Samira Asgari
There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
Scientist, Computational biologist. Asst. Prof. Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai 🧬. Alum. Harvard Medical School 🇺🇸, EPFL🇨🇭, University of Tehran 🇮🇷
- 🎉Just learned that our proposal on how viral exposures shape lupus risk & heterogeneity will be funded by the Lupus Research Alliance's Innovation Award. Grateful to @lupusresearch.bsky.social & to collaborators @alemedinarivera.bsky.social & Deshire Alpizar-Rodriguez for their energy & enthusiasm.
- I’ve always been fascinated by how psychedelics can rewire the brain, and as new research starts to reveal the mechanisms behind it, the whole picture just gets even more interestig. We cover some of these new discoveries in the latest issue of @mindshiftnews.bsky.social.
- New MindShift issue is out 🔊 ⚠️ ER visits after hallucinogen use linked to higher 3-yr odds of mania + bipolar diagnoses. 🧠 Rabies-based neural tracing shows how psilocybin rewires circuits. 💵 U.S. launches $100M program on neuroplastogens. 🔗 mindshift.news
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- 🎉 Grateful to have received one of the inaugural pilot awards from Mout Sinai Institute for Liver Research. With this award, Dr. Michael Murray and my team will explore the role of somatic mutations in inflammatory liver diseases. reports.mountsinai.org/article/live... @sinaigenhealth.bsky.social
- My lab is at #ashg2025 🧬🥳: 1- Platform talk & predoc finalist by Abhijith Biji: human genomics of infectious diseases 2- Lighting talk & poster by Ashley Richardson: somatic mutations underlying auto-inflammatory diseases Looking forward to a few days of science & networking.
- Preprint alert 📜: How do social, behavioral, and environmental factors combine with genetics to shape risk for common diseases? In our new work, led by senior bioinformatician Jane Brown, we sought to answer this question. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
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View full threadWhat we found: - Including social, behavioral & environmental context in disease risk models consistently improved prediction. - Their contribution often outweighed polygenic risk. - Genetic and non-genetic risks act largely additively (little interaction effect at the level we examined).
- Biomedical sciences need more comprehensive disease risk models that assess all potential risk factors together. Our work contributes to this effort, showing the power of integrating social determinants of health into risk models for more equitable and accurate prediction.
- First, we developed a scalable framework that distills hundreds of lifestyle, environmental, and social measures into clear, independent profiles that can be used to assess disease risk on their own or alongside genetic scores.
- Then, using data from >170,000 All of Us biobank participants, we asked how adding these profiles changes disease risk prediction and modifies the impact of genetic risk.
- If you are @cellpress.bsky.social #CSPrecisionGen25 conference don’t miss the talk by my brilliant PhD student Abhijith Biji. He will share our latest findings on human genomics study of 99 infectious disease phenotypes in ~800k individuals.
- Preprint alert📜: How do lifetime viral exposures shape our immune system response to future infections? 🦠🧬 We explore this question in our new preprint, led by postdoc Chad Hogan. biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #SystemsImmunology #Immunology #Virology #Infection #HostResponse
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View full threadAdditionally, we observed a measurable imprint on future innate cytokine production after past infection with viruses such as HSV-1 and HSV-2.
- While these are initial findings from a small cohort, they suggest that diversity in lifetime viral exposures may be an underappreciated factor influencing individual variability in responses to infections, vaccines, and inflammatory triggers.
- To link past viral infections with future innate immune responses, we combined VirScan (which measures antibody responses to past viral infections), with Olink proteomics after ex vivo TLR stimulation of blood samples.
- What we found: Strong protein-level immunodominance to viral surface proteins. Striking individual variability at the epitope level (even within the same proteins)
- Another two weeks, another MindShift issue; this one packed with updates on advancing clinical trials and new opportunities for psychedelics beyond the Global North.
- Former NFL players turn to psilocybin & ayahuasca to heal concussion damage. Does the science back it up? Discover this story and all the latest updates on psychedelics legalization, markets, and research in our newest issue. #psychedelics #mentalhealth #neuroplasticity mindshift.news/p/mindshift
- Starting the academic year with a trip to Yale. Looking forward to sharing how large biobanks and real-world data are reshaping our understanding of infectious disease genomics, and to the conversations ahead!
- 🤩What a nice surprise to see @mindshiftnews.bsky.social mentioned by @jeanabbiateci.bsky.social, seasoned journalist and founder of the award-winning newsletter bulletin.fr. Curious? Read our latest issue: bit.ly/4oCg22F Want to support us? Subscribe (free, ad-free): mindshift.news/subscribe
- LA DROGUE ! 💊 Mon sémillant confrère Lionel Pousaz, ex-collègue de @heidi.news, lance MINDSHIFT avec la généticienne @samiraasgari.bsky.social, une newsletter très experte sur l'actu des psychédéliques dans la recherche, la politique, le business et la société. mindshift.news
- Lab news 🎉 We’ve received a 5-year, $2.3M award from NIH/NIGMS to leverage large-scale biobanks and build a data-driven approach to understanding sepsis biology and risk.
