Michael Totty

Postdoctoral researcher at @JohnsHopkinsSPH ; Neuroscientist ; Computational Biology. Person who stutters; Opinions are my own

[Michael Totty @MicTott]

Very excited to share my second postdoc paper with you all, now out in @ScienceAdvances! We used targeted snRNA-seq to profile four major subnuclei of the primate across three species (including humans). 1/14 https://t.co/VorIIODdsD

[Max Kozlov @maxdkozlov]

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 @MicTott]

Fwiw, my initial submission was scored competitively (26) last August and it finally bumped to "Pending" 40+ days ago. Still no word, but maybe I'll get an NOA one of these days! I know others are in the same boat.

[Michael Totty @MicTott]

19 on my K99 resubmission! Massive thanks to my mentors and letter writers for all their support. Hard to tell if it will actually translate to funding in this climate, but I'll take the win regardless!

[Michael Totty @MicTott]

@emukamel Not to mention only 8k cells across both experimental groups. Is this just two total mice, 1v1? Even if the data are real, the Ns/nuclei are so small that the data isn’t exactly reliable.

[Neuron @NeuroCellPress]

Online now: Dual-engram architecture within a single striatal cell type distinctly controls alcohol relapse and extinction https://t.co/uwjoFuipbL

[Lior Pachter @lpachter]

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/🧵

[BrainVTA @Brain_VTA]

❗️❗️❗️NEWS︱Nature Neuroscience
👏👏👏Prof. Tianle Xu’s Team Uncovers Core Molecular Mechanisms Underlying the Formation and Extinction of Fear Memories.
👇MORE
https://t.co/LVt4i0S8lu

[Hao Yin @HaoYin20]

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
https://t.co/w33guYOfc6

[Leland McInnes @leland_mcinnes]

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 @MicTott]

@heel4ever_81 @antwanstaley @ScoopB To make it worse, Stack was the first Vandy HC not to make the NCAA during their tenure since Richard Schmidt in ‘81. All other 6 coaches since then have.

[Michael Totty @MicTott]

@heel4ever_81 @antwanstaley @ScoopB He was not “good for Vandy”, Vandy fired him. Kevin Stallings had eight 20+ win seasons in his time from 1999-2016 and would coach circles around Stackhouse to this day. Stack didn’t make a single NCAA tournament in 5 years.

[Ava Amini @avapamini]

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

https://t.co/B0XQaCgjSY @NatComputSci

great work @sebacultrera @davide_dascenzo!

[Michael Totty @MicTott]

I’ve never seen a fanbase so out of touch with a sport. It’s like this really was the second basketball game they’ve ever watched before.

[Sam Dekker @dekker]

I don’t know why I’m so triggered by this Nebraska fanbase. It’s like the small town high school that is just angry for 2 hours at the officials and they actually have no idea why.

[Sam Dekker @dekker]

I don’t know why I’m so triggered by this Nebraska fanbase. It’s like the small town high school that is just angry for 2 hours at the officials and they actually have no idea why.

[matrixbot @thematrixb0t]

New leaked Epstein documents show the FBI removed the hard drive from the prison's camera system and wiped all footage from the night Jeffrey Epstein was murdered..

[Steve Maren 🐀🧠💭😨 @StephenMaren]

Stress undermine behavioral therapies for PTSD; beta-blockers may alleviate this problem. We hope that this work in animals will inform clinical interventions in humans. Thanks to @NIH for supporting the work and my lab group @BeckmanIllinois for this outstanding effort!

[Anshul Kundaje @anshulkundaje]

Please stop insulting the centuries of effort put in by biologists & computational biologists who built those prior knowledge networks & literature that u piggy back on by calling ur nearest neighbor look up engine a virtual cell. 26/

[Science Magazine @ScienceMagazine]

By tracking nearly every movement of a tiny fish’s life from adolescence to death, a new Science study reveals a hidden behavioral blueprint of aging—one that can predict a fish’s age or how long an individual will live.

Learn more: https://t.co/MfogDptGF9

[Bart T🏀rvik @totally_t_bomb]

Vanderbilt vs. the actual 4 seeds—hard to figure

[David Cobb @DavidWCobb]

Vanderbilt & Michigan State: both No. 4s in bracket preview on Feb. 21

MSU: one Q1A win since then | 2 wins over tourney teams. Rose to a 3

Vandy: three Q1A wins | 4 wins over tourney teams. Fell to a 5

Brand bias at its worst.

https://t.co/W3xMoCoehb