Tara Eicher
@tarabyte1024.bsky.social
Postdoc in the Quackenbush Lab @ Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Follow me for network science, bioinformatics, machine learning, algorithms, neurology and neuro-oncology. All views my own.
Reposted by Tara Eicher
At the recent ACIP meeting, members spread lies about vaccines and autistic people. Vaccines are important. They protect us from diseases, and they let autistic kids grow to become autistic adults. We do not need to be prevented; we need support and respect. autisticadvocacy.org/2025/12/asan...
December 5, 2025 at 10:18 PM
At the recent ACIP meeting, members spread lies about vaccines and autistic people. Vaccines are important. They protect us from diseases, and they let autistic kids grow to become autistic adults. We do not need to be prevented; we need support and respect. autisticadvocacy.org/2025/12/asan...
This article — focused on my mentor John Quackenbush and the state of our lab — summarizes the impacts of the current funding climate on academic research as a whole. #academia #research #harvard #TrumpAdministration
www.statnews.com/2025/12/05/r...
www.statnews.com/2025/12/05/r...
His lab was humming with discovery. After one year under Trump, it’s almost silent
John Quackenbush built a lab that is at the forefront of human genetics research and bioinformatics. Trump administration cuts have put it in danger of collapse.
www.statnews.com
December 6, 2025 at 12:04 AM
This article — focused on my mentor John Quackenbush and the state of our lab — summarizes the impacts of the current funding climate on academic research as a whole. #academia #research #harvard #TrumpAdministration
www.statnews.com/2025/12/05/r...
www.statnews.com/2025/12/05/r...
On November 14th at 12 pm ET, I will be giving a talk at the #NHGRI ELSI Friday Forum focused on what #autism #researchers owe the communities they study. I encourage anyone interested in my work, as well as the topics of #neurodiversity or autism research, to register: elsihub.org/ELSIFridayFo...
ELSI Friday Forum | ELSIhub
elsihub.org
October 18, 2025 at 4:42 PM
On November 14th at 12 pm ET, I will be giving a talk at the #NHGRI ELSI Friday Forum focused on what #autism #researchers owe the communities they study. I encourage anyone interested in my work, as well as the topics of #neurodiversity or autism research, to register: elsihub.org/ELSIFridayFo...
In the light of the current administration’s claims of an “autism epidemic”, I highly encourage everyone to register for this webinar: sparkforautism.org/discover_art... #autism
Webinar: The Numbers Behind Autism-Unpacking Prevalence, Trends, and Understanding of Heterogeneity - SPARK for Autism
Join us for this webinar on October 23rd, when Karen Pierce, Ph.D., will discuss how we know how many people have autism and why the count is always changing.
sparkforautism.org
October 17, 2025 at 2:29 PM
In the light of the current administration’s claims of an “autism epidemic”, I highly encourage everyone to register for this webinar: sparkforautism.org/discover_art... #autism
I just need to take a moment to appreciate the fact that this image was in a Nature Research Highlights article. 😆🍔
March 20, 2025 at 12:19 AM
I just need to take a moment to appreciate the fact that this image was in a Nature Research Highlights article. 😆🍔
The preprint is out for BLOBFISH, a tool I developed to find connections between genes of interest across sample-specific biological networks! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #biology #genomics #networks #graphtheory
BLOBFISH: Bipartite Limited Subnetworks from Multiple Observations using Breadth-First Search with Constrained Hops
In analyzing gene regulatory network models, a common question is how members of a particular set of genes are connected. For example, one might want to explore network relationship between a set of d...
