Ko-Fan Chen 陳克帆

Staff ‘demoralised’ by lack of career progression amid cost cuts Promotion freezes at UK universities exacerbate frustrations caused by mass redundancies and low pay rises, with academics warning it could force more people out of the sector

*curb your enthusiasm theme*

Staff ‘demoralised’ by lack of career progression amid cost cuts

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/staff-demoralised-lack-career-progression-amid-cost-cuts

@jonny 🙏😡

Happy "they finally came for UCLA" day (yesterday) - the grants that pay my wages were suspended. Potentially looking for work soon in case they're fully cancelled

Expert Directory | Bioclocks Uk

Happy launching 🎊🎊🎊 @bioclocksuk #circadian #sleep
Expert Directory | Bioclocks Uk
https://www.bioclocks.uk/about/bioclocks-uk-experts

« Lancaster University is proposing over 450 job cuts, with a Voluntary Redundancy Scheme underway and a Compulsory Redundancy scheme likely to launch in September 2025. That’s roughly 1 in 4 staff — gone. » […]

We have a post-doc position for 15 months in the framework of the https://dnaquaimg.eu/ project (11 countries) at UMR Carrtel https://carrtel.lyon-grenoble.hub.inrae.fr/unit (Lake Geneva, France).
If you have good skills in molecular biology, aquatic ecology […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

<Grumpy old guy> I find single-cell machine learning talks which show lots of studies and results very fast without explaining any in detail a bit disappointing despite the excellent underlying science. I noticed it for the first time 2 years ago and it seems to be a general way of presenting in […]

A topic dear to my heart: Irene Julca on functional divergence of duplicated genes #EvolCompGen #ismbeccb2025
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.29.620890v1

One thing I absolutely love about #drosophila behavioural #genetics is that from time to time the results present you with answers for your research questions but with complete unexpected perspective! Yesterday our MSc student showed us some cool #sleep data with manipulation of […]

CRISPR mutagenesis is also not perfect. A common limitation is generation of genetic mosaics, where only some cells carry gene knockouts. But our new generation of tools substatially improves on that. Described in the preprint below with flies on their way to VDRC:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Images from the linked preprint showing Wingless stainings in the Drosophila wing imaginal disc. Targeting vps15 with two indepependent RNAi lines (paper also shows the same with a third line) does not result in a phenotype. In contrast, targeting vps15 with two independent sgRNA constructs and Cas9 results in strong accumulation of Wingless protein in perturbed cells.

Why use #CRISPR in #Drosophila when RNAi works so well? Because for some genes well is not good enough.

Check out new preprint from the lab demonstrating a role for Vps15 in Wingless trafficking. Something that was missed in several RNAi screens.

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

Giant study finds a research field that’s mostly reproducible Researchers assessed more than 1,000 results from fruit-fly immunity research published between 1959 and 2011. The majority of findings look verifiable.

Drosophila for the win! When you can afford more than 3 subjects per experiment, your results get more reliable...

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Hey @nature.com What's up with your share buttons? Can we please also get 🦋 and 🦣 options to not exclusively promote the network of the guy who has done more than most to harm US science?

Green snake with a yellow mouth in dry brown leaves. Described as lemon and lime flavoured.

Borrowing this snake pic from a colleague who spotted it the other day in Brazil - our students are spending time with our partner institution UENF. Chironius bicarinatus #WorldSnakeDay

Hello! I am jonny saunders, currently at the conference, having a great time, thanks for organizing! I have celiac disease, an autoimmune disease that is defined by a runaway autoimmune response to exposure to gluten. Given the self-amplifying nature of the autoimmune response, exposure to microscopic quantities of gluten from e.g. individual crumbs or splatters of sauces is enough to trigger sometimes debilitating symptoms that can last for days. I took a chance today and ate lunch from the buffet, taking food only from trays marked gluten free with decent distance from glutenous items, and am feeling an immune aura that precedes a more severe reaction. Buffet lunches are not accessible to people with severe allergens or other food-based immune diseases. Most catering companies are aware of this and have some means of preparing food separately that can be guaranteed safe and ADA compliant when there is some employment-related reason one is compelled to eat in a particular place like at a conference.

