Itai Yanai 💔 @ItaiYanai Twitter profile | Pikagi

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Itai Yanai 💔

@ItaiYanai

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Professor at the NYU School of Medicine. Co-host of the 'Night Science Podcast' @nightsciencepod

NYU, School of Medicine

https://t.co/TOKdhUhCHX

Joined January 2015

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

3 months

Our paper is out today in @Nature ! Imagine getting this plot when studying single-cell data of growing bacteria! Could it be the cell cycle?! We found that a gene’s response to its replication reveals gene regulation on a genomic scale. @AndrewPountain

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

New Nature paper provides evidence that science has become less innovative since the 1950s. The authors suggest reversing the trend by: 1. reading widely, 2. focusing less on quantity of papers, & more on research quality, 3. taking year-long sabbaticals.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

I must admit that this annotated Nature abstract remains a useful recipe for constructing a summary paragraph. I show it to my students every time we get started.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

3 years

I met a scientist who was just trying to do good science. No Nobel prize fetish. No imposter syndrome. No deep desire for flashy publications. No venting about evil reviewers. No need to gossip about other scientists. Only doing good science. Like a psychopath.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

If you don’t feel stupid doing science you’re not trying hard enough.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

Doing a PhD is - at heart - one long discussion with your mentor. The discussion changes over time - with unexpected turns and ups & downs - but through it all is a pair of people discussing a topic endlessly to make sense of it. PhD students: choose someone you like to talk to!

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

PhD students tend to choose a lab based on the topic, but a creative and supportive environment is more important. If everyone in the lab is miserable, you will probably be miserable there too; and if they are happy and thriving, you'll also likely feel good about yourself there.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

4 months

Out today in @NatureBiotech ! PhD students & postdocs: there's a trick – overlooked and underused – for having new ideas in the creative process. Talk science 1 on 1 with a science buddy that you trust and think of it as an improvisation. … @MartinJLercher

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 months

How did we lose our tail? A simple question.. but it wasn't really asked before! We discovered a plausible scenario for the genetic mechanism that led to tail loss. Amazing that such a big change may have been caused by such a small genetic event. @BoXia7

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

A central problem in science today is that scientists are encouraged by the system to become just managers; meaning the vast majority of the scientific process is handled solely by grad students, postdocs, & research scientists without much input from the principal investigators.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

The difference between doing a project and presenting it. An observation can lead to many avenues of explorations before focus turns to a specific discovery. Presenting it, in a talk / paper, follows inversely, with broad perspectives coming before & after the specific discovery.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

When looking for a mentor, remember that a career in science is a 1000 times easier if you have a mentor who will - time after time - make the phone calls, write the letters, and enable opportunities for you.. Be sure to choose a mentor you can easily imagine doing that for you.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

10 months

The night before my talk at a conference last week, I decided to make it a chalk talk, instead of using my slides. Not being tied down to slides allowed me to jump around as questions came up & our discussion led to new insights. Why did we let PowerPoint take over our meetings?

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Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

Knowing how to give a good talk is a crucial skill to have, but it's mostly not formally taught very well. Here's a 🧵on my strategy for how to prepare for the presentation, actually present it, and then answer the questions.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 months

How the project happens –– How we write the paper

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

Science is unbearable if you hold off on celebrating until the publication of a big paper. The more we enjoy the process, the happier we are.. Celebrate the interesting group meeting, the preparation of a new presentation, the new technique, & the progress our friends are making.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

Here are my 12 guidelines for data exploration and analysis with the right attitude for discovery: 1. You never really finish analyzing a dataset. You just decide to stop and move on at some point, leaving some things undiscovered. 🧵

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

4 years

The postdoc stage was the hardest for me. Even with the best mentors, the stress from the uncertainty and the self-doubt is very real. Hang in there postdocs. #postdocappreciationweek

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

4 years

It is not well appreciated, but the truth is that one never really finishes to analyze a dataset. You just decide to stop and move on at some point, leaving some things undiscovered.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

5 months

In today's @Nature , a study shows that remote teams produce fewer breakthroughs! Disruptive science is more likely to come from groups working in close collaboration. 'Night science' discussions may require the kind of energy that's communicated in person.