www.biorxiv.org
March 16, 2025 at 3:59 PM
The preprint is out for BLOBFISH, a tool I developed to find connections between genes of interest across sample-specific biological networks! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #biology #genomics #networks #graphtheory
Reposted by Tara Eicher
Check it out! Another novel RNA modification - ADP-ribosylation - that was previously only known on proteins. A cousin to #glycoRNA 👏
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
February 6, 2025 at 7:38 PM
Check it out! Another novel RNA modification - ADP-ribosylation - that was previously only known on proteins. A cousin to #glycoRNA 👏
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
😔
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the nation’s largest private funder of biomedical research, yesterday killed a $60 million program aimed at making universities’ STEM education more inclusive. scim.ag/3EtS0US
HHMI kills program aimed at boosting inclusivity in STEM education
“Inclusive excellence” program had committed $60 million to 104 institutions
scim.ag
February 6, 2025 at 11:34 PM
😔
I’m excited to see a study that focuses on the impact of interventions on #mentalHealth in #autism. Classically, many studies have focused more on #behavioralOutcomes, something #autismAdvocacy groups have pinpointed as a problem. This study shifts the focus from presentation to internal experience.
Registered: for autistics (any age), "What types of interventions targeting emotion regulation have been evaluated" & "Do these interventions improve emotion regulation" & "Do these interventions improve mental health" www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/dis... systematic review (including all study types?)
The Centre for Reviews and Dissemination is a department of the University of York and is part of the National Institute for Health Research.
CRD undertakes high quality systematic reviews that evaluate the effects of health and social care interventions and the delivery and organisation of health care.
www.crd.york.ac.uk
February 3, 2025 at 11:31 AM
I’m excited to see a study that focuses on the impact of interventions on #mentalHealth in #autism. Classically, many studies have focused more on #behavioralOutcomes, something #autismAdvocacy groups have pinpointed as a problem. This study shifts the focus from presentation to internal experience.
Reposted by Tara Eicher
How do children develop their 'me'? Dr Salim Hashmi explores how young people form their identities, from the age of five, through play, imagination, art and technology for @place2becharity.bsky.social's #ChildrensMentalHealthWeek #PsychSky
Becoming me: How children develop their identity
What makes us who we are? Our ‘identity’ is a combination of lots of different parts – some that make us similar to other people and some that make us unique. When all of these parts come…
www.kcl.ac.uk
February 3, 2025 at 10:34 AM
How do children develop their 'me'? Dr Salim Hashmi explores how young people form their identities, from the age of five, through play, imagination, art and technology for @place2becharity.bsky.social's #ChildrensMentalHealthWeek #PsychSky
Reposted by Tara Eicher
Ensembl is 25! 🥳 Join us in celebrating our silver birthday by trying out our new browser - beta.ensembl.org 🎂
Silver carp 🩶🐟 and silvery gibbon 🩶🦧 genomes await!
Silver carp 🩶🐟 and silvery gibbon 🩶🦧 genomes await!
January 27, 2025 at 4:50 PM
Ensembl is 25! 🥳 Join us in celebrating our silver birthday by trying out our new browser - beta.ensembl.org 🎂
Silver carp 🩶🐟 and silvery gibbon 🩶🦧 genomes await!
Silver carp 🩶🐟 and silvery gibbon 🩶🦧 genomes await!
#DeepLearning methods often don’t work well for #genomics research because they are difficult to interpret and require more training data than anyone in the medical field could possibly collect. Classical #MachineLearning, in turn, does not adequately model the complexity of the data.🪡
February 1, 2025 at 12:35 AM
#DeepLearning methods often don’t work well for #genomics research because they are difficult to interpret and require more training data than anyone in the medical field could possibly collect. Classical #MachineLearning, in turn, does not adequately model the complexity of the data.🪡
Interesting 😂
📊 Did you know about the Kardashian Index?
