Our pup Marvin went for his very first trail run today and he was pretty pumped about it! It is very hard to be a scientist right now, but Marv only cares about getting to hang out with the people he loves, and sometimes that’s a good reminder.

If you're in the Bay Area, @your.neighborhoodscientist.org is having our first in-person event, "Brains, Biology, and Big Pharma", on September 29. See flyer below and register here: luma.com/m51ug5x1 Great opportunity to meet w/ scientists & learn about the scientific process! 🔭🧪👩‍🔬

Good morning ☀️

I had SO much fun speaking about how amazing hearing is at Philly’s @pintofscience.us last night!! Thank you to my amazing lab @geffenlab.bsky.social & @mikelhaggadone.bsky.social for coming out to support! 🧠 🍺

Everything seems terrible in the world but this is Marvin, a scared little shelter pup we adopted last week. We love him and his little tail wags and sweet kisses and goofy mannerisms so much. Thanks for bringing us a lot of joy in such a hard time, little buddy ❤️

Interrupting your daily doom scroll with some very happy neurons 😊 So happy to be back at recordings again! Continuing to do good science = resistance 🇺🇸❤️

I spent this afternoon in DC meeting with @repdwightevans.bsky.social about the current science funding freeze & indirect cuts. I'm proud to fight for the biomedical research funding & cures we all deserve—and you can, too.

Here’s a script from the 5calls app!

Hi, please call your reps tomorrow to restore funding to the NIH and oppose RFKs nomination! Here is a script you can use. If you are in Pennsylvania, you are calling these people: John Fetterman: (202) 224-4254 and David McCormick: (202) 224-6324

Response from a Pennsylvania GOP congress member I emailed urging the continued funding of the NIH.

I am very sad this morning to see this email from Penn about the bird flu mRNA vaccine utilizing Dr. Drew Weissman's tech, as this paragraph completely ignores and erases the work of Dr. Katalin Karikó, the Penn faculty with whom he shared the Nobel Prize in 2023 and who pioneered mRNA technology. 🧪

One critical but rarely discussed inclusion in all of my machine learning pipelines is lots of adjacent plants 🪴🌱🌿🌵

Reached peak patch clamper during the move (packed my wine glasses in an old Sutter micro manipulator box from the lab)

Not many people would say that grad school was the best five years of their life, but I loved every second of getting my PhD in the @robertsneuro.bsky.social lab. I’m packing up my things to move today and feeling so grateful for my people—it’s been an absolute honor. ❤️ 🧪 🧠

Paper reading buddy:

So fun to be cruising thru some great science posts again with the pup (BlueSky, meet Mo)

In 2021 I wrote this poem about how women should be allowed to drink beer

I think about this quote from Duke Ellington at least once a day, and it appears in the opening pages of my dissertation. I love it because it’s so easy to forget the love for science in between all the pipetting, but at the end of the day, science, art, music—it’s all dreaming. 🧪