Michelle Franc Ragsac, PhD 🇵🇭🇺🇸
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mragsac.com
Michelle Franc Ragsac, PhD 🇵🇭🇺🇸
@mragsac.com

👩🏽‍💻 #FilipinoAmerican Postdoc 🧪 @ https://amariutalab.org studying #PediatricAsthma • #Bioinformatics PhD, PI: Emma Farley 💻🧬 & #Bioengineering BS, PI: Terry Gaasterland from @ucsandiego.bsky.social ☀️ • #InvisibleDisability 🌻 • She/Hers

Personal Account! ✨ .. more

Theresa Gaasterland is an American politician and scientist. She is a Professor of Computational Biology and Genomics and Director of the Scripps Genome Center at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She was elected a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2018 for contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. .. more

Biology 71%
Computer science 16%

Despite trying my best to work while manage my health, it hurts to hear from others that I don’t work as fast or my research output is lacking 🧪🧬💻

Sometimes I feel like I’m working twice as hard with physical and nerve pain, brain fog, and exhaustion … but none of that counts 😭 🥲

#AcademicChatter

I’m taking Letrazole now and the side effects are so bad?! 🫠

As somebody with two herniated discs, a surgically fused SI joint, and general nerve damage in my legs, the additional bone and joint pain doesn’t help 😭

It’s hard to focus when my body is actively working against me all the time … 🥲

Sometimes, #endometriosis pain is really rough despite the heated blankets, hot water bottles, and pain meds that I have to try and alleviate things 🫠

I was on 200 mg of Orilissa twice daily and it was LIFE CHANGING to be pain free! ✨ But after a year, my insurance will no longer cover things 🥲 😭

WHOLE ?! That’s diabolical 😭 But I do applaud her for trying to make something 🥲

I feel like the dismantling of government-funded scientific resources has really made me rethink whether or not I want to continue being a scientist 🫠 It's disheartening ...

Also -- Thank you to you, @samjscience.bsky.social, and other members of the Tiny Matters team for the good work you do! 🥹
They misidentified the intern. The judge told them they had misidentified the intern. But instead of double checking, they took that as an affront to their authority. So they surrounded the judge's car and threatened to smash the windows to get to the intern.

They had misidentified the intern.
The part where they threatened to break a judge’s car windows should be a bigger story … they feel comfortable treating judges this way, which means they are being told that they can do literally anything to nearly everyone
#BREAKING: A student intern at Rhode Island Superior Court was briefly taken into custody by ICE this afternoon before a judge intervened, 12 News has learned. Story by @jusolyn.bsky.social and @timwhiteri.bsky.social: ⤵️

The three-year anniversary of my PhD defense is steadily approaching ✨

Even though I'm far removed now, I still continue to hear concerning accounts about the lab environment where I did my graduate work... I'm so relieved newer students are openly discussing lab culture fit and mental health! 💖

Out of curiosity ... How does one get into the profession of fact checking? Is there a certain background that people look for? 🤔
HHMI @hhmi.org · 9d
Calling all rising juniors & seniors: Interested in biological or biomedical research? Applications for our ’26 Summer Undergraduate Research Experience Program are now open! Nine weeks, hands-on research, & mentorship from some of the nation’s top scientists — learn more: bit.ly/CechFellows
Summer Undergraduate Research Experience | HHMI
The Cech Fellows Program is a paid, nine-week summer research experience empowering the next generation of scientific leaders.
bit.ly

It was also posted on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social! So many different feeds for papers 😅

Side Note: Ke & I met in “Pathways to Scientific Teaching” taught by Prof. Diane Ebert-May! We sat beside each other on the first day and bonded over the struggle of studying non-traditional model organisms 🤣 😭
Sensory receptor expansion and neural accommodation in butterfly color vision https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.30.685642v1

Hey Bluesky 🦋✨ It’s been a while! 👋🏽

As a small update, a preprint I’m on was posted to bioRxiv! 📑 It was great to work with Ke on analyzing the Butterfly scRNA-seq data, and teach him bioinformatics over multiple boba runs! 🧬 💻 🧪

Seurat has also changed SO, SO MUCH since I last used it ~2020 🫣
Sensory receptor expansion and neural accommodation in butterfly color vision https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.30.685642v1

