Rob Noble

Warwick's recent rebrand is also largely purple

As someone who's had a Green MP since before it was cool, I'm surprised that in all the discussion of policy platforms, nobody's mentioning that the Greens have a record of being absolutely fantastic constituency MPs.

Same pattern in the website search bar. I guess the main branding challenge is to avoid confusion with the other UCL. So it's weird that they went with purple.

This week's cover @thelancet.com

EXCLUSIVE: Harvard placed Martin Nowak on paid administrative leave amid a renewed investigation into his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to a letter obtained by The Crimson.

Hugo C. Chiasson and Elise A. Spenner report.

www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

Delighted to see my third PhD student, Kim Verity, successfully defend her thesis this morning. Kim has a couple of preprints already posted at www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... and www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1.... More coming soon!

A seven‐step guide to spatial, agent‐based modelling of tumour evolution Spatial agent-based models are frequently used to investigate the evolution of solid tumours subject to localized cell–cell interactions and microenvironmental heterogeneity. As spatial genomic, tran...

I recommend the published version, which is also open access doi.org/10.1111/eva....

I'm delighted to hear that

Terry really hit it out of the park with this post. I even posted it on the bulletin board outside my office. I'm making time today to rekindle my joy.

Apart from much else, the naming of this tool defames the guy who said, "The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think".

“Kick it while it’s down” approach to cancer treatment could improve cure rates, suggests new study | City St George's, University of London Dr Robert Noble, Senior Lecturer, Department of Mathematics, led the study based on modelling from evolutionary theory.

Some coverage on my university's website about our recent paper on evolutionary cancer therapy www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

"To build on a tool such as edgeR, which is 16+ years in the making and consists of a complex codebase with thousands of lines of code, would previously have required years of study and effort". In his blogpost @lpachter.bsky.social explains how he ported all of it from R and C to Python in a week.

Fair point! Curious that three of the names are associated with unappealing characters in The Simpsons.

Also one hat that says "drift as in genetic drift" and another that says "drift as in BM with drift"

Nor snowboarding

I was a postdoc in Basel for 3.5 years and never got round to trying skiing. Still highly recommend Switzerland.

Developing machine learning methods to infer the evolution of haematological cancers at Imperial College London on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Developing machine learning methods to infer the evolution of haematological cancers at Imperial College London, listed on FindAPhD.com

If you’re interested in machine learning and mathematical modelling, we’re recruiting a PhD student to develop new methods for studying cancer evolution at
@imperialimmuno.bsky.social

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

"Why do you care about US politics?"

No reason. No reason at all.

"The intern who now produces all our international coverage has upgraded his ChatGPT subscription to make such mistakes less likely in future"

Davis Summer Population Genomics Program Want to learn population genetics? Please fill out this form to indicate your potential interest in a 2-week intensive online summer population genetics course taught by Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra and Graham...

Fun news! @gcbias.bsky.social and I are teaching a 2-week online population genetics workshop this summer to raise money for the Center for Population Biology at UC Davis. We're trying to gauge interest -- please fill this out if you might be interested! And please share broadly!

Google's AI Overview says, "Selective sweep probabilities in spatially expanding populations, such as in growing tumours or biological invasions, are generally independent of the mutation rate and determined by the ratio of mutant-to-wildtype radial expansion speeds, with the probability approximated by \((1-c_{wt}/c_{m})^{d}\) (where \(d\) is the spatial dimension)." These are new results that we reported for the first time in our preprint.

I just returned the proof of our paper "Selective sweep probabilities in spatially expanding populations". Google's AI Overview is already reporting the main results (presumably scraped from the November 2023 preprint) as established fact.

"I want to be a good figurehead, lend dignity to the University ... I have networks both overseas and in the UK" - Peter Mandelson in October 2024 making his case to be Chancellor of @ox.ac.uk. Good thing no one voted for him.

Notwithstanding my previous post this is a fantastic opportunity

Although I strongly sympathise with US-based colleagues valiantly swimming against the tide, I'm afraid I can't in good conscience advise any non-US citizen to take up a PhD or postdoc in the US right now. Mind you, all the ECRs I've given guidance to lately needed no persuading on this point.

Trump says he 'didn't see' part of video with racist clip depicting Obamas as apes The US president says he

People accused him of being racist. He'd like to clarify that he is in fact dumb, lazy and irresponsible. As well as racist. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Hundreds of staff leave Edinburgh University amid cuts drive According to the university, 345 of these departures were the result of a targeted voluntary severance (VS) scheme run by the institution in 2025.

Missing from the coverage of redundancies at Edinburgh: this was done in such a haphazard, uncoordinated way, there are now core teams who have gone from 5 people to 1 with no change in workload or pressure and huge loss in knowledge of institutional process. www.heraldscotland.com/news/2576321...

A 🆕 episode of Genetics in Your World is live! @ecoevogal.bsky.social interviewed @srishtipatil.bsky.social & @robjohnnoble.bsky.social about their work testing a new approach to cancer treatment rooted in theory from evolutionary & conservation biology.

Listen now: buff.ly/B2YyByg

Bridging Disciplines: How a Theory Meant to Aid in Saving Plant and Animal Species is Helping Scientists Reconsider an Evolutionary Approach to Cancer Treatment — A Conversation with Srishti Patil and...

I really enjoyed chatting with @srishtipatil.bsky.social about our “Preventing evolutionary rescue in cancer" paper for the @genetics-gsa.bsky.social "Genetics in Your World" podcast. Listen for free at shows.acast.com/genetics-in-...

The "colleagues" here are Yannick Viossat and @armaanahmed.bsky.social, who were vital members of the team led by first author @srishtipatil.bsky.social.