Piper Below

How my stutter is teaching me humility—in science and beyond “I will always face the burden of coaxing my body to do what comes naturally and effortlessly for most,” this assistant professor writes

I can relate.

I have been a stutterer since I was a child. I hated being the only one who did. Figuring out the best way to work a sentence w/o stuttering is still exhausting.

Graduate school forced me to work extra hard on presentation skills. I got better.

🧪 www.science.org/content/arti...

We're excited to be recruiting an NIH funded postdoc to work in the Coop lab at UC Davis. We're specifically interested in candidates who are want to work at the intersection of human genetics, GWAS, and population genetics modeling. Please RT

Here are some great opportunities at UNC-Chapel Hill, in a very strong biology department.

Staff Scientist About EMBL-EBI EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute is a data powerhouse, utilised on a global scale to advance scientific discovery through bioinformatics and solutions to some of the world’s mos...

I am hiring! - looking for a Staff Scientist to co-run my research group with me. Staff Scientist is a senior professional scientist role at EMBL. Please forward to people you might know who could be interested! embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/EMBL/j...

A reminder that the PhD program for EMBL is open for winter recruitment round. If you want to understand life at a molecular level and have a quantitative science (you don't have to have done biology - we love our mathematicians/physcists/chemists!) apply www.embl.org/about/info/e...

COMPADRE: Combined pedigree-aware distant relatedness estimation for improved pedigree reconstruction Designing powerful and unbiased genomic studies requires accurate assessment of familial relatedness even when this information is not captured from p…

Big day in Lab- one grad student defended (so proud)! Another lectured for me (90 min!) because I had to give a talk for a consortium. Another gave an hour talk for the dept. Another is away getting married. Another had his thesis paper come out today! Phew! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

So happy to see this out! Please feel free to contact me if anyone wants to roll COMPADRE out in their data and wants help/advice!!

This work, led by my excellent graduate student Grahame Evans, was so much fun to do. we expanded the PRIMUS/PADRE relatedness tool suite to a new and improved all-in-one, scalable and user friendly tool, COMPADRE. Tools for genetic relatedness will always be one of my most fav parts of our work.

Our paper on clonal expansions in Sperm is out in Nature www.nature.com/articles/s41...
If you are interested in working at an intersection of Mendelian genomics/Population genetics/Clonal expansions +Cancer genetics/ and of course mutagenesis, please rich out about postdoc in my lab

"If everything around you looks dark, look again, you may be the light"

-Rumi

Job alert ‼️ UChicago Micro is hiring! Open to tenured/tenure track faculty at all levels in any area of microbiology. Come join our amazing and growing department. apply.interfolio.com/174404

The Length of Haplotype Blocks and Signals of Structural Variation in Reconstructed Genealogies Abstract. Recent breakthroughs have enabled the accurate inference of large-scale genealogies. Through modelling the impact of recombination on the correla

Delighted that our paper about the distribution of genomic spans of clades/edges in genealogies (ARGs), and using this for detecting inversions and other SVs (and other phenomena that cause local disruption of recombination) is out in MBE academic.oup.com/mbe/article/... (1/n)

Assistant Professor, Tenure-Track, Department of Biology, University of San Francisco Job Title: Assistant Professor, Tenure-Track, Department of Biology, University of San Francisco Job Summary: The Department of Biology at the University of San Francisco invites applications for a fu...

Tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Bioinformatics in the Department of Biology at the University of San Francisco
usfca.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/USF_Fu...

Come be my colleague! We’re hiring a tenure-track assistant professor of developmental psychology at the University of Denver. Please share with anyone on the job market this year! jobs.du.edu/en-us/job/49...

Faculty Recruitment

Please apply to our tenure-track faculty position at
@stanford-chemh.bsky.social! We are searching for a new colleague working at the interface between computation and molecular sciences. See post below and pls forward widely!
chemh.stanford.edu/opportunitie...

WE ARE... hiring!