Reposted by Terry Gaasterland

The US Transportation Department is abandoning an effort started by the Biden administration to require airlines to provide meals, hotels and cash payouts to passengers affected by significant flight disruptions.
Trump Administration Ditches Plan to Compensate Stranded Flyers
The US Transportation Department is abandoning an effort started by the Biden administration to require airlines to provide meals, hotels and cash payouts to passengers affected by significant flight disruptions.
bloom.bg

Reposted by Terry Gaasterland

Sensory receptor expansion and neural accommodation in butterfly color vision https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.30.685642v1

Reposted by Terry Gaasterland

Sensory receptor expansion and neural accommodation in butterfly color vision https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.30.685642v1

📝 So, the fellowship actually ended up removing the Diversity Fellowship as one of the formal requirements without notifying people! 🤔🧪

I still ended up submitting my statement by adding it to the end of my research proposal because it definitely influenced my scientific direction 🫣👩🏽‍💻
This may be the most important paper ever published about NIH funded research.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
What if NIH had been 40% smaller?
Replaying history with less NIH funding shows widespread impacts on drug-linked research
www.science.org

I got a liver biopsy yesterday and, wow, I didn’t expect that to hurt as much as it did … Thank goodness I have sick days so I can rest! 🥲

They also weren’t able to give me as much sedative because my blood pressure runs pretty low to begin with so I felt everything 😭

Pinning this for later! 📌 Thanks for all of the educational posts as always 🤩

My parents keep pointing out parallels between what has /already happened/ in the Philippines and the resulting aftermath versus what's going on in the United States today 😬

... And comparing that to why they left in the first place during the Marcos' regime 🫠

Reposted by Terry Gaasterland

Again, this is *verbatim* the exact messaging Rodrigo Duterte used in order to run his deadly drug war in the Philippines en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp...

Oh wow, this is super cool work! 🤩 I'm excited to look deeper into the paper 👀

Tagging with some emojis and whatnot so that it gets on the #SciSky 🧪 feed too! 🧬💻✨

Reposted by Terry Gaasterland

Americans, I am once again begging you to consider that sometimes people aren't in America and may be discussing their own bad governments on the niche microblogging website. Please. I am begging.

I attended a @anvilproject.org workshop 🧬 💻 🧪 yesterday and we were outrageously Zoom bombed 💣 💥 🫣

Luckily, the workshop runners handled things well, but … it goes to show that passwords in Zoom meetings are still important for webinars because we can’t trust people 🙃 🫠
Your periodic reminder that mRNA vaccines are a scientific and public health game-changer. Those that have been approved have passed stringent efficacy and safety checks. They protect you and your child against potentially fatal diseases. You may, however, get a sore arm.

Reposted by Terry Gaasterland

I refuse to give em dashes to the AI

Reposted by Terry Gaasterland

So new studies showcase that the more you know how GenAi works, the less likely you are to use it! 😌

This reminds me of ai advocates who claim that those who refuse to use GenAi do so because they dont know how it works, yet it’s the opposite!
The less you know the more you are likely to use GenAi
The Less You Know About AI, the More You Are Likely to Use It
AI can seem magical to those with low AI literacy, a new study finds. That, in turn, might make them more willing to try it.
www.wsj.com

Hmm, that’s a good point! I’ll ask the fellowship coordinators to try and learn more! 🤔

Reposted by Terry Gaasterland

Intentionally attacking civilians like aid and rescue workers, and journalists, is a violation of international humanitarian law and a war crime.
Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist on murdered journalists and Trump's America
Intentionally attacking civilians like aid and rescue workers, and journalists, is a violation of international humanitarian law and a war crime.
www.abc.net.au

Reposted by Terry Gaasterland

New study on #BlueSky for #SciComm.

“Bluesky posts demonstrate substantially higher levels of interaction (likes, reposts, replies, and quotes) and greater textual originality than previously reported for X, suggesting both stronger interactive and more interpretive engagement.”

🦋🦫🌱🐋🧪 #philsci
Research posts on Bluesky are more original — and get better engagement
Bluesky posts about science garner more likes and reposts than similar ones on X.
www.nature.com

For sure! I feel like with AI/LLM-generated content, there’s a lot of filler text and fluff that isn’t very useful 🥴