Hattie Chung

asst prof @YaleMed | systems biology, tissue homeostasis, machine learning | @hattaca.bsky.social

[Emma J Chory @chorye]

Hi all. I made a thing, and wanted to give it to all of you.

TLDR: A free, customizable ordering app for labs, courses and iGEM teams. Request, approve, track, budgets, reorder alerts and chemical safety, all stored in one Google Sheet, run free in google scripts . Setup takes 15 min, and the code is yours to keep.

Read on...

Nobody mentions it in faculty interviews, but one of the biggest problems you solve as a new PI is how your lab will buy things. For most groups, it starts as a shared spreadsheet and a lot of “did anyone order more tips?” slack messages, trying to fit your perfect plan into your university's convoluted ordering system. Before long, one trainee is quietly doing most of the ordering, unpacking, restocking... on top of their research. No current options really seem that great for everyone, because no two labs order the same way.

Since a whole new crop of PIs will be starting their labs on Jan 1, with iGEM is happening this week, and spring senior design courses just around the corner, it felt like the right time to share the ordering app I’ve built over the last few years, for free, with anyone who can use it. There’s no one-size-fits-all system, so instead of handing you another product, I'm just giving you the code to own and shape to fit your lab, course or team.

In addition to the standard requesting, approving, ordering and receiving, it does a few extra things. It keeps your catalog, budgets and chemical safety records in one place, flags items you’re likely due to reorder, files vendor emails onto the matching order and can post updates to your lab Slack. For courses and iGEM teams, each team can order against its own budget, optionally request oligos, etc, which have their own form. It runs on a single Google Sheet + google scripts, so if you can click a button, you can set it up in about 15 minutes.

I’m not selling anything, and once you have your copy, the code is yours to keep and change however you like. My hope is that it saves some new professors some of the time it took me to figure this out, and allows you to spend more time focusing on science.

Please pass it along to anyone starting a lab, advising an iGEM team, undergrad lab teaching, or someone simply in need of a better system. And if you build a feature other labs would find useful, I’d love to hear about it. I (claude) also put together exhaustive instructions, if you have the patience to scroll through them.

Happy ordering to all.

https://t.co/Z7DMDY9YPQ

[Michael Baym @baym]

@orukja Knowing how to take biological dynamics and express how they change information mathematically will be as valuable in 50 years as today. Having an encyclopedic knowledge of 2026 bioinformatic tools and file formats will be as useful as a card catalog

[Michael Baym @baym]

@orukja Learn how to think deeply about either the algorithms or the biology of a system. If you become a shallow generalist who relies on AI to handle the deep details, you will be outmoded and replaced. The latter is fashionable, but it's skipping building the real value of the PhD

[Michael Baym @baym]

It splits by type of bioinformatician. For the those who think deeply about the structure of the data and build the tools that AI-guided analysis relies on, skipping the simple stuff is empowering. For those whose only differentiating skill is pipelining existing tools, it's over

[Hattie Chung @hattaca]

@sundakao @jacksonweir4 @UChicagoMed @UChicago Congratulations dawei !!!

[Sun_Dawei @sundakao]

Excited to share that I will be joining the Section of Genetic Medicine at @UChicagoMed @UChicago as an Assistant Professor in January 2027! The Sun Lab (https://t.co/j6V4hb1wMG) will combine cutting-edge tools to investigate lung development, regeneration, and disease.

[Ali Max Erturk @erturklab]

How does APOE4 damage brain blood vessels?

Pericytes turn into fibronectin-secreting myofibroblasts that promote vascular amyloid, driven by TGF-β. Blocking TGF-β restored pericytes. Congrats to the Blanchard lab in Cell 👇🏻
https://t.co/o3G2sss4gC

[Michele Boiani @BoianiMichele]

Old eggs not good? Think again!

