Ananya Nidamangala Srinivasa, PhD

May in the @contamclub.bsky.social calendar is extra special to me because it features a picture I took of this super cool contaminant!! 🦠

We are experiencing an assault on science unparalleled by anything I’ve seen in my life. It’s not one issue or another anymore, the entire institution is under attack by the most powerful individuals in the country.

This Friday, where will you be?

standupforscience2025.org

I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers

Can a headline alone be eligible for a Pulitzer?

Just explained the Hardy-Weinberg principle to my 18yo brother and he understood 😭 feel so worthy of having a PhD 🥹

These remind me of stained chromosome spreads! 🤣

Infamous paper that popularized unproven COVID-19 treatment finally retracted Study on hydroxychloroquine by Didier Raoult and colleagues gets pulled on ethical and scientific grounds

It took four days from submission to publication, and nearly five years from publication to retraction. After campaigning by many, many scientists, and an investigation by Elsevier, an infamous paper on hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment has been retracted. 🧪
www.science.org/content/arti...

DIC microscopy image of six Naegleria gruberi amoebae crawling on glass. Image taken by Emily Larkin

Screenshot from the Cell Bio 2024 app summarizing information about Emily Larkin’s cell bio 2024 presentation entitled “Conserved and divergent localization of kinetochore components in the amoeba Naegleria, a model for evolutionary cell biology.” This talk is taking place in the session entitled “Highlighting Excellence: Cutting-edge Cell Biology Research Performed by Undergraduate Students, located in room 31B on Tuesday Dec 17 8:55am. The talk is 10 minutes long. The author list includes E. Larkin, A.S. Kennard, and L. Fritz-Laylin, all from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA.

So proud that my fantastic undergraduate mentee Emily Larkin will be giving her first-ever talk at #cellbio2024 TOMORROW! 8:55am in the Highlighting Excellence subgroup (room 31B). She will share the first-ever glimpse of kinetochores in our favorite amoeba, Naegleria gruberi!

Dropped a drop of protein extract on my bench and this is how it dried! So spiky 🧪

How do organelles fit together inside a crowded cell? Answering this question requires a way to image many organelles in a whole cell at high resolution with high throughput. Our new preprint shows how to do this in yeast using soft x-ray tomography
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A picture of cookies made with clay

Ending the series with these “cookies” I made with clay ☺️

A picture of brownies with a swirl of tahini on the top

Another non-cookie item: brown butter-tahini brownies!

A picture of cookies with caramelized white chocolate, strawberries and matcha

Another top tier cookie: caramelized white chocolate-matcha-strawberry 🍓

A picture of a lemon bar with tea

Not a cookie, but Meyer lemon bars with shortbread crust

A picture of a cookie with black sesame caramel and chocolate chips, with flaky sea salt sprinkled on top

Black sesame caramel chocolate chip cookies with flaky sea salt

A picture of three cookies with almonds and dusted with icing sugar

Almond croissant cookies (with an almond paste center)

A picture of chocolate chip cookies made with brown butter, with a halvah center, and sprinkled with flaky sea salt and black sesame seeds

Chocolate chip halvah cookies with sesame and flaky sea salt

A picture of earl grey cookies with some oranges on the side

These earl grey cookies with an orange icing (not pictured) ☕️🍊

A picture of chocolate peppermint chip cookies

A round up of my favorite cookies I’ve baked for the Zanders lab through my time here 🍪 ✨🤤 starting with these chocolate peppermint chip cookies

What is common knowledge in your field but shocks outsiders?

A lot of basic biological functions—which are widely conserved between species—involve genes that evolve rapidly and vary from species to species. What this tells us: maintaining those functions involves continual adaptive innovation!

blue and green watercolor brain painting

grid of virus images in jewel-toned watercolor

PSA for new people: I pay my bills by selling original art, so I would be super grateful if you bought some artologica.etsy.com #sciart #scicomm

Thinking about how to share science has been such a fun process of trial and error, so I made a "roadmap" infographic of the process I use. (there's a printable version as well) Would love to hear what your process is/what your resources are!

Leveraging Basic Design Principles to Improve Scientific Presentations Communicating scientific concepts and data effectively is a fundamental aspect of science. Scientific presentations are essential tools for sharing research, yet they are often not designed intentiona...

I wrote a short post on how I leverage design principles to improve my scientific presentations... Long story short, it's more than making things pretty. Effective design can add so much more to your talk/poster! tinyurl.com/designforsci...

Happy deepavali to those who celebrate 🪔✨

My toxic trait is making elaborate illustrations for talks😅Garter snake+rough skinned newt!

Congratulations to the winners of the Nobel prize! I hope their stories, particularly KK's, force us to confront the misogyny, bias and assumptions about "impact" and "excellence" that very likely limit the recognition of similar innovations that could improve our world.