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Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

Unpopular opinion: the peer review process does significantly improve the final work (though it is inevitably very long and super frustrating).

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

9 months

We need to have a ‘code of conduct’ for reviewing manuscripts, like (1) if you say that something is not novel then provide the reference. (2) If you propose an experiment, state precisely to which claim it is crucial. (3) If you want to say something nasty then sign your name.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

We should be funding scientists, not projects: grants to individual scientists should be the norm. Also, ideally we would fund scientists only based on their previous work (the best predictor of more good work - not a research proposal) and just trust them to do good science.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

4 years

Do you think you would you have discovered a gorilla hiding in plain sight in your data? We found that you are 5 times less likely to do so if you have a specific hypothesis in mind. *A hypothesis is a liability*

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

The notion of ‘genius’ is toxic in academia because it suggests that we either have it or we don’t. Dedicated long-term effort is what’s really required to develop an intuition for a problem. The so-called ‘genius’ may make it look effortless but you can be sure it was hard work.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 months

Future grad students: if you’re really interested in science, you will go to any university that accepts you (forgetting about any rejections from the prestigious ones) and you will do great science there and you will make our world better.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 months

Graduate students: don’t fall for the myth of the genius. It’s all hard work in science, no matter how some people try to make it look easy.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

Never let academia get in the way of your science.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

1 month

Learning how to “read” the genome is a basic skill for all biologists. As an introduction, here’s a 🧵 about using the genome browser to make a discovery about how we lost our tails. All you need is your 'thinking eye'! (1/13)

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

Rules of academia: Questions are more important than facts Answers are temporary Models are provisional Failure happens a lot Patience is a requirement When you’re lucky, hopefully you realize it Things don’t unfold linearly If there’s free food, get there early —Stuart Firestein

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

4 months

PhD students: it’s a waste to just try to impress your committee at the meeting. Bring them problems, ask for suggestions, and generally think of it as a session in which new ideas can emerge.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

3 years

Losing our tail had big consequences for our ancestors, but how did it happen? In our paper, led by @BoXia7 , and with @JefBoeke , we propose that tail-loss involved the insertion of a single transposable element, with implications for our health today.

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The genetic basis of tail-loss evolution in humans and apes

The loss of the tail is one of the main anatomical evolutionary changes to have occurred along the lineage leading to humans and to the “anthropomorphous apes”[1][1],[2][2]. This morphological...

www.biorxiv.org

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

3 years

What comes first, the hypothesis or the dataset?

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

3 years

Unpopular opinion: science cannot be run like a business.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

Capitalism in science leads to scientists constantly writing grants instead of focusing on the problem.

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Itai Yanai 💔

3 months

Otto Warburg's grant application from 1921 is just one sentence – “I require 10,000 marks” – and it was fully funded.

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Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

Professors: we must start teaching creativity to PhD students and postdocs! If you are interested in leading a course about the creative scientific process at your university or institute, here is the material we've put together to help you get started.

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Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

Reviewers should appreciate that good papers often lead to more questions than they answer. The fact that not everything that emerges from a single paper is followed up on should not reduce the reviewer's excitement; it should be seen as a mark of the work's impact.

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Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

It's easy to make fun of basic science. It seems ridiculous to study how cone snails hunt their prey. But actually it led to the discovery of pain medication: a peptide from their venom relieves pain but doesn't paralyze us, as we use a calcium channel differently from fish.💪🧪

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Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

Scientists-in-training: find the mentor that is right for you. Here are my guidelines for how to do that 🧵 1. Make sure to choose a mentor who will be deeply committed to your career; someone who will continue advising and supporting you well after your time working together.

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Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

Nothing in Physiology or Medicine makes sense except in the light of evolution.

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Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

New paper! It’s absolutely wild what you see when studying bacteria using single-cell RNA-Seq! Unlike in eukaryotes, we found a genome-scale pattern of correlations among genes showing a strong dependency on global chromosomal locations. @AndrewPountain

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

Learning how to give a good talk is crucial, but we don't teach it as much as we should. Here are the suggestions I give my student about the right kind of preparation, execution, and question-answering approach.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

Postdocs: You will pay a price for switching fields, but you can more than make up for that with the ability to recognize a hidden connection to spark a discovery (cancer -> development; immunology -> evolution; genetics -> physics..).

