Vikas Navratna

Content with how my favorite Persian love cake turned out. Nutty & tender crumb with a flavor profile of orange, rose, & cardamom.

I began speaking in tongues around the 1400s.

This is A-level parenting! Best way to learn about a place!

Join us in congratulating the winners of our 2026 Vilcek Foundation Prizes in Biomedical Science, Fashion & Culture, Fashion & Design, and Art History! This year, we awarded $850,000 to 14 immigrants and cultural leaders. https://vilcek.co/4aemyr2

I made this a year or so ago for our department pie contest. Filled with minced lamb biryani. I'm sure you'll like it.

What if it is a savory pie filled with lamb biryani?

Donuts.

My first ion channel study, a decade after I started working on membrane proteins. We report the cryo-EM structure of TWIK-2 & develop a high-throughput automated patch clamp e-phys assay to screen modulars of TWIK-2 channel activity. A great collaborative team effort.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

❤️

What a fucking end to the week. Loss of a literal legend. Moira Rose was one of my most favorite characters in the entirety of TV/film world.

Three oven-baked 8" skewers of cubed & marinated sable fish and vegetables arranged in parallel, next to a portion of basmati rice, in a colorful painted ceramic bowl. The image is illuminated by the soft ambient light of a winter afternoon.

Oven-baked sable fish tikka & rice.

Reachin' out
Emailin' me, Emailin' you

Beast Caroline
Good moods never seemed so good

Science is, certainly, not okay. Talk to ECRs and early-mid career people in academic science, especially immigrants. They're all a drink and nudge away from breaking down while sobbing. Actually, right now, it is the worst and hopeless time to be looking for a future or a stable career in academia.

Seventh cohort of BPS ambassadors in Biophysical Society January 2026 bulletin

Way to start the year with a huge humblebrag!
🎉🎉🎉 I have been selected as the Indian Ambassador for @biophysicalsoc.bsky.social seventh cohort (2026-2028)!!! Eagerly looking forward to working with other ambassadors to promote biophysics and bioinfo in India. 🥳 🙌
biophysics.cld.bz/Biophysical-...

How Does India Cook Biryani? A large-scale dataset and VLM-based pipeline for analyzing procedural differences across 12 regional Indian biryani variants using 120 cooking videos.

@vikasnavaratna.bsky.social This is right up your alley! farzanashaju.github.io/how-does-ind...
Haven't read it fully, yet! Sounds interesting...

What if I told you you're not the first person to send me this today. I'm happy to have a brand. Lol. One critique I have is that they don't argue Hyderabadi biryani is the best, based on their model!! I was hoping that to be the conclusion, lol.

I guess the algorithm doesn't really like food pics.

Thanks Raghu!!!

Thank you PBS! For teaching an immigrant like me so much, if not everything that I know, about American history, geography, food, nature, politics, music, art, & culture. Since moving to the US in 2015, watching PBS daily, in some form, has been one of the most enriching experiences of my stay here.

The diversity and function of sourdough starter microbiomes In the most comprehensive survey of sourdough starter biodiversity, this work identifies processes that control the diversity and function of sourdough microbiomes at a continental scale.

This is a fascinating paper, that I read a couple of years ago, around the time I started making sourdough bread.

elifesciences.org/articles/61644

First working day of the new year, got an acceptance email from Nat. Comms. I hope the rest of the 2026 isn't already scheming to offset this.

Some of us who moved to the US as postdocs didn't have to take any SAT or GRE. Perhaps this is another means of exclusion of immigrants from jobs that are already hard for immigrants to get.

So it begins! Ginger spice cake, & black coffee with cardamom.

Symbolizing the year that was, burnt cheesecake with sour cream instead of heavy cream.

Alternative title.

Derangement, a postdoc syndrome.

This story is absolutely wild. Did you know that avocados change sex over the course of a day? And that it's controlled by a single ancient balanced polymorphism? This is flat our crazy

It is soup weather, after all.

There was a lot of artistic liberty with the board, actually.

Can I get the check mate?

I don't get many invitations, as I'm not a tenure-track faculty. But, on the 2-3 occasions when I couldn't feasibly get reviews to the editor within 2-3 weeks, due to existing workload, I had declined to review mentioning this as the reason. I'd like to not be the person delaying the review process.