[Chronic illness things]

Participating in public life while having chronic illnesses means you pretty regularly need to disclose what is happening within your body sometimes to a literally molecular level, and explain what that means in a way that doesn't […]

[Original post on neuromatch.social]

To my knowledge, first time that not only prestigious journals, but also prestigious institutions are implicated as major drivers of irreproducibility:

"Higher representation of challenged claims in trophy journals and from top universities" […]

And yet another one in the ever increasing list of analyses showing that top journals are bad for science:

"Thus, our analysis show major claims published in low-impact journals are significantly more likely to be reproducible than major claims published in trophy journals. " […]

I'm offering a 3-year PhD position with benefits at the University of Stuttgart (1-year extension possible). Research topic is open but broadly in incremental sentence comprehension. If you're into eye-tracking, even better! No teaching obligations until Summer 2027, some light teaching after […]

The "Developmental epigenomics" team (www.ghavihelmlab.com) led by Yad Ghavi-Helm at the Institute of Functional Genomics of Lyon (IGFL) is recruiting 1 technicians/engineer, 1 PhD student, and 1 postdoctoral fellow in the context of ANR and HFSP-funded projects. The primary scientific interest of the team is to understand how gene expression is regulated during development. We particularly focus on the role of 3D genomic organization in this regulation. By challenging prevailing paradigms - largely based on vertebrate genome research - we aim to bring forward a more nuanced understanding of how animals use 3D genome organization to regulate gene expression. We combine this scientific goal with the development of experimental and bioinformatics spatial OMICs tools (within the frame of the Spatial-Cell-ID facility) applied to our scientific questions. Until recently, we have used Drosophila melanogaster embryogenesis as a model system, but have recently incorporated a non-conventional model, the planktonic chordate Oikopleura dioica, due to the unique structure of its genome. some more details in image Please send a CV, cover letter, and contact details of at least two referees to: yad.ghavi-helm@cnrs.fr. There is no fixed deadline: applications will be considered upon submission.

fly job at Lyon, see partial details in ALT
#drosophila #postdoc #PhD

Hello #Biology and #Neuroscience Mastodon, does anyone has recent successful case for host MCSA postdoc fellowship?

https://marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/actions/postdoctoral-fellowships

if you do and would you be happy to share any parts of application, if so please DM or email […]

Team up between Sehgal and Dissel lab working out links between clock and homeostatic sleep centre! A bit of rescue of FSB role in sleep!

Clock-dependent regulation of a homeostatic #sleep center maintains daytime sleep and evening activity […]

My presentation on the #neuroscience of decision-making and #freewill in Vienna this past month:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yabf5Y1KQ68

It takes 10 hours on a laptop accurately simulating 5 seconds of a worm wiggling: https://archive.is/0j2Jp (and we still cannot simulate more than 20-30 #quantum particles exactly). Please be humble when the universe is present! #modeling #complexity (through @loriemerson )

Thanks for all the suggestions, looking forward to reading these👍

Register and Task Variation in Learner Corpus Research Elen Le Foll • University of Cologne • VAR4LCR

I'm on the train to Brussels and, although it's a Sunday afternoon, it appears that almost everyone in the carriage is their polishing presentation slides. And, to be fair, that's also what I'm doing... Looking forward to an evening with my former landlady in […]

[Original post on fediscience.org]

@kofanchen The book on my shelf that comes to mind is Hempel's "The Philosophy of Natural Science"

at a kid's play session I talked to a fellow parent who has a degree in #philosophy and specifically in #scientific research method. It was a fascinating convo and made me realise I never had a formal grasp of my science method: the way I identify and approach the research subjects. I simply […]

A UCL Chemistry undergraduate guiding a lesson on air pollution in front of a class of year 5 children.

UCL chemistry students preparing calibration solutions for their diffusion tubes using the Griess-Salzmann reagent to prepare the pink diazo dye - volumetric and other glassware visible in the picture.

A UCL chemistry student placing a diffusion tube on a lamp post with tall buildings visible in the background.

UCL Chemistry students looking at their maps to determine where to site their tubes after getting instruction from the class.

Our #UCLChemAirPoll 2025 project is just getting underway. We send our first year undergrads in primary schools, where Year 5 or 6 children predict where in their neighourhood levels of NOx will be high or low. We measure using diffusion tubes, and report our […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

diagram showing interactions among light, circadian clock, sleep and disease conditions

Hello biologists.social!
I just moved here, I am working on sleep and circadian rhythm using #Drosophila, hope to continue engaing with the drosophila researchers and wider community here!