OSNAP!

I received an NIH Outstanding Scholars in Neuroscience Award

This award makes my heart sing -- between college and PhD I spent a year researching at the NIMH, and loved every minute of the campus and community.

Feels full circle to be honored by NIMH post-PhD!

In this vein, we separate circuit formation into three “systems,” each deployed at different times and contexts:
• System One: Developmental Maturation
• System Two: Eureka Moments
• System Three: Staying Tuned

Not sure why @macshine.bsky.social @drbreaky.bsky.social + co are not posting more about their fantastic paper from last week:

"Multiscale organization of neuronal activity unifies scale-dependent theories of brain function"

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Massively humbled to be on the 2025 Forbes Science 30 under 30 List

Huge thanks to my mentors, family, friends and collaborators — I would not be here with you all.

Now here's to living up to his honor in my next 30 years!

#ForbesUnder30

#221: Scalable genetic screening for regulatory circuits using compressed Perturb-seq by Yao et al

Compute twice, measure once?

How sparse sensing can get you more insight with fewer scRNA experiments.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#216: Learning spatio-temporal patterns with Neural Cellular Automata by Richardson, Antal, Blythe, Schumacher

Intricate training methods allow NCAs to learn custom morphologies and transitions.

arxiv.org/abs/2310.14809

#215: A marmoset brain cell census reveals regional specialization of cellular identities by fenna krienen et al

Massive resource on cell type identities and distributions across a nonhuman primate's brain!

science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#214: Spatial enhancer activation determines inhibitory neuron identity by Elena Dvoretskova et al

Beautiful study combining diverse omics practices to understand PN vs IN differentiation.

biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Five years of work reduced down to one button press.

My research wouldn't be possible without modern tech, but moments like these I miss the loss of physicality in administrative processes.

#213: GRouNdGAN: GRN-guided simulation of single-cell RNA-seq data using causal generative adversarial networks by Zinati, Takiddeen, Emad

Eerie, but inspiring, how learnable the mapping is from regulatory network dynamics to gene expression

biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#212: Growing Brains: Co-emergence of Anatomical and Functional Modularity in Recurrent Neural Networks by Liu, Khona, Fiete, Tegmark

I wonder if this could be paired with network growth to find minimal modules + then scale them up!

arxiv.org/abs/2310.077...

#211: Tardigrades dramatically upregulate DNA repair pathway genes in response to ionizing radiation by Clark-Hachtel, Hibshman, De Buysscher, Goldstein

Powerful study: the DNA repair genes provided up to 1000x survival when transferred to E Coli!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#210: Cell signaling stabilizes morphogenesis against noise by Hagolani, Zimm, Marin, Ciudad

On how cell-cell interactions provide stability for GRN-driven development, with a robustness-complexity tradeoff.

journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...