Will Freyman

U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office A Science analysis reveals how many were fired, retired, or quit across 14 agencies

Incredible self own for the US. The damage being done to the US scientific enterprise is generational. We will look back on this as a tipping point where the US chose all on its own to stop leading the world in science.

www.science.org/content/arti...

🚨 Requesting help:

I am looking for an agent who can facilitate more speaking gigs, podcast appearances, and interviews with journalists

I want to more widely share my story and expertise as a trans geneticist who understands the reality and complexity of "biological sex" 🏳️‍⚧️🧬

Please signal boost?

I also welcome any direct connections people may have to podcasts who need a guest, or organizations who need a speaker (it's about that time to start planning for Trans Day of Visibility!)

If you have questions or ideas, DM me or email me at jey (at) beyondxandy (dot) org

@beyondxandy.bsky.social

Voting NO on the DHS funding bill is the bare minimum.

Backing Kristi Noem’s impeachment is the bare minimum.

Holding law-breaking ICE agents legally accountable is the bare minimum.

ICE is beyond reform. Abolish it.

This is courage. Looking a masked, government fascist dead in the eye, face to face, knowing full well that your life is on the line.

If elected officials had 1/10th of Alex Pretti's resolve, we would have far fewer troubles.

Alex Pretti was a colleague at the VA. We hired him to recruit for our trial. He became an ICU nurse- I lover working with him. He was a good kind person who lived to help and these fuckers executed him.

White. Hot. Rage.

Genetic Data From Over 20,000 U.S. Children Misused for ‘Race Science’

An excellent, bone-chilling story about a cadre of online racists who stole genetic data from studies on children so they could make specious arguments for the innate inferiority of non-white people, it's embrace by Elon Musk/twitter & how the Trump administration might make it easier to do again.

New paper with @smishra677.bsky.social!

How many different trees can be generated by just one duplication event? It turns out A WHOLE LOT, if you consider the coalescent process.

1/

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Minneapolis ❤️

This line graph illustrates the percentage change in agency staff levels from the previous year for nine major U.S. federal scientific and health organizations between the fiscal years 2016 and 2025. The agencies tracked include the CDC, Department of Energy, EPA, FDA, NASA, NIH, NIST, NOAA, and NSF. For the majority of the timeline between 2016 and 2023, the agencies show relatively stable fluctuations, generally staying within a range of +5% to -5% change per year. However, there is a dramatic and uniform plummet starting in the 2024–25 period. Every agency depicted shows a sharp downward trajectory, with staffing losses ranging from approximately -15% to over -25%. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows the most significant decline, dropping to roughly -26%, while the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shows the least severe but still substantial drop at approximately -15%.

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again.

www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Unifying phylogenetic traversal and deep learning to guide tree exploration https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.14.699358v1

ICE will continue to murder us until we abolish them

Minneapolis is literally occupied by its own federal government, this is an abomination, an act of civil war by the federal government against the sovereign states.

Kristi Noem must be impeached.

Tracing the evolutionary histories of ultra-rare variants using variational dating of large ancestral recombination graphs https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.07.698223v1

Final version of paper with @smishra677.bsky.social now published in a wonderful issue of GENETICS!

academic.oup.com/genetics/art...

Rep. Omar: Trump admin’s take on MN shooting is ‘delusional,’ ‘we’ve all seen the video’ | CNN Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar joins The Lead.

It was not "domestic terrorism.” It was state sanctioned violence.

A family will forever live with the pain caused by the admin's reckless and deadly actions.

Abolishing ICE is not enough. They must be held accountable.

Bay Resistance has an anti-war organizing call tonight as well as many local organizing meetings in the East, West, and South Bay coming up - get the details at www.bayresistance.org/events

Despicable. Non scientists have a hard time understanding how hard it is to get NIH funding. Brenna's work has been amazing and to see her lose funding because of a racist administration that wants our understanding of genetics to ignore the vast majority of human genetic variation is a travesty

Find Your Representative Find your representatives. Learn how to find and connect with them. Stay informed about their bills, committees, and contributions.

You can find your US reps and senators here: reps.fyi

If you call now, you'll get an answering machine and you can leave a message. A great thing to do if you're nervous about talking to someone. Just give your name, your zip code, and demand they impeach Trump for illegally invading Venezuela.

Oil brings us climate change and illegal invasions of sovereign nations.

SIR of susceptible, infectious, and recovered compartments with individuals who take short "trips" to other locations away from home, plus diagram of four phylogenetic patterns of host-mediated infection (resident-to-resident, visitor-to-resident, resident-to-visitor, visitor-to-visitor).

New preprint modeling pathogen phylogeography, where infected hosts spread disease through short "trips" between locations. Very fun collaboration with the brilliant @albertchristian.bsky.social and Ammon Thompson.

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

yallHap: Modern Y-chromosome haplogroup inference with probabilistic scoring and ancient DNA support https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.28.696719v1

Neural posterior estimation for population genetics Simulation-based inference methods are increasingly being used in population genetics due to their flexibility and ability to be applied in settings where likelihood-based methods are intractable. Per...

Popgen folks, Jiseon, Nate, and Andy, along with Yuxin Ning and Franz Baumdicker, just released a really cool new method for simulation based inference (think ABC) using normalizing flows. It seems to work really well! full joint posteriors ftw!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I have a new preprint demonstrating a genome-architecture-aware approach to inferring species trees and introgression landscapes from a small number of genomes. If you are interested in phylogenomics, birds, or hybridization, this is for you! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The missing heritability question is now (mostly) answered Not with a bang but with a whimper

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵

22-Oct 2022 headline from The Economist A new paper claims SARS-CoV-2 bears signs of genetic engineering But it has yet to be peer reviewed. And others strongly disagree

🧵Remember the preprint claiming SARS-CoV-2 has a "synthetic fingerprint"?

It said a restriction map was "extremely unlikely to have arisen by random evolution.”

I took its claims seriously.

The "synthetic fingerprint" hypothesis collapses. My new preprint explains why.

arxiv.org/abs/2510.23833

Proud of the latest edition of my free intro biostats book.

gitrepo: github.com/ybrandvain/b...
book: ybrandvain.github.io/biostats/

Not complete but at a good point to take a break, and I think its quite usable

dm me with comments , ideas etc

Thursday October 23 ICE has touched down and is gathering their forces. We are gathering to show united opposition and that we are ready. Rally and March 5pm in San Francisco Embarcadero Plaza Hands off the bay! Sign up for text alerts. bit.ly/baygetready

Bay Resistance has announced a rally and march this Thursday at 5pm, starting at San Francisco's Embarcadero Plaza.

There will also be upcoming meetups at libraries around the Bay Area later on. Details at www.bayresistance.org/get-ready