William DeWitt

chatgpt5 thinks a savings account with APY 4.10 will make money faster than a savings account with APY 4.8 or 4.9

Sam Altman on ChatGPT5: "A legitimate PhD-level expert in anything"... "it can help you understand your healthcare, and make decisions on your journey."

Great postdoc fellowship option at Santa Fe - lots of independence, interdisciplinary focus, strong quantitative element

apply-sfi.smapply.org/prog/complex...

Junior, Assistant, or Associate Specialist – Xue Lab University of California, Irvine is hiring. Apply now!

The Xue lab at UC Irvine is looking for a staff scientist to support our work investigating how microbes interact and evolve in the gut microbiome! Open to a wide range of previous experience levels, see ad for more.
recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09601

Genome Sciences is looking for a Director of Departmental Computing. This is a rare opportunity for someone interested in leading our excellent IT team, building and maintaining computational infrastructure, and working closely with our faculty and labs uwhires.admin.washington.edu/ENG/candidat...

Our annual "Wednesday Evening at the Genome" public lecture series starts this week! Talks by Andrew Stergachis, Ivan Liachko, Gaurav Bhardwaj, & Mary-Claire King geared toward a general audience. 6:00 in Foege auditorium, followed by time to meet the speakers. www.gs.washington.edu/news/publicl...

This is a good time to remember that Moas, Emus, and the other ratites diverged so long ago, they FLEW to different continents, and then lost the ability to fly and became giants independently. You can't just sprinkle a few variants to make one into the other.

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

Right. Imagine the race to the moon, but instead we landed astronauts on a plateau in Arizona with manmade craters.

This is Colossal. As much as it hurts to say so.

🚨 Most variant screens measure growth or abundance. What do they miss? That variants impact a spectrum of protein and cellular phenotypes. Variant in situ sequencing (VIS-seq) finds what’s missing: image cells 🔬 first, decode later, revealing multi-scale phenotypes for thousands of variants.👇

1/9

"Dr. Kobak and his team calculate that at least 13.5 percent of all biomedical abstracts appeared to have been written with the help of chatbots."

Not so surprising, given tools like Writefull (now integrated into Overleaf) that are explicitly marketed to scientists for this purpose.

Go Maggie! @magdalenarussell.bsky.social gets UW's Distinguished Dissertation Award for her PhD work with @matsen.bsky.social "Inferring mechanisms of V(D)J recombination using statistical inference on high-throughput immune repertoire data". 🏆

Germinal center clonal diversity trees as a musical score, a great image to start @victora.bsky.social's CCII seminar, "Replaying germinal center evolution on a quantified affinity landscape"
#GerminalCenter #Immunology
www.ccii.med.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/event/the...

Very excited to share I’ll be starting my own group at University of Utah in the Department of Human Genetics in the new year! Reach out if you are interested! vollgerlab.com

I am thrilled to announce that in January 2026 I will be starting my own lab at NYU Biology! Soon enough I will be recruiting postdocs and students! Please reach out if you are interested with a CV and description of your research interests, or if you know of people who could be interested! 🧬🗽 🦊

Congrats!

The link got me a "Error: DOI Not Found"

😂 Amtrak ad in the style of a monster truck rally

Helen Chu is the hero who revealed that—contra daily briefings from the White House—COVID was spreading widely in the community in the US by late February 2020..

I'm stoked to have this long-term and highly collaborative effort out in the wild. We present an experimental evolution system to quantitatively study the rapid evolutionary dynamics of B-cell affinity maturation. These evolutionary mechanisms underpin antibody responses and immune memory formation.

I'm stoked to have this long-term and highly collaborative effort out in the wild. We present an experimental evolution system to quantitatively study the rapid evolutionary dynamics of B-cell affinity maturation. These evolutionary mechanisms underpin antibody responses and immune memory formation.

Congrats!

Simons Graduate Fellowships in Ecology and Evolution The purpose of these awards is to provide support for students entering U.S.-based Ph.D. programs with a plan to perform research in ecology and evolution. While we will consider all projects in ecolo...

Check out this brand new fellowship from the Simon’s Foundation in Ecology and Evolution. Incoming grad students this year are eligible to apply. No citizenship restrictions. www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons...

Guide your favorite protein generative model with experimental data? Meet ProteinGuide - a method to condition pre-trained models on properties without retraining. We validated it both in silico by guiding ProteinMPNN and ESM3 on 3 tasks and in vitro by engineering base editors.

From Likelihood to Fitness: Improving Variant Effect Prediction in Protein and Genome Language Models Generative models trained on natural sequences are increasingly used to predict the effects of genetic variation, enabling progress in therapeutic design, disease risk prediction, and synthetic biolog...

New preprint in collaboration with @paulinanunezv.bsky.social supervised by @jonnyfrazer.bsky.social and Mafalda Dias – we propose a simple approach to improving zero-shot variant effect prediction in pre-existing protein and genome language models: 🧶 1/n

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

How can one efficiently simulate phylodynamics for populations with billions of individuals, as is typical in many applications, e.g., viral evolution and cancer genomics? In this work with M. Celentano, @wsdewitt.github.io , & S. Prillo, we provide a solution. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
1/n

Scientists, reach out to your local communities about the importance of funding science! Write an op-ed to your local newspaper as part of the #McClintockLetters.

Please spread the word and sign up! DM me if you're interested and need help getting started. I'm trained as a writer and happy to help.