Michelle Franc Ragsac, PhD 🇵🇭🇺🇸
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mragsac.com
Michelle Franc Ragsac, PhD 🇵🇭🇺🇸
@mragsac.com

👩🏽‍💻 #FilipinoAmerican Postdoc 🧪 at https://amariutalab.org studying #PediatricAsthma • #Bioinformatics PhD, PI: Emma Farley 💻🧬 & #Bioengineering BS, PI: Terry Gaasterland from @ucsandiego.bsky.social ☀️ • #InvisibleDisability 🌻

Personal Account! ✨ .. more

Theresa Gaasterland is an American politician and scientist. She is a Professor of Computational Biology and Genomics and Director of the Scripps Genome Center at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She was elected a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2018 for contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. .. more

Biology 71%
Computer science 16%

It was also posted on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social! So many different feeds for papers 😅

Side Note: Ke & I met in “Pathways to Scientific Teaching” taught by Prof. Diane Ebert-May! We sat beside each other on the first day and bonded over the struggle of studying non-traditional model organisms 🤣 😭
Sensory receptor expansion and neural accommodation in butterfly color vision https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.30.685642v1

Hey Bluesky 🦋✨ It’s been a while! 👋🏽

As a small update, a preprint I’m on was posted to bioRxiv! 📑 It was great to work with Ke on analyzing the Butterfly scRNA-seq data, and teach him bioinformatics over multiple boba runs! 🧬 💻 🧪

Seurat has also changed SO, SO MUCH since I last used it ~2020 🫣
Sensory receptor expansion and neural accommodation in butterfly color vision https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.30.685642v1

Reposted by Terry Gaasterland

The US Transportation Department is abandoning an effort started by the Biden administration to require airlines to provide meals, hotels and cash payouts to passengers affected by significant flight disruptions.
Trump Administration Ditches Plan to Compensate Stranded Flyers
The US Transportation Department is abandoning an effort started by the Biden administration to require airlines to provide meals, hotels and cash payouts to passengers affected by significant flight disruptions.
bloom.bg

Reposted by Terry Gaasterland

Sensory receptor expansion and neural accommodation in butterfly color vision https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.30.685642v1

Reposted by Terry Gaasterland

Sensory receptor expansion and neural accommodation in butterfly color vision https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.30.685642v1

📝 So, the fellowship actually ended up removing the Diversity Fellowship as one of the formal requirements without notifying people! 🤔🧪

I still ended up submitting my statement by adding it to the end of my research proposal because it definitely influenced my scientific direction 🫣👩🏽‍💻
This may be the most important paper ever published about NIH funded research.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
What if NIH had been 40% smaller?
Replaying history with less NIH funding shows widespread impacts on drug-linked research
www.science.org

I got a liver biopsy yesterday and, wow, I didn’t expect that to hurt as much as it did … Thank goodness I have sick days so I can rest! 🥲

They also weren’t able to give me as much sedative because my blood pressure runs pretty low to begin with so I felt everything 😭

Pinning this for later! 📌 Thanks for all of the educational posts as always 🤩

My parents keep pointing out parallels between what has /already happened/ in the Philippines and the resulting aftermath versus what's going on in the United States today 😬

... And comparing that to why they left in the first place during the Marcos' regime 🫠

Reposted by Terry Gaasterland

Again, this is *verbatim* the exact messaging Rodrigo Duterte used in order to run his deadly drug war in the Philippines en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp...

Oh wow, this is super cool work! 🤩 I'm excited to look deeper into the paper 👀

Tagging with some emojis and whatnot so that it gets on the #SciSky 🧪 feed too! 🧬💻✨

Reposted by Terry Gaasterland

Americans, I am once again begging you to consider that sometimes people aren't in America and may be discussing their own bad governments on the niche microblogging website. Please. I am begging.

I attended a @anvilproject.org workshop 🧬 💻 🧪 yesterday and we were outrageously Zoom bombed 💣 💥 🫣

Luckily, the workshop runners handled things well, but … it goes to show that passwords in Zoom meetings are still important for webinars because we can’t trust people 🙃 🫠
Your periodic reminder that mRNA vaccines are a scientific and public health game-changer. Those that have been approved have passed stringent efficacy and safety checks. They protect you and your child against potentially fatal diseases. You may, however, get a sore arm.

Reposted by Terry Gaasterland

I refuse to give em dashes to the AI

Reposted by Terry Gaasterland

So new studies showcase that the more you know how GenAi works, the less likely you are to use it! 😌

This reminds me of ai advocates who claim that those who refuse to use GenAi do so because they dont know how it works, yet it’s the opposite!
The less you know the more you are likely to use GenAi
The Less You Know About AI, the More You Are Likely to Use It
AI can seem magical to those with low AI literacy, a new study finds. That, in turn, might make them more willing to try it.
www.wsj.com

Hmm, that’s a good point! I’ll ask the fellowship coordinators to try and learn more! 🤔

Reposted by Terry Gaasterland

Intentionally attacking civilians like aid and rescue workers, and journalists, is a violation of international humanitarian law and a war crime.
Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist on murdered journalists and Trump's America
Intentionally attacking civilians like aid and rescue workers, and journalists, is a violation of international humanitarian law and a war crime.
www.abc.net.au

Reposted by Terry Gaasterland

New study on #BlueSky for #SciComm.

“Bluesky posts demonstrate substantially higher levels of interaction (likes, reposts, replies, and quotes) and greater textual originality than previously reported for X, suggesting both stronger interactive and more interpretive engagement.”

🦋🦫🌱🐋🧪 #philsci
Research posts on Bluesky are more original — and get better engagement
Bluesky posts about science garner more likes and reposts than similar ones on X.
www.nature.com

For sure! I feel like with AI/LLM-generated content, there’s a lot of filler text and fluff that isn’t very useful 🥴

Sharing this here on my main feed as well 👀 ! 🧪💻👾

I replied to @carlbergstrom.com’s post about the #GoogleSearch AI Responses, but somebody wrote a cool thing to make them look like “fortunes” and it was featured on @gigazine.net 💪🏽✨

The more I think about it, the more I believe that we’re in the New Gilded Age 💛🥲

I also miss StumbleUpon and randomly finding delightful corners of the internet 🥲

I went to my community’s monthly 🏠 HOA Meeting 🌳📆 last evening, and the amount of yelling at board members (then gaslighting them by saying it was polite conversation and comments 🙃) was absolutely insane 🫣

Are other communities in #SanDiego also doing special assessments and balcony projects? 🥲

Is there a transcript or recording of these conversations somewhere? 🤩🧪

Would love to hear what was discussed, especially since I couldn’t make the @uaw4811.bsky.social event that recently happened! 💪🏽

I was a little surprised that they were asking for one given ✨everything going on🤪🧪 but a good exercise nonetheless?

Reposted by Terry Gaasterland

My pet peeve is people who tell other people to quit their jobs while they would never quit theirs.

I just forwarded this paper to my lab's Slack! Super cool work! I'm excited to go more in the details in a possible journal club 👀🧪🧬💻