- Our immune response is shaped by inherited variants, somatic mutations, cell- and tissue-specific functions, environmental exposures, and social and behavioral factors. This award will allow us to study how these layers interact.
- While sepsis is our starting point, our broader goal is to apply this whole-human, multi-omic lens to other infectious and immune-mediated diseases.
- I just learned that Americans call some chalky, non-chocolatey!, pale candies ‘Smarties’ 😱 and they have no idea what they’re missing. Europeans, you know what I mean.
- Back in Boston for #FOGBoston and excited to share our latest work! Using #Genomics, clinical data, and #RealWorldEvidence from three large #Biobanks, we identified hundreds of novel genetic risk loci for #InfectiousDiseases. If you're around or want to chat, let’s connect!
- Excited to be in beautiful Madison, visiting colleagues @uwmadison.bsky.social! I’ll be sharing our recent work using three large-scale biobanks to advance understanding of the human genomics of infectious diseases. Looking forward to a full day of science and fun!
- I asked #ChatGPT: Based on my prompts so far, describe me in 20 words. The answer: Data-driven, sharp-tongued scientist blending genomics, AI, and storytelling. Strategic thinker, clear writer, playful observer—always chasing impact, never fluff. I think we're in a relationship.
- To women who lead, inspire, mentor, break barriers, and lift others as they rise - thank you for shaping the future! 🥂💜 #WomenMentors #IWD #InternationalWomensDay Many thanks to @NaturePortfolio for giving us an opportunity to acknowledge some of the women who inspire us.
- Six award-winning female scientists highlight women who have inspired them by pushing innovative research and creating opportunities for others #IWD #InternationalWomensDay go.nature.com/43w9Voe
- UES cafe - #NYC guy 1: …these girls serve some of the wealthiest women in New York. They can’t be, you know, ugly. g2: That’s why I had to let [name] go. She was not bad looking, but kind of bland…poker face. g1: What about [name]? g2: She was 38. #peopleunfiltered 🤢
- In snow-filled Breckenridge for the inaugural Keystone somatic mutation meeting! We are new to this space, so I’m beyond grateful for receiving the Keystone Symposia fellowship—giving us the chance to share our work & learn from some of the field's best. Excited for what's ahead!
- Looking forward to spending the afternoon with our midtown neighbors. Stop by if you are on campus (talk starts at 4:30).
- Artists often have rituals that accompany their creative pursuits. It’s less spoken of among scientists, yet I know many who have their own. For me, writing projects begin with an obsessive search for the song to embody its essence (Jacques Brel sets the tone atm!). What fuels your process?
- It would be funny if it couldn’t be true.
- What To Know About The Jan. 6 Pardons theonion.com/what-to...
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- Reminds me of this
- Ana, at the risk of looking like someone who lives under a rock (I kind of do :-)): what happened/is happening?
- And the cherry on the cake… @ashleyrichardson.bsky.social got the prize for the best lighting talk! #proudPI
- Excited to attend the NYC Inborn Errors of Immunity meeting and look forward to an incredible lineup of speakers. Our work on leveraging genetics and electronic health records to identify IEIs in adults will be showcased through lightning talks by Ashley Richardson & Eitan Carroll.
- Too bad middle children are going extinct…y’all will miss our humility 😏
- Middle children are officially delightful. A study of 700,000 adults finds that the more siblings people have, the higher they score on measures of honesty-humility and agreeableness—and middle children score higher than other birth positions. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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- Btw, Many prs software take care of this automatically in case you don’t want to code the sums yourself
- Normally the training study, releases weights and the effect alleles in trait increasing direction. In general, you want to make effect directions for all included variants consistent (either all + or -). It can be achieved by flipping alt/ref in multiplying your betas/zscores by -1. Happy to chat
- Admixture mapping (AM) or genome-wide association studies(GWAS)? Please, I'll have both, and so should you! Read our last preprint, led by @sineadyc.bsky.social, to learn why (or read the TL;DR version by @eimearekenny.bsky.social below). #SinaiGenHealth #HealthEquity #FutureHealth #Genomics
- 🚨 New paper alert! 🚨 A new study led by Sinead Cullina (@sineadyc.bsky.social) @ #SinaiGenHealth dives deep into genetic association studies in diverse populations using admixture mapping (AM) & genome-wide association (GWAS). www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... Here's what you need to know 🧵:
- To new beginnings 🥂
