So happy for Coby Owens 🗳️ A fantastic public servant officially headed for a first term after winning his primary by <10 votes. Local elections matter (and often materially impact you more)!

Beyond thrilled to share my PhD work, published yesterday in Developmental Cell. We show that both NODAL and BMP signalling are active in the human blastocyst, but NODAL signalling is not required to initiate or maintain the human pluripotent epiblast. 1/10

The latest version of our manuscript is up on bioRxiv! We looked more closely at how E-cadherin is trafficked in the separating trachea and esophagus. Check it out here: biorxiv.org/content/10.110… #devbio

1/6 New Preprint Reptiles comprise ~23,000 species with an incredible range of diversity. The basis is laid during embryogenesis but severely understudied. We study the brown anole & describe its early embryogenesis for the first time: biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

🌛Western sessions: Our classic VGZT seminars will continue bi-weekly on Thursdays, featuring the same time and format as before. Check out the speaker lineup and in the future, look for the 🌙 symbol in the flyers for individual sessions. [2/4]

Ended 2024 with a few days in the Patagonia 🇨🇱

My personal website is now up! I plan to post detailed lab protocols for CRISPR gene editing, tissue sectioning, and immunostaining. Check it out at nicoleedwardsphd.com

Sheamus Heaney @LaBonneLaB Its the opposite. Academics make the discoveries, big pharma then buys the startups formed from the discoveries, and scales it to make it cheaper and a profitable product. Big pharma does not do exploratory research in the way academics do to create breakthroughs

Sheamus Heaney @LaBonneLaB CRISPR therapeutics is literally founded by Emmanuel charpentier, a nobel prize winning ACADEMIC who made crispr a thing with other ACADEMICS like jennifer doudna, feng zhang, and many other microbiologists. The foundings have literally nothing to do with biotech

Sheamus Heaney @LaBonneLaB It is a progression of scientific advancement. Academic labs at unis (supported by the NIH) explore and make fundamental, transformative discoveries that are then picked up later by pharma. It's important to recognize this. Losing the academic labs mean no future advancements.

Things I wish more people knew about doing science in the US (thread):

People need to know that NIH grants are the backbone of American biology and thus of our biotech industry. I took a moment away from doing science to talk about how science gets done with Olivia Aldridge with KUT News about recent IDC rate cuts. kut.org/science/2025-0…

Froggers unite at SDB! 🐸💞🐸

I was really happy to meet Bailey Weatherbee, postdoc ⁦Cincinnati Children's⁩ ⁦20th Intl Congress Dev Biol⁩ because she is a Filipino American developmental biologist, like me. With Maple Adkins-Threats! ⁦Society for Developmental Biology⁩

Incredibly grateful to have been selected as one of this year's Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral fellows!

Our paper is out! We show how the extracellular matrix guides body axis formation in mouse—and possibly human—embryos during early pregnancy. Grateful to Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz Zernicka-Goetz Lab for the chance to work with mouse, human, and stem cell–derived embryo models. nature.com/articles/s4146…

Midwest SDB starting now! #MWSDB25 Cincinnati Children’s Research Society for Developmental Biology

Kicking it off at #MWSDB25 with a keynote from Paul Trainor Paul Trainor Society for Developmental Biology Cincinnati Children’s Research

Going strong on day 2 of Midwest SDB #MWSDB25 @socdevbio Cincinnati Children’s Research

Fantastic interactive plenary talk at #MWSDB25 on from Jason Organ on the importance of changing our communication styles as scientists to more effectively communicate with the general public Society for Developmental Biology