@rust_ruslan

Asst Professor @USC with interest in the brain, BBB, stem cells, AI + what can go wrong after stroke & AD. Alum @ETH_en. Fixing science @ResearchHub

Los Angeles, USA
Joined June 2019
highly recommended 👇
Are you planning a PhD in neuroscience? The Department of Neurobiology at USC has launched a new PhD program, and we’re recruiting our first cohort. Our labs seek answers to: How animals learn, remember, and choose what to do. How synapses transmit signals and stay stable over a lifetime. How neural circuits are built, how they fail in disease, and can they be repaired? How the brain turns sensation into action. We investigate these questions at scales from single synapses to whole-brain networks, using molecular, genetic, physiological, imaging, computational, and behavioral approaches across model systems. Explore our labs: dornsife.usc.edu/neurobiolog… What you’ll get: Full funding: tuition plus a $43,000 annual stipend and health insurance A small cohort with direct faculty mentorship, where you’ll help shape a program as it grows Lab rotations across three faculty labs before you choose your thesis lab Los Angeles: a major research hub with S-tier climate, cultural vibrancy and global influence Applications due December 1, 2026. GRE optional. Application fee waivers available based on demonstrated need. Apply here: dornsife.usc.edu/neurobiolog… Any questions? Reply or DM and I’m happy to answer.
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The problem isn’t high schoolers being excited about research. It’s the admissions incentives that push them to produce “publishable results” instead of just exploring without a predetermined outcome.
Unless the kid is a once-in-a-generation prodigy, college admissions officers should probably stop rewarding applicants for doing "research" in high school
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This could be a game changer. Researchers just published a paper on a smart ring that can continuously monitor glucose, ketones, vitamin C, uric acid, lactate, and alcohol through sweat.
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Ruslan Rust retweeted
For anyone who is either a fan of vaccines, or a critic of vaccines but open-minded to the idea that vaccines *could* be great if they were made with a more open-source open-science and public-spirited approach, I highly recommend checking out PopVax. chronicles.popvax.com/p/popv… firefly.social/post/x/210927…
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Ruslan Rust retweeted
Being angry helped people solve 39% more puzzles on a difficult task and perform better on a challenging video game. The advantage was seen on hard tasks, not easy ones.
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Next step: Engineering neural cells for stroke and other neurological disorders!
Engineering T cells for immunotherapy vs cancer had already had marked success in certain types. But there's a next generation in the hopper, as reviewed today @Cancer_Cell, that ought to help take the field much further into solid tumors cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltex…
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Ruslan Rust retweeted
Introducing Muse Wonder, our new family of frontier models with state of the art performance for personal and professional agentic work.
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Age-Stratified Analysis of Blood–Brain Barrier Proteins Identifies Lower Occludin Abundance in the 3xTg-AD Model mdpi.com/1422-0067/27/19/870…
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Ligand-specific endothelial Notch signaling coordinates brain pericyte specification and expansion biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
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Not so sure about this. Germany looks great on paper, but life science PhDs are usually on 50-60% contracts. When I did my PhD at ETH Zurich I earned about double what PhD students in Germany got 😅
How much do PhD students earn? The first comprehensive overview of PhD income shows vast imbalances across much of Europe Read the full story: nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
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Ruslan Rust retweeted
🌐 AI for science just became science diplomacy. On October 4, the US and 16 other countries, including Japan, South Korea, the UK, Germany and Singapore, endorsed the "Kyoto Vision for a Golden Age of Science" at the STS Forum in Kyoto. I only learned about it today, from a friend. In case you missed it too, here is the short version. 💡 The one-page text covers a lot of what I care about. More diverse funding, from long-term awards to fast grants and prizes. Room for new institutional models. Metascience and reproducibility. AI for science, including autonomous closed-loop discovery. Early investment in young talent. Much of this I support. Closed-loop, AI-driven experimentation is at the core of what we do in the Theis lab, and funding systems everywhere could use more experimentation themselves. The declaration builds on the White House report "Science: A New Golden Age" from July, which goes further, for example in rethinking the role of universities. Not trivial. How these ideas translate will differ between national systems. Germany's research ministry, for instance, calls the paper a non-binding basis for discussion and stresses that freedom of research and the independence of science remain non-negotiable. 🌍 For me, the test will be concrete: shared access to compute, data and automated labs, and collaboration across borders. Researchers should help shape what this means in practice. How do you see it? Will it change how science is funded where you work? 🇩🇪 BMFTR statement: bmftr.bund.de/SharedDocs/Kur… 📄 Kyoto Vision: bmftr.bund.de/SharedDocs/Dow… 📘 Science: A New Golden Age: whitehouse.gov/wp-content/up… 🇺🇸 White House release: whitehouse.gov/releases/2026… #AIforScience #ScienceDiplomacy #Metascience
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Ruslan Rust retweeted
DECONVersation incorporates cell embedding extraction methods from four scFMs: Geneformer, Cell2Sentence, scGPT, and CellHermes. Foundation model embeddings are robust to batch effects and implicitly encode complex gene relationships, sidestepping explicit marker gene selection.
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APOE4 reduction in vascular-associated fibroblasts decreases cerebral amyloid angiopathy and associated vascular dysfunction biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
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Ruslan Rust retweeted
When genome editing got going, the ability to trace a mammalian embryo's development to organ generation in exquisite detail was not envisioned. Now it's been accomplished by 2 independent groups. A big week in developmental biology science.org/doi/10.1126/scie… @JShendure @ScienceMagazine cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092… @jonathanweisman @CellCellPress nature.com/articles/d41586-0… @nature @ewencallaway
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High-SNR Whole-Brain Mesoscale Diffusion MRI Using Rotating-View Acquisitions (ROVER-dMRI) biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
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SFUMATO: Bayesian probabilistic clustering for uncertainty-aware spatial transcriptomics analysis and mapping biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
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Inferring the evolving objectives that organize animal behavior biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
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