Barbara Jennings

Is it time for the UK to develop split-mode undergraduate degrees? — Neil Mosley Consulting A look at why online undergraduate education has developed so differently in the US and UK, and whether it’s time for UK universities to explore split-mode degrees.

"one wonders what the impact would be if UK students had greater options and more explicit and deliberate flexibility within a campus anchored undergraduate degree"

View of the River Exe running through the Quay in sunny Exeter.

Post-doc opportunity in Exeter 🌟 studying genetic modifiers of haemochromatosis 🩸

Closing date 30 Oct!

Come and work with a interdisciplinary team of epidemiologists, clinicians, and statistical geneticists, in a beautiful city in the South West of England ❤️

jobs.exeter.ac.uk/hrpr_webrecr...

🤗 Out now @naturemedicine.bsky.social results of our genomic NBS study BabyScreen+ 👶🧬

👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1,000 babies
WGS using existing cards
600+ conditions
13 day TAT
16 diagnoses (vs 1 in std NBS)
High clinical impact
High parental acceptability

🚨 New paper alert on telomeres! 🚨
Something different from the group! Thanks to Yuxin, a talented student in the lab, we used long-reads in 75 human trios to study telomeres and their inheritance.

Painting featuring a white man and woman as if dancing joyfully in a lush garden amongst washing hanging on a clothesline and in front of a small hut and bird houses

'Halcyon Days' by Anna Pugh, contemporary British folk artist #womensart

A short thread. For years, I have been surprised by how much confusion our discovery of clones carrying cancer-driver mutations in normal tissues has caused in the cancer community. Typical questions like: (1) if you see these mutations in normal cells, are they really cancer drivers?... [1/4]

In our latest paper, I wrote 2 supplementary notes (5 and 6) to briefly recap classical models, starting with Armitage&Doll and moving onto models with different types of clonal expansions. Some readers may find them of interest. [4/4] static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10...

Education - Genomics Education Programme share.google/M6vINJt16CrP... lots of videos in the education collection. Some cover sequencing and bioinformatics principles.

My thoughts on job advisers in GP surgeries. As you might guess, I'm not a fan.
Will make anxious patients worse. How about incentivising employers instead of telling patients to try harder.

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...

John Innes Foundation Rotation PhD Programme

Applications are now open for the 2026 John Innes Foundation Rotation #PhD programme - bringing together three world-class institutes with expertise in #plant, #microbial, and #datascience at the Earlham Institute, @johninnescentre.bsky.social and @thesainsburylab.bsky.social.

👉

An exciting opportunity has arisen for a senior bioinformatician to join the Cancer Genetics team on the Prostate Cancer UK funded project “Identifying patients with aggressive prostate cancer by detecting molecular subtypes in urine”. 3 years starting in Feb 2026.

🧬🖥️

bit.ly/3Wt3Lk8

I want to try something again at #ASHG25 this year: I'll block some time on Thursday and Friday afternoons to meet with trainees who would be interested to chat on any topic.

I did this last year and it was great to meet a whole bunch of new people, at all career stages!

Image shows the first two printed pages of the paper “A forkhead-domain gene is mutated in a severe speech and language disorder” by Cecilia Lai and colleagues, published in Nature in 2001 (volume 413, pages 519-523). The abstract reads as follows: Individuals affected with developmental disorders of speech and language have substantial difficulty acquiring expressive and/or receptive language in the absence of any profound sensory or neurological impairment and despite adequate intelligence and opportunity. Although studies of twins consistently indicate that a significant genetic component is involved, most families segregating speech and language deficits show complex patterns of inheritance, and a gene that predisposes individuals to such disorders has not been identified. We have studied a unique three-generation pedigree, KE, in which a severe speech and language disorder is transmitted as an autosomal-dominant monogenic trait. Our previous work mapped the locus responsible, SPCH1, to a 5.6-cM interval of region 7q31 on chromosome 7. We also identified an unrelated individual, CS, in whom speech and language impairment is associated with a chromosomal translocation involving the SPCH1 interval. Here we show that the gene FOXP2, which encodes a putative transcription factor containing a polyglutamine tract and a forkhead DNA-binding domain, is directly disrupted by the translocation breakpoint in CS. In addition, we identify a point mutation in affected members of the KE family that alters an invariant amino-acid residue in the forkhead domain. Our findings suggest that FOXP2 is involved in the developmental process that culminates in speech and language.