Penn State Biology & the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences is recruiting a tenure track or tenured neurobiologist (Assistant or Associate Professor rank), and the committee is open to a broad scope of scientific questions.

psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/PSU_Academic...

📢 Open Call! The Max Perutz Labs invite applications for a Tenure-Track Professorship in Mechanistic Cell and Developmental Biology. More details ➡️ tinyurl.com/3fbkp89c

What causes stuttering? It might be in your DNA : Short Wave For a long time, scientists have suspected that stuttering — a common speech condition that affects an estimated 1 in every 100 people — could be heritable. Despite how common it is, it's still a rema...

We were interviewed by NPR's program Shortwave about our stuttering paper! Aside from my mouth saying "polymorphic" while my brain was thinking "polygenic" I think it came out fantastic! Please check it out! #NPR #VGI
www.npr.org/2025/09/03/n...

Seeking a Project Manager for the PRIME project:
"Building Infrastructure for Patients, Researchers and Industry for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS)". Closing date for applications is 15 September 2025. #pwME #MEcfs
elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

You found it, and haven’t yet invited me out to give a talk so we can go?

Rapid Response: Reinvesting in Racial and Indigenous Health Equity Research The purpose of this call for proposals is to meet the current moment by supporting timely, actionable health equity research that has been interrupted by shifts in federal funding.

ATTN: Robert Wood Johnson has money to support “canceled” research on racial-indigenous health equity

www.rwjf.org/en/grants/ac...

Over 20 years after Julius’s lab and mine cloned TRPM8, it is rewarding to see this science helping patients. The TRPM8 agonist Tryptyr treats dry eye by increasing tear production. A reminder that NIH-funded curiosity-driven research translates to medicines.
tryptyr.myalcon.com?gad_source=1...

Large-scale genome-wide analyses of stuttering - Nature Genetics Genome-wide analyses in over one million self-reported cases and controls identify genetic variants associated with stuttering and find genetic correlations with autism, depression and impaired musica...

📢PUBLISHED @natgenet.nature.com

📰Large-scale genome-wide analyses of stuttering.

By Hannah G. Polikowsky, Jennifer E. Below and colleagues.

⬇️

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Large-scale study uncovers 57 genetic hotspots into stuttering origins Findings published in Nature Genetics point to 48 genes associated with stuttering and highlight neurological pathways of risk.

fascinating and huge study into the origins of stuttering

I've been anxiously awaiting this @natgenet.nature.com piece from @piperbelow.bsky.social to publish!

news.vumc.org/2025/07/28/l...
🧪🧬

there are clips of the researchers talking about the findings and an animated vid w/study highlights

Update This is "Update" by Kindea Labs on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

Check out our new work! vimeo.com/1104948937/0...

Large-scale genome-wide analyses of stuttering - Nature Genetics Genome-wide analyses in over one million self-reported cases and controls identify genetic variants associated with stuttering and find genetic correlations with autism, depression and impaired musica...

Exciting paper on genetic influences on speech fluency, out now in @natgenet.nature.com. In a big step forward for the field, genome scans of almost 100,000 people with self-reported stuttering, & 1 million controls, identify 57 associated loci. Great work by @piperbelow.bsky.social & her team.🗣️🧬🧪

Genome-wide study makes ‘quantum leap’ in understanding stuttering Analysis of DNA from 23andMe users points to variants in genes linked to brain function and sense of rhythm

Thanks to @aaas.org for covering our paper! www.science.org/content/arti...

Large-scale study uncovers 57 genetic hotspots into stuttering origins Findings published in Nature Genetics point to 48 genes associated with stuttering and highlight neurological pathways of risk.

Trainees Dillon Pruett and Alyssa Scartozzi, who helped lead this research, are featured in a discussion of our work in this #VUMC Reporter article: news.vumc.org/2025/07/28/l...

This work was led by exceptional grad students and an amazing post doc, Dillon Pruett, who is about to launch his own lab at FSU! We also worked with the talented people at kindealabs.com to make a video that summarizes our work! We hope you will check it out!