PostDoc Position in Microenvironment and Cancer BioEngineering. Info & apply here: zervalab.com/join-the-team Please RT. @UPMCHillmanCC @PittTweet @PittBioE @UPMCnews

Excited for this moment! I joined @StrandTx for the mission to build programmable genetic medicines for patients in need. IL-12 has enormous promise in cancer immunotherapy, but toxicity has been a major hurdle. We're excited that STX-003 could change that. #cancer #immunotherapy

Organizations with a culture of “niceness” can actually undermine performance. Shifting toward a more rigorous culture requires senior leaders to model and reward feedback, create measurable successes that demonstrate that tougher choices improve performance, and redesign operating processes so that they encourage substantive debate rather than polite approval. Read more about how to build this supportive but rigorous culture: s.hbr.org/3SFRY3K

Looking for a postdoc? We are recruiting scientists who are finishing their PhD to study how metabolism shapes cancer progression, immunity, and therapeutic resistance. Recent highlight: our Nature paper on αKG tiny.cc/ur15101. Learn more at airdlab.com.

🎓 Don’t miss our upcoming HBA-USA Meet the Professional event! Dr. Apostolia M. Tsimberidou (MD Anderson) 📷 Personalized Medicine for Advanced Cancer – IMPACT Studies 📷 2 PM EDT 📷Zoom mdacc.zoom.us/j/99975777982?… #HBAUSA #PrecisionMedicine #CancerResearch

Family is everything! @DALauffenburger and I are starting a conversation with our BMES senior colleagues about supporting lab members & junior colleagues for child care costs during travel to annual BMES meeting - by starting a travel fund open to BMES attendees. bmes.org/news/new-endowment-…

RT @LindaGGriffith1: We are launching anendometriosis drug development center as part of our Menstruation Science Initiative. We are hiring…

Blog post: Just quit Quitting projects in science is hard, but we should be doing a lot more of it. We spend a lot of time as scientists thinking about how to choose a project—and that is, of course, critically important to success. But… no matter how carefully you try to pick out the most groundbreaking, innovative project imaginable, the simple truth is that not every project is going to be awesome. Consequently, just as important as the skill of choosing a project is the skill of knowing when to quit a project. In my view, we should quit far more often than we do, for the simple reason that time is so very precious. Here is possibly the scariest diagram of all time (from Wait but why): That is not a lot of weeks. Each scientific project can take up 2-4 ENTIRE COLUMNS. As mentioned, the success of a project is way more probabilistic than we care to admit. So you have to sample, and that means rejecting many samples. Do not let this precious time go to waste. Sometimes, you just have to quit. Why is it so hard to quit in science? Here are a few top reasons, all of which are based on fear: Fear of the unknown. It’s in many ways easier to keep going with the devil you know. Sunk cost fallacy. Don’t finish bad projects. A project typically takes 2-10x as long to finish as you think (and that’s even when you’ve already factored in the 2-10x). Do you really want to “just tie up a few loose ends” on a crummy project for the additional years required? Falsely estimating the value of future and past time. People often worry about how long a new project will take. Let me tell you, finishing a project you don’t like will usually take way longer than one you do like. Also, time as you become more trained is worth much more than untrained time, especially for graduate students, so don’t waste precious time in the future on ill-spent time in the past. Bad advice. Beware: other people typically value your time far less than you do. That’s not necessarily bad mentoring or anything sinister, just a very human reality. “Sure, do that extra control to kill the project”—sounds reasonable, and maybe it is, but it’s a lot easier to say when it costs very little to whoever says it. Feeling like a quitter. We have been socialized in science to have a certain “stick-to-it-iveness” that I think is often counterproductive. What can you do to make quitting easier? Frame quitting by time, not results. It is practically a mantra in scientific management to say “I don’t care about time, I care about results”, and we pride ourselves on making decisions based on data. The problem is that there’s always “one more experiment” to do to see whether something will (or most likely, will not) work. Why spend time trying to do the experiment to kill a project you hate when you can just… stop working on it? Set a time, perhaps a week or a month or six months in the future, evaluate then based on whether you’re really getting where you imagined, and move on. Do the control you’re scared of. Often, you know the go/no-go experiment you should do, but you put it off because you’re scared of the result. You know what I’m talking about. Just have to do it. Don’t chase wishy-washy results down the rabbit hole. When things work, they work. When they seem to maybe work, they usually don’t actually work. Get some honest external feedback. Find someone that you really trust to give you honest feedback and ask them whether the project is worth pursuing. Sometimes, getting that negative signal from the outside is far more convincing than from your advisor/trainee. Imagine the future of the project. Envision the title/abstract of the paper you imagine writing. Is that something you really want to spend potentially years writing the rest of? Often, people begin with a starter project in the lab, which can have a habit of turning into way more than a starter. If you’re just not that into it, quit. And finally, just listen to that voice in your head. You probably already know you should quit, so just do it. I have quit projects many times in my career—grad school, postdoc, professor—and while the alternative is unknowable, with hindsight, it certainly feels like those were almost invariably the right decisions to make.