Twenty-four years ago today, our paper “A forkhead-domain gene is mutated in a severe speech and language disorder” was published: www.nature.com/articles/350....
A personal thread about the ups & downs of the journey we took to get to that point....1/n
🗣️🧬🧪

Edward Stott was an English Romantic visionary who loved the land and its characters. In this work he explores one of the great themes of 19thC art and poetry: labourers returning home by moonlight, as the seasonal cycle draws to a close and the harvest is safely gathered in.

For a U.K. equivalent, it’s like sending troops to war-ravaged Bath.

🧬 New to Bluesky? The GEP has created a Starter Pack to help genetics educators get started! Find accounts, discover genomics feeds, and join the GEP’s growing community.
Get started: go.bsky.app/3JFUJRg

#GeneticsEducation #Bluesky #CURE #Genomics

View of the Palace of Westminster and Big Ben next to the River Thames under a partly cloudy sky.

A new UEA study has found that UK Members of Parliament (MPs) and the public overestimated the time left to meet a critical deadline for limiting global warming. 

Read more 👉 bit.ly/3KAs1y2

#UKParliament #MPs #ClimateChange
@ukri.org
@climateuea.bsky.social

PhD students Our PhD programme attracts the brightest scientific minds and is an opportunity for talented people to embark on their career in biomedical research.

Motivated graduates with backgrounds in biological or biomedical sciences, physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering and/or computer science are invited to apply to our 4-year fully funded PhD programme.

Apply by 05 November 2025

www.crick.ac.uk/careers-and-...

Jane Goodall stands at a plinth, mid-speech, with a UEA logo behind her, when she opened the New Science Building in 2019.

"Everything is connected. Everyone can make a difference."
Rest in peace, Jane Goodall.
We are proud to have known you.
#UEAScience

Dr. Jane Goodall was an extraordinary champion for nature. She holds a special place at Esri as a friend and advocate for using technology to protect and transform our world for the better. Her inspiration will always remain in our hearts.
Rest in peace, power, and warm chimpanzee embrace, dear Jane

Six journal rejections and a major rethink: why I’m happy to admit to my research failures, and you should too Outlining the trial-and-error processes that are involved in every research project could help others to become more efficient and paint a more honest picture of life as a researcher.

Outlining the trial-and-error processes that are involved in every research project could help others to become more efficient and paint a more honest picture of life as a researcher, says Séverine Toussaert

go.nature.com/4q4TPLs

There is a ton of research that students ratings on aggregate do not reflect learning outcomes, but whatever biases the population has. But in the "run universities like a business" model, student ratings are customer satisfaction surveys, so reflecting learning outcomes is irrelevant.

A screenshot from BBC Breakfast feature, showing the inside of tomato in front of a backdrop of another image of tomatoes

📺 We were on BBC Breakfast this morning together with the @johninnescentre.bsky.social talking about our new ViTaL-D study 🍅

Watch back from 2:40:12
➡️ buff.ly/xorscwz

Find out more about the study
➡️ buff.ly/EtOzDdH

Primary Cilia in the Developing and Mature Brain Primary cilia emerge as key regulators of development, neurogenesis, and signaling in the mammalian brain. Guemez-Gamboa et al. review the status, genetic basis, potential, controversies, and unanswer...

It continues to be weird to me that adult CNS neurons have a single, nonmotile cilium just hanging out, maybe acting as a site for receptor expression. Like a little extra antenna that we all just ignore in our drawings of neurons. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Just fuck off with this. How about start the conversation by highlighting how much immigrants contribute to the UK - not least by propping up the NHS and social care system!

Also - forced volunteering is not volunteering, it's unpaid labour.

this! the commercialization of education via the integration of AI in classrooms and big tech infrastructure is the most dangerous and destructive capitalisation of education

Evening view from the Thames of London cityscape & Tower Bridge

Tower Bridge - view from a Paddle Steamer heading into London.

Was amazing 👏 thank you @tb-lifts.bsky.social & the fabulous Waverley.

Photo of a white woman sitting on a stone step in a garden

Joni Mitchell, musician, songwriter, painter, genius.
#Womensart
(Image via JMitchell FB)