I puertorrican’t.

You need to come to Puerto Rico for scientific conferences! Once again, a conversation between scientists during their participation at a conference in Puerto Rico sparked a successful scientific collaboration. It happened in 2011 when Jennifer Doubna and Emmanuelle Charpentier @e_charpentier went for a meal in Old San Juan and while walking on the cobblestone streets decided to start a collaboration that later resulted in their shared Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. I just learned from the story that I'm posting here of another example, this time in 1979 when Charles H. Bennet @chdbennett and Gilles Brassard attended a computing conference in San Juan, met at the beach, and talked about combining quantum mechanics and information theory which started a collaboration that now resulted in them sharing this year's A.M. Turing Award in computer science, the "Nobel Prize of computer science". So, come to Puerto Rico for your next scientific conference, you never know who you might meet and start a successful collaboration for the ages! Computer science’s ‘Nobel Prize’ goes quantum | Science | AAAS @CienciaPR science.org/content/article/…

We used evolution to train an unconventional yeast to eat plastic carbon and identified the underlying mechanisms that make it grow as well in depolymeryzed HDPE as in glucose. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128…

Excited to share my research with @UWChemE!

Last week I joined the Maravelias group at Princeton as a visiting scholar. During my stay here, I will be training in biorefinery modeling (Pyomo/GAMS) with the goal of integrating metabolic models with process simulation and systems-level analyses as part of my GLBRC project.

In response to the federal directive issued on Feb. 7, 2025 to change the Facilities and Administration rate for all existing and ongoing new @NIH research awards, UW–Madison has issued the following statement. news.wisc.edu/uw-madison-res…

The next @EngBioRC SPA panel is Jan 28! Please RT/share! 🧬 Are you an undergrad or Master’s student and applying to graduate school or thinking about it? 📺 Attend our panel to learn about interviews and choosing a program/lab! 🔗 Register here: forms.gle/YTPvQ8ZewGc9z7dn8

Quick career update: I just joined @GLBioenergy as a Keegstra Bioenergy Fellow. I will be co-advised by Brian Pfleger at UW-Madison and Christos Maravelias at Princeton.

me, locking in and getting ready for unprecedented levels of screen time over the next 48 hours

Excited to announce two upcoming events from @EngBioRC's student and postdoc association! First, next Thursday Sept 26 @ 2:30 pm PT / 5:30 pm ET we're hosting a workshop to help with writing graduate fellowship applications! Register here: forms.gle/PGbdyYxo2mS7vndv9

I can’t believe the GOP is running an old guy for president. Yikes.

Join us in San Diego for the inaugural CMiC meeting! Accepting abstracts until July 9. To policy folks: we will have a session on Microbiome Policy, Advocacy, and Regulation. Reach out to me if you are interested in giving a talk.

¡Bien merecido!

Efraín Rodríguez Ocasio, Ph.D.

🚨The FTC is finalizing a rule banning noncompete clauses for *all workers* regardless of income or industry. It will increase pay, new business formation, innovation -- and cut health care costs. It's one of the most important things the Biden Administration has done.

I was at DC this week participating in the @AIBSbiology Congressional Visits Day and I had to share the obligatory Capitol picture. Special thanks to AIBS for the EPPL Award and the Congressional Offices from Iowa and Illinois for receiving us!

"Any enterprise that has a homogenous workforce, is by definition not recognizing a meritocracy"

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott responds to being called the city’s “DEI mayor” “What they mean by DEI, in my opinion, is duly elected incumbent.”

First step in a community project to provide a uniformly assembled, annotated and searchable set of bacterial genomes, our preprint on our initial release of 1.9 million genome assemblies taxonomic estimates. (figure compares with previous 661k dataset) biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…