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Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

Teams composed of just a few people are more likely to produce highly novel (disruptive) work, while larger teams may be best for going big and developing an idea. This notion is supported by classic work by Lingfei Wu, @dashunwang , and @profjamesevans .

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Itai Yanai 💔

9 months

To the many PhD students starting this month: choosing a mentoring lab - which is THE crucial decision - should be made based on the atmosphere in the lab, the attention you will get from the mentor, what they can teach you, funding, and the lab’s topic, probably in that order.

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Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

Most of academia is by now so distracted by grantsmanship, publishing, and administration they no longer even seen it as a distraction.

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Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

Paper is finally out in @NatureGenet ! "Cancer cell states recur across tumor types and form specific interactions with the tumor microenvironment" Check out our catalog of conserved cancer cell states defined by scRNA-Seq & ST. Congrats @BarkleyDalia !

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 months

A notable scientist accused my team yesterday of being ignorant in biology or not actually believing what we are proposing in the tail manuscript. They make interesting points but starting with insults is distracting and not constructive. A few points..

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On the genetic basis of tail-loss evolution in humans and apes

Nature - An insertion of an Alu element into an intron of the TBXT gene is identified as a genetic mechanism of tail-loss evolution in humans and apes, with implications for human health today.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

It’s funny how those years without publications look bad on the CV, but were actually the ones with the most scientific progress.

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Itai Yanai 💔

9 months

Doing science is hard, so everything else needs to be easy. Choose a lab where the personal side is supportive with good communication.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

‘In 20 years there will be no bioinformatics; it will just be called biology’ - Charles DeLisi (my PhD advisor, as quoted in my thesis). That was nearly 20 years ago, and I think he was right. Grad students and postdocs in particular know they need to be computational now too.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

The hardest thing in academia is the postdoc stage. So while it seems obvious, it’s still worth repeating: PIs, remember to give your postdocs daily encouragement and help transitioning to their next career step.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

The secret to staying calm as you prepare to give a good presentation is to remind yourself that you want to explain, not to impress.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

Standard advice to: PhD students - focus on your advisor’s questions. Postdocs - it’s too risky to search for a new question. Junior faculty - stay conservative until you get tenure. But to remain engaged in science, be sure to nurture your creativity at every career stage.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

Writing a good grant proposal involves both creative ('night science') and executive ('day science') aspects that are important to distinguish. Here's a 🧵on my strategy for deciding what to propose and the process of actually putting the grant together.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

Choose the mentor that has the time to talk with you and who energizes you on a weekly basis.

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Itai Yanai 💔

6 months

😯 François Jacob (co-discoverer of gene regulation) asked by Lucy Shapiro (Stanford): "It's always been hypothesis-driven research [..] but a new way is looking at vast amounts of data and not asking a question, just seeing if it give you a pattern." Jacob: "It’s very boring.."

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

A common way to ruin your project is to skip doing a series of pilots before the big expensive experiment. Pilots help you work out the problems and prevent the creation of impossible-to-analyze datasets. Published papers often don't discuss pilots, encouraging us to do the same.

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Itai Yanai 💔

9 months

What does a mentor advise a mentee to do on the weekends? I encourage my lab members to rest but it’s a bit hypocritical because when I was at their stage I worked on the days off (and still do, kind of..). Maybe the best thing is to just make sure there's no expectation to work.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

7 months

Top 10 misconceptions about the situation in Israel: 1. ‘Standing by Israel’ means you are anti-Palestinian. (You can both unequivocally condemn this attack & support Palestinian rights.) 2. Hamas wants to ‘Free Palestine’. (It wants Jews dead; see their charter's Article 7.)