The deadline for applying to be a 2026 Young Innovator is this Sunday, November 16. We encourage you to apply!

.@FritzLaylin et al propose a simple way to highlight both experimental #reproducibility & cell-to-cell variation, while avoiding pitfalls common in analysis of cell biology data hubs.la/Q03FmFjM0 📕 #Reproducibility & Best Practices in Cell Biology hubs.la/Q03FmFlB0

Congratulations to the 2025 Young Innovators! Come see their talks on Friday, October 10 at #BMES2025. Apply to become a Young Innovator next year!

PSA: Stop calling macrophages in tissue M1 or M2. These are not states that exist in biology. The only use of M1 is a macrophage cultured ex vivo with LPS and IFNg; and for M2: IL-4/13/10. Macrophages in tissues are highly complex and diverse and do not resemble either of the aforementioned M1/M2 states. M1/M2 language causes confusion and sets the field back. Refer to your macrophages by the molecules they express and the cytokines they make.

🚀Today we're launching the 'Night Science Institute', a non-profit to lead a cultural shift in science! You may say we're dreamers, but we think we're not the only ones. Perhaps today you will join us to make the Day Science and Night Science parts of the process live as one! 😉

Today, NSF announced an add’l 500 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program awardees for the 2025-2026 cohort, bringing the total to approx 1,500. #NSFGRFP supports grad students as they pursue their dreams, build STEM skills, & become the next generation of innovators & leaders.

In the last five years, Pennsylvania companies received 10,783 new life sciences patents — the 4th highest number in the country — but only received 3% of the venture capital flooding into life sciences.  That means we’re doing the research — but losing out on commercial opportunities to other states.  My budget is going to change that.

An NIH-supported study found that cancer cells can cooperate with each other to extract and share key molecules from their environment in order to survive, pointing to potential new strategies for treating certain cancers. bit.ly/3XGYFlg

On Tuesday I received the NOA (notice of award) for an @nih_nhlbi R01 grant submitted back in Feb 2024 and marked pending after the Oct 2024 Council meeting. Let me tell you the story of the 15 years it took to get here:

Over the last 30 years, the cancer death rate has fallen 34% as hundreds of new therapies and prevention strategies have been discovered and validated with NIH funding. Future progress depends on an unwavering national commitment to the lifesaving research supported by NIH.

Major problem in biopharma R&D is poor translation from animal models to human patients. Would be great to see increased attention to this problem in academia.  Our latest effort to help in address has come out now, hopeful to stimulate wider efforts.  rdcu.be/d95QF

I’ve spent most of my life both in understanding this T cell (white cell) & training & programming it or shaping it into a warrior to hunt down & destroy the bad guys (such as cancer or the pink cell). No regrets. It was life well spent ☺️

Congratulations!!