We asked a simple question: when embryos from reproductively aged females do poorly, is the problem the oocyte, or the body it develops in? In mice we separated the two - IVF with shared young-donor sperm, then transfer to young recipients. Check out this preprint. https://t.co/11u8SIvuQl

Once the aged oocyte is removed from the aged oviduct, and fertilized in vitro, it makes blastocysts at young-like rates, with normal cell lineages and no implantation deficit. At the proteome level the oocyte’s age signature isn’t transmitted intact - fertilization offsets it (parthenogenesis doesn’t).

This doesn’t overturn the literature, but suggests part of that phenotype may arise in the aged environment rather than being fixed in the oocyte. A hypothesis now worth testing directly. Comments welcome!

[Maria Marinova, PhD @m__marinova]

Excited to see the results of this huge effort out. Congrats to Sharif and the Gladyshev lab - there’s so much in one paper. Young ovaries make babies in old mice. Old ovaries make babies in young mice. Young ovaries also shift the age of brain, liver and uterus in old mice. And the age of the ovaries is shaped by the body they’ve been placed in. Overall great stuff.

https://t.co/pJd6QfNNBk

Thread below

[Hattie Chung @hattaca]

Grateful to Google AI4Science for supporting our work with Keisuke Ishihara @mweber_PU combining geometric AI + multi-species genomics + human cardiac organoids to ask why some animals regenerate their hearts and we can’t https://t.co/bS0Z8WpMqe

[Uri Alon @UriAlonWeizmann]

Our Nature Medicine paper is out: menopause isn't a slow slope. Across 300M+ lab tests from 1M+ women, many body systems jump at the final menstrual period. Men show no such jump. 1/4
https://t.co/OgrPwaQe2E

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

BREAKING NEWS
The 2026 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.”

[Anshul Kundaje @anshulkundaje]

AI folks who are new to bio should spend some time with wet lab folks not only to understand how experiments, assays, lab work is done but also to learn the basic concept of CONTROLS. 1/

[Hee-Hoon Kim @Hee_Hoon_Kim]

A paradigm shift!💡 We decouples the effects of sulfur amino acid restriction, revealing that cysteine restriction, not methionine, is the mediator of the related anti-aging immunometabolic benefits.
@VishwaDeepDixi1 @schumacherbj @maxim_artyomov
👉https://t.co/RxCY3aDV8i

[Hattie Chung @hattaca]

@JiaqiZhangVic @HuChenlei @Columbia Congratulations Jiaqi!!

[Jose Angel Nicolas Avila @NicolasAvilaJA]

Thrilled to share our latest work, out in @SciImmunology! We show that tissues match their #macrophage numbers to #mitochondrial_activity , ensuring efficient #waste_clearance and #tissue_fitness . A tour de force by Laura Pena-Couso, in collab with @andrsHidalgo16 & Pura Muñoz🧵

[Hattie Chung @hattaca]

@landau_lab @arjunrajlab @WeillCornell Congratulations Dan !! Excited for your new adventure

[YSM Yale Center for Research on Aging (Y-Age) @YaleAge]

We seek to fill a tenure-track faculty position at the Assistant or Associate Professor Level (PhD or MD/DVM/PhD) to build an interdisciplinary research program here at @YaleAge, part of @YalePathology & @YaleMed. #pathologyjobs Learn more & apply here: https://t.co/xPvj6fvqwG

[kate cavanaugh @cavankatenaugh]

And finally—a bit of personal news:

🔬 I’m on the faculty job market this year!

I’m looking for tenure-track opportunities where I can build a lab at the intersection of developmental biology, mechanobiology, reproductive biology & aging.

[Martin Borch Jensen @MartinBJensen]

This is actually a great slide for how to get fooled by trying to target immunity/inflammation.

Classic bio textbook, one mechanism cleanly leads to another.
Which is not at all what happens, each of these trigger dozens of other genes too. So when you systemically drug a cytokine, all kinds of consequences.

Not saying Novo is naive to this. They know, but lack better ways to engage inflammation.