Megan E. Kelley, PhD

National Postdoc Appreciation Week September 2025

As part of our National Postdoc Appreciation Week tradition, we are celebrating our remarkable #MSKPostdocs with social cards & profiles! 🎉🙌 Stay tuned over the next two weeks to meet the outstanding scientists driving innovation at @mskcancercenter.bsky.social💡🧬🥼👩‍🔬👨‍🔬 #NPAW2025

Well don't I feel stupid

It was an honor to have made it to the Postdoc SLAM finals and I'm thrilled to have earned 2nd place! The entire lineup was amazing. Thank you @mskeducation.bsky.social for kicking off #NPAW with such a great event and many thanks to our audience and judges for coming out to support science at MSK

Megan Elizabeth Kelley, PhD Sfeir Lab/ Molecular Biology Losing our edge: Combating drug resistance in cancer

It’s SHOW TIME! 🎤 Kicking off the MSK Postdoc Slam is @meganekelley.bsky.social from the @agnelsfeir.bsky.social lab, diving into how error-prone DNA repair fuels drug resistance in cancer 🧬💊

immediately added to the lab's shared playlist! also to my toddler's playlist, though she doesn't seem to share the same enthusiasm for it

Yellow close lid now (don't think you'll see the white sign if the lid is open)

Wild side note on medical research: 1 million people is a lot of people to have in a study. Denmark can do it because, more than a country, it's a continuous natural experiment of every healthcare issue.

The public healthcare system keeps unusually easy to cross reference databases of its users.

The Elements (song) - Wikipedia

If you're a scientist or interested in science, it's well worth listening to Tom Lehrer's "The Elements" (sung by the author) in his honor (especially the last line 😉) 🧪
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ele...

Interview: How a Hearing-Loss Grant Got Cut in the Fight Over DEI “It felt like the floor dropped out,” researcher Uri Manor said after the sudden suspension of his lab’s award.

undark.org/2025/07/11/i...

Lamenting our microscopes aren't hooked up for sound..

On the first day of the conference, find the biggest, most senior professor, and punch him directly in the face

Same 🤣

Convergence and consensus In these days of political instability, geopolitical tensions, and social discontent around the world, there are continued threats to the principles, conduct, and findings of science. This assault on ...

Interesting opinion in Science suggesting to replace 'scientific consensus' with convergent evidence.

Because it is less easily derailed by quoting one dissenting opinion.

Seems like a good idea!

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

Opinion | The Science I Would Be Doing if I Weren’t in ICE Detention

The Science I Would Be Doing if I Weren’t in ICE Detention

By Kseniia Petrova

"Ms. Petrova is a Russian scientist who works in a lab at Harvard Medical School. She told her story through a Times Opinion editor, Alex Ellerbeck, over multiple calls from an ICE detention center."

New preprint from the lab led by Yanyang Chen identifies BAF as a key regulator of TREX1 activity at micronuclei.

US students. Looking to apply to graduate school? Had an offer rescinded recently? The University of British Columbia in Canada will re-open the application portal in some departments for US students from April 14-18.
Details: www.grad.ubc.ca/us-applicant...
#ubc #AcademicSky #PhDSky #ScienceSky

a woman in a red dress holds a microphone and says you get one and you get one we all get one Alt: a woman (Oprah Winfrey) in a red dress holds a microphone and says you get one and you get one we all get one

I am a Biology Section leader for @aaas.org. I have one-year, complimentary student memberships to AAAS for undergrads, grads, and postdocs. If interested, please DM me.

AAAS has 100,000+ members and is a major advocacy group for science, which is critical now. AAAS publishes the journal Science.

Countdown to an epic new pre-print.

Mitochondria are cells within our cells. They need the same core activities - replication, transcription, translation. How do cells enable these diverse activities in both compartments? We uncover an unexpected + broad strategy with ancient origins. Stay tuned!

