April Wright

@wrightam.bsky.social

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Statistical phylogenetics and the fossil record. Researcher, professor and mentor at a PUI. Mother, reader, runner. Congenital optimist. Minnesotan Louisianan.

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April Wright

Swarthmore is hiring a TT Assistant Prof in Statistics. Join 4 other statisticians (incl. me) in a Math/Stat department. Friendly colleagues, excellent students, beautiful campus, convenient location (Philly suburbs). Happy to answer questions. www.mathjobs.org/jobs/list/24... #AcademicSky #stats 🧪

We had to rent a convertible because our car is in the shop, and that’s what they had. We let the kids pick the music, which meant driving through the downtown blasting “Big Chungus” with the top down.

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April Wright

Still need a room for #evol2024? There are a couple left at the Delta! Send us a note at [email protected]

My collabs finished all their digging and scoring and sent me a character matrix. As I set up the project skeleton, I misspelled the word 'data' twice, in case anyone is curious about the value of my expertise.

Thief. Before we adopted one, I didn’t realize heelers hoard. But apparently they’ll steal things and hide them in a secret place. Like dragons.

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April Wright

Really great read on #OpenScience and the role of publishers in promoting it. They provide a synthesis of the state of things, but do so eloquently and with much-needed perspective. If you're #AcademicSky #SciPub -curious, this is one to read. open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/4-1...

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April Wright

The in-person schedule is live for the Third Joint Congress! Check out all of the talks and events here: www.evolutionmeetings.org/program.html

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April Wright

Our work on the Last Universal Common Ancestor is out!! 🧬💻 To improve data reproducibility and accessibility, I have created a GitHub repository that documents the steps you need to follow to reproduce all our timetree inference analyses. (1/n) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The nature of the last universal common ancestor and its impact on the early Earth system - Nature Ecology & Evolutionwww.nature.com Integration of phylogenetics, comparative genomics and palaeobiological approaches suggests that the last universal common ancestor lived about 4.2 billion years ago and was a complex prokaryote-grade...

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April Wright

Not good. Museum collections & research are essential to understanding both the history and future of life on Earth. "California Academy of Sciences reeling from budget cuts: a major natural history collection loses one-quarter of its curators"

California Academy of Sciences reeling from budget cutswww.science.org A major natural history collection loses one-quarter of its curators

Man, there just keeps being tomorrows, eh? I think we’ve really got it this time.

We cooked up some cute little simulations in the lab. Which unfortunately turned out to be simulations of our null model when we were trying for the actual model. There's always tomorrow.

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April Wright

A new program from NSF is targeting graduate fellowship money to people who received Honorable Mention on a GRFP within the past three years, who are currently enrolled in grad school in EPSCoR states. here is the solicitation: new.nsf.gov/funding/oppo... and a map of EPSCoR eligible states:

It took me for-fucking-ever, but I’ve got my husband’s FoundryVTT server up and running so we can play Symbaroum. This is how I spend my free time. What is wrong with me?

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April Wright

We’ve got a new phylogeny of the ants out as a preprint! It’s been an exciting collaboration with some awesome 🐜 people for the past few years, led by Marek Borowiec and @corriemoreau.bsky.social: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How very nice to see this in press. From @basantakhakurel.bsky.social, a look at why your homology statement is still really quite important in Bayesian phylogenetics. t.co/8WDGwYnK7H

The fundamental role of character coding in Bayesian morphological phylogeneticst.co Abstract. Phylogenetic trees establish a historical context for the study of organismal form and function. Most phylogenetic trees are estimated using a mo

Guess who hates fireworks. It’s Mina!

One of the most distressing things about academia is the pervasive belief that changing the demographic make up of our fields always involves lowering the bar. Speak up about diversity? Get told we can’t lower the bar. Did I ask to lower the bar? No.

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April Wright

I have been saying since February that major media are 100% devoted to But Her Emails 2, but I didnt imagine it would get this bad. The day after SCOTUS stops the law applying to Trump, we have to scroll thru 4 fucking top stories on “Biden old” & an ad before getting to anything on SCOTUS decision

The idea that these are the top stories when the Supreme Court blew up the constitution yesterday makes me want to scream and cry forever.

We cooked up some cute little simulations in the lab. Which unfortunately turned out to be simulations of our null model when we were trying for the actual model. There's always tomorrow.

The dog ate the plastic ring that holds together my kid’s Tevas. Luckily, like all people who wear Tevas everywhere, we have a strategic stockpile of small carabiners.

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Adam Bonin

Justice Sotomayor, in conclusion.

Oh look, a preprint from @brenenwynd.bsky.social and I. Big ups to Brenen for putting up with me on this breakneck "crackpot idea" to "oh wow, we're right" journey. In it, we look at what molecular ideas of among-character rate variation mean in morphological analyses www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Modeling of Rate Heterogeneity in Datasets Compiled for Use With Parsimonywww.biorxiv.org bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

Our primer on MCMC is approved and published! With @rachelwarnock.bsky.social and @oschwery.bsky.social and Jölle Barido-Sottani and Chi Zhang (not on Bluesky) open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/3-204

open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu

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RIP: Kinky Friedman’s oddball magnetism and “fearless Texas chutzpah,” as his friend Taj Mahal once described it, in both his writings, stump speeches, songs, and interviews, cemented him as a media darling

Kinky Friedman, Proudly Eccentric Texas Singer-Songwriter, Dead at 79www.rollingstone.com Kinky Friedman, the proudly eccentric Texas singer-songwriter and folk hero, has died at age 79

Did my most classic nerd move: Finishing A Wizard of Earthsea, then immediately reaching into my bag and producing the sequel, the Tombs of Atuan. I just love Le Guin.

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Burrowing wolves will slowly leech your arachnophobia away til none remains. This perky lass was such a sweet lump and hung out with me for 15 minutes or so 🖤 🌿 🕷️ #EmotionalSupportSpood

Just spitballing some idea with @brenenwynd.bsky.social and I’m pretty sure we’re releasing a punk album called Meta-analytical and Political

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April Wright

Posting this randomly and not for any recent headlines or whatever

Wanna go on a roadtrip with two unlikeable people, a sadboy, and an unfilled template of a character? Boy do I have a novel for you. Only 250 pages, but felt so much longer.

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April Wright

tbea: tools for pre- and post-processing in Bayesian evolutionary analyses https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.18.599561v1

tbea: tools for pre- and post-processing in Bayesian evolutionary analyses https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.18.599561v1 www.biorxiv.org Estimating phylogenies in which branch lengths are expressed in units of absolute time is crucial fo

I should throw it out there that I specifically state in my mentor interests that I’m interested in PUI-interested mentees because opportunities for PUI mentorship are rarer than R1. Even if we don’t connect via SSB, I do run the PUIScience slack. Join the convo: wp.me/p7MnFE-ev

I did this last year, and got to spend rewarding time getting to know a brilliant early career scientist. I think we both got a lot out of it, and had some really awesome, deep discussions about life, the universe and everything. Highly recommend!

PUIScienceSlackwp.me I had a little bit of a rough women in science day Thursday. I turned to Twitter for some support: https://twitter.com/WrightingApril/status/1223061003300212736?s=20 It turns out quite a few people, a...