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

To increase our innovative thinking we need to allow time for the creative process: using analogies, finding new questions, embracing contradictions, importing/exporting ideas, improvising, exploring the data & puzzle-switch. Joint work w/ @MartinJLercher

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

PhD students and postdocs are the most likely to make the key discovery in a field, because they can look with fresh eyes at well-known observations and understand for the first time what they actually mean.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

Ever hear that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’? In our new work, we found that it’s also true for cancer cells as they continuously adapt to drug treatments. We call it a ‘resistance continuum’ that's dependent on treatment history. @Gustavo_SFranca

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Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

A big part of the scientific process is just having someone to talk to. If you can spare a few minutes, ask a colleague what they're working on..

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Itai Yanai 💔

18 days

A secret superpower of a lab with more than one research topic is that group meetings are a safe space for naive questions - because there are many ‘outsiders’ - and a big idea tends to start out as a naive question.

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Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

🔥Check out our new paper🔥 Make Science Disruptive Again! All graduate programs should teach the CREATIVE SCIENTIFIC PROCESS to help change the research system and increase the disruptiveness of science projects. @MartinJLercher @NatureBiotech

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Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

The revolution comes to science when we finally dethrone the hypothesis-driven mode as the only respectable form of scientific inquiry for grant and thesis proposals.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

People will try to label you as though it’s the most natural thing: ‘are you an immunologist, a microbiologist, or a computational biologist?’ Don’t fall for that. A label may limit your opportunities to do basic research, and find new things regardless of human-made divisions.

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Itai Yanai 💔

7 months

Jews this week have had to do 2 things simultaneously: process the horrors of the attack and deal with anti-Israel/antisemitic sentiments plus the painful silence of most folks. It's been difficult but also frees us from any illusions we might have had on our status in the world

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Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

Prospective postdocs: make sure to choose a mentor who will be deeply committed to your career; someone who will continue to advise and support you well after your time in their lab. You could say that the postdoc-mentor relationship is the closest thing to marriage in academia!

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 months

It is not the dissertation, tenure or retirement, but finding a good collaborator which is truly the important event in your career.

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Itai Yanai 💔

4 years

Sperm cells express nearly all genes - a well-known yet mysterious observation. In our new paper, we hypothesize ‘transcriptional scanning’ where expression is coupled globally for DNA repair and even modulates gene evolution rates. @boxia

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Itai Yanai 💔

4 months

Had a potentially life-changing experience yesterday listening to a talk by @BobFarese and @TobiWalther and realizing the benefits of having the kind a scientific partnership that comes with having a joint lab. I’m thinking now that I would really love to do that!

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Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

If you’re not embarrassed by your first bioRxiv version of the paper, then you’ve waited too long.

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Itai Yanai 💔

3 months

Real science: 1. Is not correlated with the amount of funding 2. Progresses slowly, usually taking many years 3. Leads to more questions than it answers 4. Advances when we disengage & in improvisational discussions 5. Is too important a thing to be done in a non-playful way

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Itai Yanai 💔

11 months

Starting PhD students and postdocs should be advised against working on a specific project right away. It’s better to first explore opportunities with colleagues & to be open to an extended process of improvising ideas. It may seem like a waste of time, but it’s actually crucial.

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Itai Yanai 💔

7 months

There’s this unfortunate myth in science that the head of the lab alone controls its culture. In reality, all the members do and so each person should realize that they bring their own values, attitudes, and spirit for how things should be and that this does matter quite a bit.

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Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

Here’s one piece of advice to the newly minted assistant professors: when setting up the group meetings do it so that you yourself are also in the rotation. I still present regularly in our lab meetings and I feel it helps a lot to create an egalitarian and motivated atmosphere.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

New paper🔥! How do macrophages respond to bacterial infection? We identify distinct states with a highly inflammatory state composed of sequentially expressed gene modules and dynamics that depend on the pathogen, infection length, & toxins.🧵 @CellReports

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Itai Yanai 💔

6 months

Science Twitter: the last 19 days were a living hell for our Israeli colleagues. Their loved ones have been brutally murdered in their homes, raped and kidnapped. They spend hours sheltering from bombings. They feel scared, angry, & isolated. This is the time to show our support.