The Kardashian Index, or K-Index, is a fun way to look at the relationship between a scientist’s social media popularity and their research impact. 🧑🔬📱
The Kardashian Index, or K-Index, is a fun way to look at the relationship between a scientist’s social media popularity and their research impact. 🧑🔬📱
January 23, 2025 at 1:20 PM
Interesting 😂
In short, #LLMs have been applied to biomedical text analysis as well as analytical tasks involving #sequencing data. However, the following challenges still remain:
arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06271
arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06271
arxiv.org
January 20, 2025 at 3:23 AM
In short, #LLMs have been applied to biomedical text analysis as well as analytical tasks involving #sequencing data. However, the following challenges still remain:
arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06271
arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06271
Reposted by Tara Eicher
Small AI-designed proteins neutralized one of cobras' nastiest venom toxins. The findings raise the question: Could AI bring antivenoms into the 21st century? That and more of the best from @science.org and science in this edition of #ScienceAdviser: www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪
January 17, 2025 at 10:14 PM
Small AI-designed proteins neutralized one of cobras' nastiest venom toxins. The findings raise the question: Could AI bring antivenoms into the 21st century? That and more of the best from @science.org and science in this edition of #ScienceAdviser: www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪
I come across the #fourierTransform in many of the algorithms I study, but it was not intuitive to me when I first encountered it. This video makes it intuitive. #math #engineering youtu.be/r18Gi8lSkfM?...
Fourier Transform, Fourier Series, and frequency spectrum
YouTube video by Physics Videos by Eugene Khutoryansky
youtu.be
January 11, 2025 at 10:51 PM
I come across the #fourierTransform in many of the algorithms I study, but it was not intuitive to me when I first encountered it. This video makes it intuitive. #math #engineering youtu.be/r18Gi8lSkfM?...
A preprint is now available for Graph Ensemble Neural Networks (GENN), a novel #MachineLearning architecture I developed during my PhD! GENN finds an optimal #subgraph of #multimodal data associations (e.g. gene-metabolite) to predict outcomes (e.g. drug response).
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Finding Salient Multi-Omic Interactomes Relevant to Multiple Biomedical Outcomes using Graph Ensemble Neural Networks
Although multi-omics integration relevant to patient outcome is typically characterized by an analyte interactome, current multi-omic integration methods either (1) model outcome without directly incl...
www.biorxiv.org
December 31, 2024 at 4:45 PM
A preprint is now available for Graph Ensemble Neural Networks (GENN), a novel #MachineLearning architecture I developed during my PhD! GENN finds an optimal #subgraph of #multimodal data associations (e.g. gene-metabolite) to predict outcomes (e.g. drug response).
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A nice overview of the problems with Andrew Wakefield’s “research” with a deep-dive into one of his fabricated results.
#Vaccines don’t cause #autism.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXtA...
#Vaccines don’t cause #autism.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXtA...
Wakefield's Smoking Gun
YouTube video by C0nc0rdance
www.youtube.com
December 23, 2024 at 3:12 PM
A nice overview of the problems with Andrew Wakefield’s “research” with a deep-dive into one of his fabricated results.
#Vaccines don’t cause #autism.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXtA...
#Vaccines don’t cause #autism.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXtA...
#machineLearning research should focus more on solutions for high-dimensional low-sample-size data. The majority of real-world data sets do not have enough samples to train deep neural networks.
December 23, 2024 at 1:53 AM
#machineLearning research should focus more on solutions for high-dimensional low-sample-size data. The majority of real-world data sets do not have enough samples to train deep neural networks.
A little bit of info about #genetics : We often speak of people “having a gene”, but in reality that isn’t how it works. A gene is a location within the DNA that gets transcribed into RNA and then gets translated to make a protein, which then interacts with other proteins and compounds 🪡
December 20, 2024 at 10:37 PM
A little bit of info about #genetics : We often speak of people “having a gene”, but in reality that isn’t how it works. A gene is a location within the DNA that gets transcribed into RNA and then gets translated to make a protein, which then interacts with other proteins and compounds 🪡
Biological networks provide information about biomolecular interactions that cannot be obtained by analyzing omics measurements (e.g. differential expression) alone. Here is my take on why they are not used more frequently in analysis: NetworkScience 🪡
December 12, 2024 at 5:23 PM
Biological networks provide information about biomolecular interactions that cannot be obtained by analyzing omics measurements (e.g. differential expression) alone. Here is my take on why they are not used more frequently in analysis: NetworkScience 🪡