsky.social
🥳 Thrilled to share that our lab has been awarded an ERC StGrant for our project SigReg: Signal to Regeneration!

How can we unlock limb regeneration in adult mammals?

It’s time to apply what we learned from 🐸 ➡️ 🐭

Thank you @erc.europa.eu for supporting ambitious science!!!
mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social MPI for Biology Tübingen & Friedrich Miescher Laboratory @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social · Sep 4
Massive congratulations to @canaztekin.bsky.social for being awarded an ERC Starting Grant @erc.europa.eu ! 🎉 His "Signal to Regeneration" (SigReg) project will explore the potential of limb regeneration in mammals.

Read more and watch Can introduce his project: s.gwdg.de/cLAmJE
September 4, 2025 at 1:27 PM
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
monicamedhist.bsky.social
Here's a #GiftLink for those who want to read the full NYT obit of historian of science & gender, Margaret Rossiter. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/s... #histSTM 🧪🗃️
August 30, 2025 at 3:04 PM
merianelion.bsky.social
My lab cannot afford donating at the moment, so I donated privately. Even if you don’t work on flies we all owe so much to FlyBase. Consider donating, and importantly, let’s strive to make the more official funding bodies aware of how much is at stake.
August 27, 2025 at 8:07 AM
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
pessoabrain.bsky.social
𝗖𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻
by Earl K Miller, Scott L Brincat, Jefferson E Roy
This promises to be a must read
One day we should create an online journal club to just read these kinds of papers!
#neuroskyence
doi.org/10.1016/j.co...
August 16, 2025 at 3:05 PM
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
milanlab.bsky.social
Why would anyone want to be a scientist? url: journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...
Why would anyone want to be a scientist?
It is difficult to fathom why anyone intelligent enough to be a scientist would actually choose to be one. Doing good science requires the utmost exertion of body, mind and spirit, yet is consistently...
journals.biologists.com
August 16, 2025 at 8:39 AM
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
katjaroeper.bsky.social
If you run a fly lab and have not yet contributed to save FlyBase, please look at our wiki page for the latest information!
flybase.bsky.social FlyBase @flybase.bsky.social · Aug 15
FlyBase needs your help! We ask that European labs continue to contribute to Cambridge, UK FlyBase, whereas US and other non-European labs can contribute to US FlyBase. For more information and how to donate: wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase...
FlyBase:Contribute to FlyBase - FlyBase Wiki
wiki.flybase.org
August 15, 2025 at 4:59 PM
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
drglam.bsky.social
I just got the notice that all the FlyBase people at Harvard, including me, will be laid off on October 12. I'm devastated.
August 11, 2025 at 6:12 PM
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
alexis-verger.cpesr.fr
How it started / How it's going 😱

(www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... / www.nature.com/articles/s41...)

#preprint
July 19, 2025 at 9:32 AM
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
archaeon-alex.bsky.social
Academia should not be a production where efficiency = many flawless but low penetrance pdfs. People become avoidant of taking risks and become burocrats. It's fine to be wrong. Reproducibility problems is related to ethics, not being right all the time.
scientist.sc
July 10, 2025 at 12:30 PM
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
bstevensonlab.bsky.social
Progress with my grant proposal:
Comic view on writing.
July 10, 2025 at 4:55 PM
merianelion.bsky.social
Apply to this amazing lab and work on exciting and relevant challenges in AI-powered microscopy! Super opportunity to work with someone as cool as Martin!
maweigert.bsky.social Martin Weigert @maweigert.bsky.social · Jul 10
Do you like developing new AI vision methods for microscopy image analysis? You love theory & implementation? 1 week left to apply for a fully funded PhD position in our lab in Dresden 🇩🇪! Topics: object detection/tracking, multimodal models & more. DM/email for details! #PhD #AcademicJobs #GPUsgoBrr
Vacancy ID 12244
www.verw.tu-dresden.de
July 10, 2025 at 2:48 PM
Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
hansonmark.bsky.social
So what can we do in response? A key problem:

The transformation from long- to short-term funding leads researchers to flit from topic to topic, and move across fields chasing 'sexy' stories.

Science is done better when you leave someone to geek out on a single topic for their whole career.

5/n
Abstract The ReproSci project retrospectively analyzed the reproducibility of 1006 claims from 400 papers published between 1959 and 2011 in the field of Drosophila immunity. This project attempts to provide a comprehensive assessment, 14 years later, of the replicability of nearly all publications across an entire scientific community in experimental life sciences. We found that 61% of claims were verified, while only 7% were directly challenged (not reproducible), a replicability rate higher than previous assessments. Notably, 24% of claims had never been independently tested and remain unchallenged. We performed experimental validations of a selection of 45 unchallenged claim, that revealed that a significant fraction (38/45) of them is in fact non-reproducible. We also found that high-impact journals and top-ranked institutions are more likely to publish challenged claims. In line with the reproducibility crisis narrative, the rates of both challenged and unchallenged claims increased over time, especially as the field gained popularity. We characterized the uneven distribution of irreproducibility among first and last authors. Surprisingly, irreproducibility rates were similar between PhD students and postdocs, and did not decrease with experience or publication count. However, group leaders, who had prior experience as first authors in another Drosophila immunity team, had lower irreproducibility rates, underscoring the importance of early-career training. Finally, authors with a more exploratory, short-term engagement with the field exhibited slightly higher rates of challenged claims and a markedly higher proportion of unchallenged ones. This systematic, field-wide retrospective study offers meaningful insights into the ongoing discussion on reproducibility in experimental life sciences
July 10, 2025 at 8:23 AM