What Biology Can Learn from Physics 🚀 World War II shifted physics from a field of brilliant individuals to one of well-managed teams. CERN, LIGO, and the JWST all cost >$1 billion. Biology has had a few "moonshots," but not nearly as many. Why not? Read: readcodon.com/p/biology-phys… *** There are probably a few reasons. First, biology research is inherently broad. A zoologist, ecologist, and protein engineer all call themselves “biologists,” but rarely attend the same conferences. Biological discoveries are also made organically, with thousands of teams chipping away at problems. And it's opaque; researchers don’t share their results until a paper is published. These quirks make it difficult to coordinate on large problems.  The foundation of physics has been built over several centuries, thanks to a constant back-and-forth dialogue between theory and experiment. Progress in biology will similarly accelerate once the field builds predictive models that can accurately anticipate the outcome of experiments before they have taken place. AlphaFold2, a model that predicts protein structures, was a great start. But now, biologists should work to build predictive models at more scales: from molecules, to whole cells, to the behavior of cells at the macroscale. This is what @Align_Bio and others are doing. But it will require large-scale funding and coordination amongst biologists. The last century of biology looked like an organic and exploratory process, with many small groups discovering and rediscovering curiosities. But the next century may resemble a coordinated, whole-field effort to divide biology into a series of prediction tasks and then solve those tasks, one-by-one. This piece was written with @erika_alden_d.

Now online! Structure of the thrombopoietin-MPL receptor complex is a blueprint for biasing hematopoiesis dlvr.it/Sv9s81

Excited to share my first paper from my PhD research in Chris Garcia's lab! We determined structures of the IL-21 receptor complex and engineered IL-21 variants that enhanced vaccine responses in tonsil organoids with reduced autoantibody induction. (1/9) cell.com/cell-reports/fullte…

Here they are!!! 31 outstanding scientists who as early career faculty with exceptional mentoring skills will build inclusive and supportive labs where all trainees thrive and persist #FHScholars

Congrats to Dr. @amycfanphd for successfully defending her PhD thesis on “Genetic blood disorders and inflammation: Characterizing cell autonomous & non-autonomous contributions of RUNX1 loss in hematopoiesis and leukemogenesis” 👏🎉!! #StanfordImmuno #thesisdefense #PhD

Congratulations to @CalebGlassman for being the 2022 Stanford Immunology McDevitt Award winner for his dissertation on Structure-Based Cytokine Engineering. I don't have a photo of Caleb, so I am using the photo from his hybrid defense.

We are thrilled to have been part of a multi-institutional, multidisciplinary group to identify disease-associated T cells in #AnkylosingSpondylitis & Anterior #Uveitis that recognize antigens presented by HLA-B27, published in @Nature. (1/9)