Varsha Singh

Alum:Fergusson,SPPU,IITB. Prof@IITD Interests: cognition-affect, decisions, mind-brain, PFC, sex dif.+sharing treepics. PI, mom, WoSResearcherID:H-5212-2019

[Tilman Bayer @tilmanbayer]

@skdh "70-90% of scientific citations are copied from the lists of references used in other papers"
https://t.co/wzZ0ULNlW9

[Varsha Singh @VsPsych]

Sunday morning

[Varsha Singh @VsPsych]

For scholars from Australia, wanting to visit a lab in India @affectScience @SASstudents Pl see this link/announcement: https://t.co/XGoNoApxml

[Varsha Singh @VsPsych]

@di_akshay @Sak5shiSharma @Jyotsnapandey22 Thesis in IITs lists the title and department, this is from School of Interdisciplinary Research (SIRe) IIT Delhi.

[Varsha Singh @VsPsych]

Two equally difficult issues addressed by these two brave students: brain as a biological organ impacted by psy. stress, and how it impacts brain pathology and cognition deficit (decision making).

[Varsha Singh @VsPsych]

Best of luck to brave and talented @Sak5shiSharma & @Jyotsnapandey22 - hope you two carry forward this line of thinking, continue to bridge biology & cognition.

[Varsha Singh @VsPsych]

Best of luck to @Sak5shiSharma & @Jyotsnapandey22

[Varsha Singh @VsPsych]

Again, animal model allows greater control, precision for studying brain degeneration, cognitive effects are too subtle, dynamic, highly varied. Supervising this work allowed determining region-specific alteration linking cellular changes to cognition & behavioural changes+

[Varsha Singh @VsPsych]

Rodent neurobiology labs rarely draw insights from cognitive psychology. Biggest obstacle in this was not lab resources, ethics approval, or training but mindset. Greater collaboration between animal & human research might help understand brain & cognition. A small step

[Varsha Singh @VsPsych]

A happy, relieved #supervisor - Congratulations @Sak5shiSharma🎉. Interdisciplinarity that ties biology to cognition is difficult, glad to supervise this work on neurobiology of early stress, sex differences in rodent decision making.+

[Sakshi Sharma @Sak5shiSharma]

Recently defended my PhD...made the first correction in my thesis. 😅
@VsPsych @Jyotsnapandey22 Thank you for being part of this journey!!

[Varsha Singh @VsPsych]

Tree, lamp light

[Amy Diehl, Ph.D. @amydiehl]

Most scientific orgs have open & merit-based nomination, election & awarding procedures. But in 90% of academies surveyed, nomination relies on existing members. When membership is already predominantly male, such procedures perpetuate existing imbalances.https://t.co/BnEhQg8Huj

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A mathematician who shared an office with Claude Shannon at Bell Labs gave one lecture in 1986 that explains why some people win Nobel Prizes and other equally smart people spend their whole lives doing forgettable work.

His name was Richard Hamming. He won the Turing Award. He invented error-correcting codes that made modern computing possible. And he spent 30 years at Bell Labs sitting in a cafeteria at lunch watching which scientists became legendary and which ones faded into nothing.

In March 1986, he walked into a Bellcore auditorium in front of 200 researchers and told them exactly what he had seen.

Here's the framework that has been quoted by every serious scientist for the last 40 years.

His opening line landed like a punch. He said most scientists he worked with at Bell Labs were just as smart as the Nobel Prize winners. Just as hardworking. Just as credentialed. And yet at the end of a 40-year career, one group had changed entire fields and the other group was forgotten by the time they retired.

He wanted to know what the difference actually was. And he said it wasn't luck. It wasn't IQ. It was a specific set of habits that almost nobody is willing to follow.

The first habit was the one that hurts the most to hear. He said most scientists deliberately avoid the most important problem in their field because the odds of failure are too high. They pick a safe adjacent problem, solve it cleanly, publish it, and move on. And because they never swing at the hard problem, they never hit it. He said if you do not work on an important problem, it is unlikely you will do important work. That is not a motivational line. That is a logical one.

The second habit was about doors. Literal doors. He noticed that the scientists at Bell Labs who kept their office doors closed got more done in the short term because they had no interruptions. But the scientists who kept their doors open got more done over a career. The open-door scientists were interrupted constantly. They also absorbed every new idea passing through the hallway. Ten years in, they were working on problems the closed-door scientists did not even know existed.

