Postdoctoral researcher at @JohnsHopkinsSPH ; Neuroscientist ; Computational Biology. Person who stutters; Opinions are my own
Baltimore, MD
Joined September 2009
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Michael Totty retweeted
The Sahay Lab is seeking a talented postdoctoral scientist to leverage exciting preliminary data and investigate lipid signaling mechanisms regulating cognition and healthspan. Please repost. Thank you.
The Ideal Candidate:
· Possesses a strong track record of peer-reviewed publications.
· Holds a PhD in molecular and cellular neuro/glial biology with a focus on metabolism
How to Apply:
Email your application directly to me.
Arrange for three letters of reference to be sent directly to my attention.
Explore our science at sahaylab.com/publications to learn how it informs our understanding of the neurobiology of cognition in neurodevelopmental disorders, aging, and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Visit sahaylab.com/the-team to see the success of trainees from the lab (academia, industry, K99s etc).
We look forward to reviewing your application and learning more about your background.
Michael Totty retweeted
Discovery often comes from putting familiar pieces in unexpected ways: but bio space is too vast to do that effectively?
🤖 1000s of AI agents helped connect our whole-brain Perturb-seq atlas w literature. w @OpenAI @joyjiao12: more coming! See preprint biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
GPT-Rosalind surfaced a new lead for drug discovery: could restoring cholesterol transport protect neurons from degeneration?
DCTN1 is a gene linked to Perry syndrome, a rare neurodegenerative disorder. In mouse-brain data, disrupting it increased expression of genes involved in making cholesterol. GPT-Rosalind suggested a possible explanation: cholesterol may not be reaching where neurons need it.
That gives scientists a specific mechanism to test and, if confirmed, a direction for developing new treatments for neurodegenerative disorders.
With @perturbai_tx and @scrippsresearch, a team of thousands of GPT-Rosalind agents worked in parallel, connecting gene-expression results from millions of mouse brain cells with scientific literature in just 32 minutes. We’re now expanding this collaboration to identify new drug targets.
openai.com/index/scaling-ai-…
Michael Totty retweeted
Congratulations to our first #NobelPrize laureate of 2026 🎉
Early this morning Karl Deisseroth found out he was awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
He seems very happy with the news!
ALT Karl Deisseroth on the phone looking happy
Michael Totty retweeted
My department is hiring! Come join a vibrant and thriving neuroscience group. New faculty are exceptionally well supported and we offer a very collaborative/collegial environment. employment.utah.edu/salt-lak…
Michael Totty retweeted
CIGMA is out in Nature — A linear mixed model to unbiasedly characterize cell-type-specific eQTLs. Work advised by @andywdahl and a lot of help from @xinpei_w
nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
Michael Totty retweeted
it was a big mistake for scientists/academics to leave twitter for bluesky. you ceded the floor.
Michael Totty retweeted
Latest paper from the lab!
How does the brain incorporate new experiences without disrupting older memories?
In our new @NatureNeuro paper, we show that experience reorganizes memory-related neural activity in macaques during both waking and overnight sleep. 1/19
Michael Totty retweeted
One of the major pains of academia is having to click through labyrinths of webpages to submit papers.
Now, thanks to @Josephmrich (and AI), problem solved!
His tool is called PaperPush and is available at github.com/pachterlab/paperp…
It's super easy to use!
1/🧵
Michael Totty retweeted
Most of you know me as VandyTracker. Funny thing is I made this account in 2022 while in the hospital actually to pass the time. We were in the NIT and Jerry Stackhouse was our HC. Life sometimes comes full circle.
My real name is Ricky. I have Cystic Fibrosis and just got diagnosed with CF related diabetes.
I have been in the hospital since July 17th with Pneumonia, Sepsis, and Salmonella. I lost my job due to this hospitalization. My medical bills are INSANE.
Honestly I feel gross asking for help. But a few of you recommended I make one of these so I’ll give it a shot. If you can’t donate a share helps more than you know too. Go Dores. ⚓️⬇️
givesendgo.com/help-me-recov…
Michael Totty retweeted
New review by @tugcettuna on the important role of the thalamic nucleus reuniens in prefrontal-hippocampal communication relevant to memory and emotion! frontiersin.org/journals/beh…
Michael Totty retweeted
It's been a year since our critique of false positives in a prominent snRNA-seq/MERFISH Nature paper, and it seems the authors have been pondering lessons learned and implications for "science integrity." Sudhof's commentary was received 2/6 and accepted 2/7....
Michael Totty retweeted
Arguably the most boring step in genomics is the first one: normalization. Settled science. Scale + log. Move on.
Except that here's been a huge blind spot in the field. And it matters for AIxBio. A 🧵about what I think may be one of the most important papers I've written. 1/
Michael Totty retweeted
NEW: A serious staffing shortage — of the Trump admin's own making — is delaying the agency's ability to send billions to universities around the US, leaving labs reeling.
“I thought we were at rock bottom”, a senior NIH official said. “We are below rock bottom now.”
Michael Totty retweeted
Online now: Dual-engram architecture within a single striatal cell type distinctly controls alcohol relapse and extinction dlvr.it/TS2Fkt
Michael Totty retweeted
If you use dim. reduction, you may be interested in two recent preprints we've posted on contrastive PCA:
The Rayleigh Quotient and Contrastive Principal Component Analysis I & II
w/ @MariaCarilli & Kayla Jackson. They cover a lot of ground from theory to practice. 1/🧵
Michael Totty retweeted
❗️❗️❗️NEWS︱Nature Neuroscience
👏👏👏Prof. Tianle Xu’s Team Uncovers Core Molecular Mechanisms Underlying the Formation and Extinction of Fear Memories.
👇MORE
nature.com/articles/s41593-0…
Michael Totty retweeted
SpaLP
Spatial Local Pooling
Index matrix (linear!)🤠
Cluster Visium HD 1.2M cells, 18k transcripts, 2 sections in 43 s🤯
vs adjacency matrix #GraphNeuralNetwork method BANKSY NicheCompass HERGAST
300-fold⏫computational efficiency
Cross-platform integration - STARmap PLUS MERFISH CosMx Xenium Visium HD Stereo-seq
3D spatial atlas MERFISH 8.4M cells, 239 sections on a single GPU in 4 min
+A local pooling-based spatial omics foundation model😎
@BingjDai bioRxiv 2026
biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
Michael Totty retweeted
EVoC is a library designed specifically for fast clustering of high dimensional embedding vectors. It can produce high quality clusters extremely efficiently, and requires little to no hyperparameter tuning.
Better clustering than UMAP + HDBSCAN; faster clustering than KMeans.
Michael Totty retweeted
cell types are hierarchical, but single-cell models ignore this
we introduced hierarchical cross-entropy: a simple loss to align models with biological ontologies to improve cell type annotation
nature.com/articles/s43588-0… @NatComputSci
great work @sebacultrera @davide_dascenzo!
