Zachary Murphy

Huge congrats to @zacharyrmurphy.bsky.social selected as a 2025 Fujifilm Fellow at @harvard.edu 🎉

The Fujifilm Fellowship Program fully funds PhD students doing groundbreaking work in the life sciences!!

I am honored to announce that I was chosen to be a Fujifilm Fellow through HMS's Therapeutics Graduate Program for the 2025-26 year. This year of funding will help me continue my research on the molecular and cellular roles of XX and XY chromosome complement in AD.
hms.harvard.edu/departments/...

We are proud to celebrate Tracy as the recipient of the Harvard Medical School Clifford Barger Excellence in Mentoring Award! 🎉 Her guidance, encouragement, and dedication mean so much to all of us. Congratulations on this well-deserved honor!

CLU alleviates Alzheimer’s disease-relevant processes by modulating astrocyte reactivity and microglia-dependent synaptic density Genetic studies implicate clusterin (CLU) in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), yet its precise molecular impact remains unclear. Through u…

Thrilled to share my first first-author paper is out
@cp-neuron.bsky.social! We show that Alzheimer's disease protective CLU alleles upregulate CLU in response to neuropathology, dampening inflammatory signaling between microglia and astrocytes.

Read here www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Congratulations our newly-minted PhD candidate Olivia Pembridge on passing her PQE with flying colors today! Olivia will be using a wide array of iPSC and organoid models to study mechanisms of neurodevelopment!

Selfie mode activated

Congratulations to TYP lab Postdoctoral Research Fellow @heuerwego.bsky.social on being awarded a @brightfocus.bsky.social Alzheimer's Disease Research Fellowship! Sarah is using iPSCs to determine the cellular impacts of ABCA7 mutations in Alzheimer's disease!

The Cost of the Government’s Attack on Columbia American universities have given the country prosperity and security. The Trump administration’s attack on academic freedom endangers all of that.

Really great article by the president of Princeton! It would be great to see more universities and academic leadership band together to protect academic freedom! Maybe this will be a turning point...

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Mitochondrial dynamics and quality control regulate proteostasis in neuronal ischemia-reperfusion Mitochondrial damage and dysfunction are hallmarks of neuronal injury during cerebral ischemia-reperfusion (I/R). Critical mitochondrial functions including energy production and cell signaling are...

Happy to share a large part of my PhD work that is now published in Autophagy!

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Stood up for Science today!! #StandupforScience

Congratulations to the newly minted PhD @alexlish.bsky.social on successfully defending her thesis today! Be on the lookout for all the amazing things to come from Dr. Lish!

Ultra-rapid droplet digital PCR enables intraoperative tumor quantification Identifying a tumor’s molecular subtype during surgery and rapidly quantifying mutations in resected tissues intraoperatively could guide resection strategy and improve resections. Murphy, Bianchini, et al. introduce Ultra-Rapid droplet digital PCR, which…

Online Now: Ultra-rapid droplet digital PCR enables intraoperative tumor quantification

Finally, a special thank you to Emilia Bianchini (co-first author) and Gilad Evrony (PI/mentor) for all your help! I am thrilled to see this come out!

Here is an open-access link to bypass the paywall. :) authors.elsevier.com/c/1kg6b9UKeT...

We accomplished this in an average of ~15 min for the IDH1 R132H assay and ~17 min for the BRAF V600E assay. Further, we combined UR-ddPCR with UR-stimulated Raman histology to estimate the tumor cell density from the tumor core and boundary (4/5)

We then implemented UR-ddPCR in the operating room successfully genotyping and quantifying the tumor cell percentage of 78 tumor samples across 22 OR cases (9 added since our pre-print). (3/5)

We developed an ultra-rapid, ddPCR-compatible DNA extraction (~3 minutes) and an ultra-rapid thermal cycling method (~5 minutes) which allowed us to create UR-ddPCR assay for both the IDH1 R132H and BRAF V600E mutations that were highly concordant with standard ddPCR (R^2 = .995) (2/5)

Exciting Update: Our paper on ultra-rapid ddPCR was published today in Med (@cp-med.bsky.social)! TLDR: UR-ddPCR enables the intraoperative genotyping of tumors and quantification of tumor boundaries in 15 min from tissue --> result (open-access link in last post)
www.cell.com/med/abstract... (1/5)

Flyer for Massachusetts stand up for science, at the Massachusetts state capitol in Boston on March 7th from 12-4 PM. More info at standupforscience2025.org

HEY BOSTON! 📣☀️

MARCH 7TH, MASSACHUSETTS STATE CAPITOL!

Join us to #standupforscience2025 and make your voice heard!

SEE YOU THERE!

www.standupforscience2025.org #standupforscience20225

Thank you! Very excited to be done with the exam! 😅

Welcome to the Bluesky account for Stand Up for Science 2025!

Keep an eye on this space for updates, event information, and ways to get involved. We can't wait to see everyone #standupforscience2025 on March 7th, both in DC and locations nationwide!

#scienceforall #sciencenotsilence

How much do people around the world trust scientists?

"Most people have a relatively high trust in scientists. People want scientists to take an active role in society and policymaking."

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

Trump hits NIH with ‘devastating’ freezes on meetings, travel, communications, and hiring Researchers facing

“The impact of the collective executive orders and directives appears devastating.” scim.ag/40ureTO

"Heterozygoats: just allele uneven." in one of those black-framed memes format. Two small goats (kids) each with black front halves and white back halves, frolicking on a snowy field. This was stolen from the Internet, because it's been a particularly long day of gut punches and we could all use some cheering up.

Heterozygoats.

I lost my Biorender access since starting grad school, and it has been incredibly annoying

...but apparently the NIH launched a free, "any-use" repository of science/medical artwork called BioArt in November! It's been a great alternative so far if others are also annoyed
bioart.niaid.nih.gov

The Young-Pearse lab is now on Bluesky!! 🤩🧬🧠

Happy New Year!!

Now, over or under 1 month until I stop accidentally writing 2024 on tubes instead of 2025 🤔😅

Ngl the TYP lab kinda killed it this holiday season 🎄 from science elf on the shelf to Tracy's holiday party these people make science even more fun :)

Created a starter pack of scientists studying sex& gender differences in biology and medicine 🧪💊 let me know if you'd like to be included go.bsky.app/CyUiL4k

A panoramic view of cell population dynamics in mammalian aging To elucidate aging-associated cellular population dynamics, we present PanSci, a single-cell transcriptome atlas profiling over 20 million cells from 623 mouse tissues across different life stages, se...

Excited to share our work @science.org. led by our incredible @tommyz626.bsky.social at @rockefelleruniv.bsky.social! By profiling 21 million single cells across life stages, we reveal aging as distinct, development-like transitions, with dramatic cell population changes in specific time windows!

Three must read papers for PhD students. #scisky #PhD #science #research #academicsky

1. The importance of stupidity in scientific research

Open Access
journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...