Gilles Vanwalleghem

YouTube video by John Rawls Zebrafish in the wild

Part 6: For decades, the zebrafish has helped scientists unlock the mysteries of genetics, development, & disease. But the fish that power most discoveries have spent generations inside lab tanks. This video captures footage of zebrafish in their natural environment in Nepal.
youtu.be/cCZhZpPALqw

Unveiling the Dimensionality of Networks of Networks "Every object that biology studies is a system of systems." (François Jacob, 1974). Most networks feature intricate architectures originating from tinkering, a repetitive use of existing components wh...

Unveiling the Dimensionality of Networks of Networks arxiv.org/abs/2510.20520

The monthly rhythm of the brain-heart connection Integrating the menstrual cycle into heart-brain research is a crucial step toward advancing sex-specific medicine and improving outcomes for female brain and body health.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

GABA produced by multiple bone marrow cell types regulates hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells Tamplin and colleagues functionally test production of GABA metabolite in the bone marrow microenvironment as a regulator of hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells. Conditional deletion of GAD enzyme...

Check out our new paper! GABA produced by multiple bone marrow cell types regulates hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells: Stem Cell Reports www.cell.com/stem-cell-re...

Cause you can then pretend you only fund the top science, and not that there is a systemic failure?

So much wasted time in writing applications, although I guess you recycle and submit with slightly different aims, so it's alright of course.
I also love that "streamlining" sometimes backfire (see bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/1/...)

Only a few days left to apply to join the lab, come have fun with lasers and fish to answer some cool questions along the gut-brain axis. Denmark is also a lovely country to live in!

Nice study from Harry Sokol's lab. #microbiomesky

Immunometabolic reprogramming of macrophages by gut microbiota-derived cadaverine controls colon
inflammation

She was so influential, a very sad loss

Such cool work!

So, when are you going to like, read me?

Professor or Associate professor (Tenure Track/Full) in Microbial Genetics of Health - Turun yliopisto - Työpaikat - Duunitori Avoin työpaikka: Professor or Associate professor (Tenure Track/Full) in Microbial Genetics of Health - Turun yliopisto, Turku. Duunitorilla lisäksi yli 30 000 muuta avointa työpaikkaa. Lue lisää nyt!

Professor (full) or Associate Professor (tenure track) in Microbial Genetics of Health (U. Turku Finland). Competitive starting package included! Please share.

duunitori.fi/tyopaikat/ty...

Comb jelly season has started in Bergen, Norway! 🌈🍂🧪

Hahaha, actually it's Historic European Martial Arts on Thursday, aka my longsword is bigger than your foil ;)

Trying to set up a new network is always so motivating, you get to chat with many cool scientists, build bridges and be curious. Interdisciplinary research is definitely my favorite thing

Pathway to Independence: a forecast for the future of developmental biology ABSTRACT. In 2022, Development launched its Pathway to Independence (PI) programme, aimed at supporting postdocs as they transition to their first independent position. In 2025, we welcome our third c...

It's online! In this series of perspectives @dev-journal.bsky.social, yours truly talks about the exciting open questions and many things to do in the field of dev bio and neuroscience #DevBio🧪 #PIsOfTomorrow journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Microbiology and Immunology – Faculty Position (Ladder Rank) – Assistant Professor University of California, San Francisco is hiring. Apply now!

Our Department of Microbiology & Immunology at UCSF is running a faculty search this year for a new Assistant Professor! Please see the ad below for details. Searching for a great colleague, mentor, and scientist!
aprecruit.ucsf.edu/JPF05807

Ever wondered how to control stretch/compression in your epithelial system? Do you know why it’s important, which mechanotransduction mechanisms could be involved? I am @valeriaventurini.bsky.social and today I will guide you through this journey.

The deadline is the 13th of October, don't hesitate to reach out with any question!

When your weird idea is starting to give results and seems to be working, that's when science is really cool. Can't wait to share the videos and more details once it's been tested, but the optical tweezers are up and running :D

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Beyond Mechanism—Extending Our Concepts of Causation in Neuroscience The search for neural mechanisms of behaviour often relies on a synchronic, driving view of causation, where neural activity drives more neural activity, which eventually drives behaviour. The real c...

Here's a link to the paper: Beyond Mechanism—Extending Our Concepts of Causation in Neuroscience onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Faculty position in proteomics (Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, Associate Professor or Professor) at Aarhus University, Denmark - Vacancy at Aarhus University Vacancy at Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics - Protein Science, Aarhus University

Our department is hiring a professor in proteomics at any level, feel free to ask any question about the department

mbg.au.dk/en/news-and-...

Postdoc position in Neuroinflammation - Vacancy at Aarhus University Vacancy at Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics - Neurobiology, Aarhus University

We are recruiting a postdoc to join our team and study neuroinflammation along the gut-brain axis. Please share it with anyone who may be interested, and do not hesitate to reach out if you have questions.
international.au.dk/about/profil...

Call for 20 Assistant Professor positions Karolinska Institutet is a world-leading medical university with a long and proud history of ground-breaking research. We are now recruiting outstanding early-career researchers with particularly exce...

Karolinska is looking for 20 (!!) assistant professors and offering 6 year appointments with ~1M USD startup packages.

ki.se/en/about-ki/...

"Everyone should think carefully about using generative AI simply because the technology is built on environmental destruction, labor exploitation, and IP theft"

The goal of a PhD is not to learn some facts or read a few papers or learn a bunch of techniques. The goal of a PhD is to learn independence, problem solving, how to finish things you start, resilience, & gain the ability to adapt & think creatively. Learning these things is hard.

Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology - Nature An analysis of research papers and citing patents indicates the extensive ties between computer-vision research and surveillance.

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance

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AI is the tech & venture capital world gaslighting the rest of us into a 💩ier existence.