Prof. Michael Lin

@doristsao @EmilianiLab It was great to see you again Doris!

Huge gratitude to Valentina Emiliani @EmilianiLab, Eirini Papagiakoumou, and the incredible lecturers and TAs of the course on “All-Optical control of brain functioning with Optogenetics and multi-photon microscopy” here in Paris. The class took us on a deep dive into 2p imaging and holography--starting from the basics of how a lens works (I did not know a lens computes a fourier transform!), and progressing to advanced methods including 3d holography with temporal focusing, voltage imaging, tricks to minimize heating, etc. We got hands-on experience though an amazing set of labs (including closed loop feedback holographic stimulation through a GRIN lens in a freely moving mouse). The entire experience was incredible, and I highly recommend for anyone interested in this frontier of neurotechnology. It was so much fun to be a student again!

Great to the see the flurry of single gene knockdown Perturb-seq like atlases from cell-lines, mouse brain etc over the last few days. These are undoubtedly very valuable datasets. I just want to re-iterate a few other very important expt. design considerations 1/

Does this count as crows using people as tools?

This is good actually

We’re debating heavy cuts to the science budget that will cost us many world-leading projects and many talented scientists (we paid to train) Meanwhile China:

Anyway we had a lot of fun with this project. BRIO was a side project for student Benjamin Kim, and then was completed by postdoc Yufeng Zhao at his new lab at U Toronto. Paper below at @ACS_Sensors pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.10…

What I found most interesting, though, is the implication that any enzyme can be regarded as a scaffold for making sensors for its substrate or similar small molecules.

Took a break from science-posting for several months (will explain later), but excited to finally discuss some recent work from the lab. First up, a new solution to the old problem: How to engineer proteins to bind to a natural metabolite of interest, in this case biliverdin

BREAKING: @rosadelauro announces at a House Oversight hearing with NIH director Jay Bhattacharya that OMB approved the agency's apportionment last night. That means the agency should* have access to its appropriated funds — 42 days after its spending bill passed.

Here is our updated database of grants for early careers researchers in all fields. It goes way beyond traditional NIH and NSF funding opportunities. We list 428 types of grants. Download it here: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-op…

Excellent post by Rachel Thomas in the ways AI hype is outrunning reality in life sciences linkedin.com/feed/update/ur…

Students who took notes by hand scored ~28% higher on conceptual questions than laptop note-takers. Writing forces your brain to process and compress ideas instead of copying them.

Writing out a conversation I’ve been having a lot at this conference: Things in US science are far, far worse than people know. Far worse than even other scientists know. 1/