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Itai Yanai 💔

19 days

Can not studying popular genes cost you your career?! Check out how the probability of a junior scientist to transition to a principal investigator is lower if the genes they research are less studied. The overall decreasing probability is also really depressing! (from Fig. S10)

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Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

What advice do editors have for authors on the process of publishing? Barbara Cheifet - Chief Editor @NatureBiotech - came to talk with us yesterday and here is her top 10 list (with permission): 1. Aim high, but also be realistic about where your paper could be accepted. 🧵⬇️

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Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

What are the principles of intra-tumor heterogeneity? In our new work, we studied 15 cancer types using scRNA-Seq, spatial transcriptomics and CODEX to propose a unified catalog of gene modules that underpin recurrent cancer cell states. @BarkleyDalia

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Itai Yanai 💔

3 months

I want to tell you a story about a recent discovery that we made in the lab, because we often argue here whether it’s the data or the hypothesis that comes first. In the case of this discovery, it was definitely the data that showed us something that we completely didn't expect.

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Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

Science is fun, but Academia.. needs work

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Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

You can’t admit this in a grant or a paper, but the way to begin a project is just by starting to do something even though it may not seem like a novel direction. The important thing is to start to make observations and the novel ideas will follow.

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Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

Don’t wait for the perfect dataset; you’ll wait forever. Explore right away the good-enough dataset.

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Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

Grad students: have you discovered Uri Alon’s classic ‘How To Choose a Good Scientific Problem’ yet? @UriAlonWeizmann discusses self expression, taking your time when choosing a project, and the support required for the exploration of new directions.

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@ItaiYanai

Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

For a good training in science, aspire to be experimental, computational, & theoretical. Without being experimental, it’s hard to have the data you need. Without being computational, it’s hard to interpret your own data. Without being theoretical, it’s hard to have new ideas.

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Itai Yanai 💔

29 days

What's the evidence for Evolution? If you want to give Creationists something to think about, here's my top 10 list of classic discoveries from genomics, biogeography, the fossil record, microbiology, developmental biology, origin of life work and population genetics. 🧵🔽 (1/11)

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Itai Yanai 💔

10 months

It’s a shame when there are no questions after a talk and it just ends like that. Often it’s just that the audience needed a little bit of time to process. The chair of the session really needs to have a question ready to get things going and buy some time for more questions!

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Itai Yanai 💔

9 months

PhDs switching fields for their next step face short-term hurdles but big long-term benefits. I don’t know if anyone has quantified this, but it seems that most of the productive scientists in a particular field were trained in a totally different field during their PhD training.

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Itai Yanai 💔

7 months

Nothing in science makes sense except in the light of the near hopeless quest for a Nobel Prize (–I forget who said this..). Any predictions? Monday: PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE Tuesday: PHYSICS Wednesday: CHEMISTRY Thursday: LITERATURE Friday: PEACE Monday (the 9th): ECONOMICS

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Itai Yanai 💔

1 year

Undergrads learn how to solve problems on a quick time-scale but in grad school you pick up an odd new skill: how to sustain for an extended period of time the major discomfort of not knowing exactly where the project is going and what might be discovered.

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Itai Yanai 💔

2 years

We fall in love with science but then become too busy with administrative aspects. Make time for creativity by: (1) Starting the day with it instead of the admin stuff, (2) Taking a walk with a science buddy, and (3) Dreaming about the project by reading about it before sleeping.

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Itai Yanai 💔

2 months

How humans lost their tails — and why the discovery took 2.5 years to publish. 🙏 @ewencallaway

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How humans lost their tails — and why the discovery took 2.5 years to publish

Nature - An elegant run of experiments in mice reveals the genetic changes that led humanity’s ape ancestors to lose the appendage.

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Itai Yanai 💔

3 years

We live in a time where smart people are expected to only say smart things. But to really get the creativity flowing, find a colleague to whom you can say anything, no matter how seemingly naive. Start by asking what is their worst possible idea and see how the thing develops.

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Itai Yanai 💔

4 years

Best advice I ever got on how to do science: find someone that you can talk to.

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Itai Yanai 💔

24 days

The 3 hardest things to learn as a scientist: 1. Trust the data, even when it’s not what you expected, 2. Trust the data, allowing it to change your direction, 3. Trust the data, but not too much: test with new data at every turn.

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