Let's go!!! Excited to go live with this year's Virtual Cell Challenge! A brand new test of perturbation prediction models, now zero-shot, and with an expanded set of metrics. Foundational to all of it all is a new dataset @arcinstitute scientists generated for this challenge.

I have long written and spoken about the many ways US immigration policy harms international students and scholars. This has been true for as long as I can remember, including when I first came to the US on a single-entry student visa more than 20 years ago under a process formerly known as muslim registry program. But the current administration has gone much further, through arbitrary policy changes, travel bans, and broad visa processing pauses that leave folks unable to work, travel, or train. These policies affect a minority of scientists, and in the current state of the world they can be easy to overlook. But we should not let that happen. I wrote about the quiet loss of Iranian scientific talent in US labs for @TheScientistLLC: the-scientist.com/the-quiet-…