Happy to have contributed a small part to this exciting story about the ancestors of eukaryotic tubulin in Asgard archaea. Congratulations to all the co-authors!

Drosophila follicle showing retrotransposons (pink & yellow) expressed in somatic cells infecting the oocyte

1/ Transposable elements are often called "jumping genes" because they mobilize within genomes. 🧬
But did you know they can also jump 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 cells? 🤯
Our new study reveals how retrotransposons invade the germline directly from somatic cells.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A short thread 🧵👇

In the midst of all the NIH & NSF chaos, I want to take a moment to focus on some good news and talk about science! 🧬✨

🚨 New preprint alert! 🚨 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
🧵👇 (1/)

Please check out our preprint where we find that mitotic transcription helps ensure ecDNA inheritance through chromosomal tethering:

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

(a) Human U2OS cells treated with dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) and stained using the Cell Painting assay, which employs six dyes in five channels to label eight cellular compartments. The top row (from left to right) shows mitochondrial staining; actin, Golgi, and plasma membrane staining; and nucleolar and cytoplasmic RNA staining. The bottom row (from left to right) displays endoplasmic reticulum staining, DNA staining, and a montage of all five channels (from Cimini et al. [21]). (b) Thousands of features are extracted from each segmented cell in microscopy images of wells. A learned function f(x) (CytoSummaryNet) aggregates this data into a single feature vector: the sample’s profile. (c) An in-depth look at the model architecture used in this study. The model consists of three elements: a function φ(x), which maps the input data from ℝD to ℝL space, a summation, which collapses the cell dimension, and ρ(z), which maps the collapsed representation from ℝN to ℝL space. (d) During training, replicate compound profiles are forced to attract each other (green arrows) and simultaneously repel every other compound (red arrows) in the learned feature space. Here, all forces are drawn for a single profile of compound B.

Taking pictures of cells with a microscope, then extracting thousands of features from them is uncannily effective for quantifying cell state, esp. for genes and chemicals (e.g., Cell Painting). But we often average the rich single-cell data to simplify analysis. Can we do better?
#bioML 🧪
1/n

Do you love science and want research experience before your next step? NY-RaMP is a 1 year paid opportunity for recent college graduates to do research in my lab or another lab at Hunter College. Learn more at a free webinar on Wed Dec 11 at 3 PM EST nyramp.org/webinars

Selfie in the new research lab.

Super excited for my first day as Assistant Prof at @cuanschutz.bsky.social in the Dept of Pharmacology! The lab is open, and now I can't wait to do exciting science! #FirstGen #newPI #STEM #AcademicLife #ExcitingScience #PhDLife #WomenInSTEM #MomInSTEM #GenomeStability #CellBiology #DNARepair

Histogram peaked at 3 minutes and 2 weeks since sent

When I will respond to your email

Hey, does anyone have any tips on how to analyze a truck load of single cell calcium imaging data?

I was thinking of clustering, but it feels off somehow.

Pointers, pubs, appreciated!

Title and abstract of the memoriam in the Journal of Cell Biology in the link

In September the world lost one of the great biologists of our time: Joe Gall. He bridged the transition from the histology era of cell biology to our molecular present, contributing a remarkable set of insights in his 9 decades 1/n 🧪
rupress.org/jcb/article-...

Profound synthetic lethality between SMARCAL1 and FANCM Feng et al. uncover a critical genetic interaction between the DNA translocases SMARCAL1 and FANCM. Their combined loss leads to catastrophic genome instability, particularly at simple-repeat sequence...

First post here!
New paper from the lab! Profound synthetic lethality between FANCM and SMARCAL1: www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

Lichens on a wet tree branch in late fall.

Bright orange damp looking folded mushrooms, probably Tremella mesenterica, also known as witch's butter.

Nice walk this afternoon at the Washtenaw County Devine Preserve. Overnight rain brought the mosses and lichens to life, along with many fungi, including this witches butter. #Lichens #Fungi