The third habit was inversion. When Bell Labs refused to give him the team of programmers he wanted, Hamming sat with the rejection for weeks. Then he flipped the question. Instead of asking for programmers to write the programs, he asked why machines could not write the programs themselves. That single inversion pushed him into the frontier of computer science. He said the pattern repeats everywhere. What looks like a defect, if you flip it correctly, becomes the exact thing that pushes you ahead of everyone else.

The fourth habit was the one that hit me the hardest. He said knowledge and productivity compound like interest. Someone who works 10 percent harder than you does not produce 10 percent more over a career. They produce twice as much. The gap doesn't add. It multiplies. And it compounds silently for years before anyone notices.

He finished the lecture with a line I have never been able to shake.

He said Pasteur's famous quote is right. Luck favors the prepared mind. But he meant it literally. You don't hope for luck. You engineer the conditions where luck can land on you. Open doors. Important problems. Inverted questions. Compounded hours. Those are not traits. Those are choices you make every single day.

The transcript has been sitting on the University of Virginia's computer science website for almost 30 years. The video is free on YouTube. Stripe Press reprinted the full lectures as a book in 2020 and Bret Victor wrote the foreword.

Hamming died in 1998. He gave his final lecture a few weeks before. He was 82.

The lecture that explains why some careers become legendary and others disappear is still free. Most people who could benefit from it will never open it.

[Varsha Singh @VsPsych]

Tree, IITD

[Dr. César Marín @cesarmarin203]

Very nice paper with a necessary discussion.

Also Im glad to see microbiologists taking this step.

[Sandeep Manudhane @sandeep_PT]

Dear kids 5 to 20 years of age:
Read books. Hard, paper books. As much as you can.
Make it a habit, a lifelong pursuit.
Ensure best brain development.

[no.mind @the_no_mind]

Martin Picard published one of the most important papers in modern biology in 2025.

Almost no one outside a small circle of researchers has heard of it.

The Energy Resistance Principle may explain disease, aging & energy crashes — from first principles.

Here’s the framework:🧵

[Partha S Kar 🇮🇳🇬🇧🏏🎥 @parthaskar]

If there was one article you want to read as a clinician?
Read this

Via @jenna_taglienti - an absolutely stunning write in @JAMA_current

"Medicine can have extraordinary meaning. But it cannot substitute for being present in your own life. The world may need us as physicians.

But the people who love us need us as ourselves.

And that is the role no one else can fill."

Brilliant - and much love to you

'Time is Finite"

https://t.co/qPJkmtwxUe

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

In 1960, a quiet woman at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was handed a routine file. It was for a drug already sold in nearly 50 countries—a sedative called thalidomide, widely marketed as safe for pregnant women.

Most people would have signed off. Frances Oldham Kelsey didn’t.

New to the FDA, she noticed something others had overlooked—or ignored. The data was thin. Reports of nerve damage were buried. The safety claims felt… too clean. While the pharmaceutical company pushed aggressively for approval, sending repeated requests and mounting pressure, Kelsey held her ground. She asked for more studies. Then more. And more.

Behind the scenes, the pressure wasn’t subtle. Drug companies expected quick approvals. Delays meant lost profit. For a young female reviewer in a male-dominated system, saying “no” wasn’t just professional resistance—it was personal risk. She was challenging an industry that wasn’t used to being challenged, especially not by a woman.

Then the truth surfaced.

Across Europe, thousands of babies were being born with devastating deformities—missing limbs, malformed organs—traced back to thalidomide taken during pregnancy. It became one of the worst medical disasters of the 20th century.

Because Kelsey refused to approve it, the United States was largely spared.

Her skepticism saved countless lives.

In 1962, she was awarded the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service by John F. Kennedy—one of the highest honors a civilian could receive. But her impact didn’t stop there. Her stand forced sweeping changes in drug regulation, leading to stricter testing requirements and proof of efficacy before approval. The system became safer because she refused to bend.

She didn’t shout. She didn’t grandstand. She simply refused to compromise when it mattered most.

And that’s what made her dangerous—in the best possible way.

© Women In World History

#archaeohistories

[dr. alicia andrzejewski (she/her) @aliciaandrz]

as a female professor, I can say with certainty: nothing enrages certain students more than when you set boundaries around your time. male professors clearly have important things to attend to, but female professors are there to care, to be a surrogate mom. it’s really hard.