I am hiring a popgen postdoc!

Looking for a creative scientist to join us at USC to investigate recessive variation and complex traits in model or non-model species. The project is funded by a multi-year NIH grant, contract can be renewed.

Job add & details 👇🏽

usccareers.usc.edu/job/los-ange...

SMBE Early-Career Excellence Award - Leo Speidel

The 2026 awardees of SMBE's Faculty Award are now known. We start by presenting the SMBE Early-Career Excellence Award winner - Leo Speidel - working at RIKEN, Japan.
@leospeidel.bsky.social

Visit our website to learn more about the SMBE Faculty Awards
🔗 smbe.org/faculty-awards

#society

GitHub - RILAB/statements: Successful Job Applications and Grants Successful Job Applications and Grants. Contribute to RILAB/statements development by creating an account on GitHub.

That time of year again! If you'd like an example of job apps in academia or industry, here's a good resource. If you got a job in industry or academia in the last few years, please consider adding yours! github.com/RILAB/statem...

Reposting this old thread on the "Pervasive findings of directional selection" from ancient DNA. While the authors extended their results in various ways, I think many of these points still stand.

I'm hiring a postdoc (start date flexible) and a PhD student (for Fall 2027) to work in any area of computational phylogenetics! More info here:

mhibbins.github.io

I will be attending both PEQG and Evolution in June, so please reach out if you want to chat at these meetings!

add a c to the end to make it a little less unsafe lol

Unfalsifiable by Design: A Year of Trying and Failing to Reproduce a Human Microbiome and Autism Study The myth of open data, reproducibility, responsibility, and accountability in science, and your role in it

How every layer of science's "self-correcting machinery" failed when Iva Veseli and I simply wanted to reproduce the findings of a high-profile study on gut microbiome and autism:

merenlab.org/2026/04/15/u...

The abstract submission deadline for EvoWorm 2026 is today! Don't forget to submit an abstract!! Share your exciting science at *the* best meeting!!!

evoworm.org

today is fight-your-conda-env-to-death day. yay!

New from our group, led by Nick Collier:

Whoa—machine learning strikes again (in a good way)

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Delighted to share our latest research from the 23andMe Research Team, just published in @nature.com !
We looked at data from >27,000 participants to uncover how human genetics influences weight loss efficacy and side effects of GLP-1 medications like semaglutide. A short thread 🧵👇

New preprint! We sequenced 175 'Alalā (Hawaiian crow) genomes to understand why >50% of eggs fail to hatch in a species recovered from just 9 individuals. What we found was a both exciting and surprising. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

of course! but more often I go out of my way to cite people who are good for our community.

We built the first complete genome for the common marmoset, fully resolving regions that were previously missing: centromeres, acrocentric short arms, and more. A new reference genome for anyone working with marmosets. This was an awesome collaborative effort & I’m grateful to all my co-authors! 🧬

From the peer review:

"What the paper actually shows is that there exists a system which can produce a mediocre workshop paper with limited human intervention ... This is very impressive in itself." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨Job alert! 🚨
The Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS) at Stony Brook University is hiring research scientists for our NSF Tier 1 HPC project.

Multiple positions are available!

stonybrooku.taleo.net/careersectio...

People love to say the faculty hiring process in Brazil is too old school, as it includes a hand-written test on a randomly chosen topic. But history is cyclical and, with genAI, the only path forward to hiring good people may be to go back to hand-written essays...

Introgression and parental conflict shape repeated occurrences of postzygotic isolation in Mimulus Postzygotic reproductive isolation is often thought to accumulate as a byproduct of neutral divergence. Yet it frequently evolves rapidly, in line wit…

I am SO THRILLED to share our first fully-lab lab paper!!!!!! Led by @hybridzones.bsky.social & @hagarsoliman.bsky.social, w/ a major assist from @pfschwarz.bsky.social!!!!!!!!!!!!! Read more below, if you're curious (you should be- it's AWESOME!!!!!!!)

link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

MKado: a toolkit for McDonald-Kreitman tests of natural selection www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...

This is a common reply to concerns about GenAI research as if it were just another computational tool that saves us times from tedious tasks and whose accuracy can be rigorously quantified.

It is not.

GenAI research poses at least 2 serious problems... /n

I CANNOT with the unspecific but fancy sounding adverbs I see cropping up in scientific writing. it's telltale sign of LLM use!1!!

the link only works for uconn people!

Rare variation in malaria parasites biases population-genetic inference Understanding how pathogens evolve is fundamental to disease control and is a basic question in evolutionary biology, yet pathogens with complex life cycles violate assumptions of classic evolutionary...

New preprint! and my first single-author paper, so bear with me.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Malaria population genetic studies have found some puzzling patterns: Ne estimates spanning orders of magnitude, genome-wide negative Tajima's D, and over a quarter of genes with πN/πS >1

1/n

HARD agree!

are there any examples of a paper where the title was a question and the answer was yes?

Gene-specific selective sweeps are pervasive across human gut microbiomes - Nature Development and application of the integrated linkage disequilibrium score (iLDS) reveals both selective pressures impacting the human gut microbiome and the mechanisms by which gut bacteria adapt to ...

Grateful to share our paper on gene-specific selective sweeps in human gut microbiomes, now out in Nature! It has been a joy to work with @rwolff.bsky.social, whose insights and hard work made this possible.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Efficient Estimation of Nucleotide Diversity and Divergence Using Callable Loci (and More) Abstract. The increasing scale of population genomic datasets presents computational challenges in estimating summary statistics such as nucleotide diversi

@cademirch.bsky.social @erikenbody.bsky.social TB Sackton & @russcd.bsky.social introduce Callable Loci And More (clam), a tool that leverages callable loci to accurately estimate population genetic statistics (π, dxy, and FST).

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf282

#evobio #molbio #compbio

Neural posterior estimation for population genetics Simulation-based inference methods are increasingly being used in population genetics due to their flexibility and ability to be applied in settings where likelihood-based methods are intractable. Per...

Popgen folks, Jiseon, Nate, and Andy, along with Yuxin Ning and Franz Baumdicker, just released a really cool new method for simulation based inference (think ABC) using normalizing flows. It seems to work really well! full joint posteriors ftw!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

How many papers outside your field of research have you read?