@StearnsLabi
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Professor and Dean at The Rockefeller University. Cell biologist. Believer in the power of science education.
New York, NY
Joined November 2010
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Tim Stearns retweeted
Rockefeller grad student @NatJAlexander of @ElaineFuchsLab investigates the connection between #obesity and #inflammation in skin—a focus she crafted by following her curiosity through different labs and scientific disciplines.
🔗: bit.ly/3VxJSuW
Great job pulling back the curtain on the polyclonal antibody industry. Fake validation, poor quality antibodies, absurdly high prices, and it has been like this for decades.
See paper by Kahn, et al. for a way forward: elifesciences.org/articles/1…
In my experience most people with "magic hands" at the bench actually just had a better understanding of their experimental system, and how experiments work. Harder to reproduce that in the roboticization of lab science. nytimes.com/2026/08/27/scien…
At the wonderful Zoological Museum in Palermo, Sicily, contemplating the extraordinary developmental plasticity that allows one eye of a flatfish to migrate from one side of its skull to the other during metamorphosis.
Tim Stearns retweeted
🔥The NIH has funded our R25 grant to bring Night Science training to all 40,000 US postdoctoral fellows!
It all started with discussions at the Radcliffe Summit we organized 2 years ago at Harvard where the question was how bring creativity training into the sciences. Our R25 team includes the amazing @StearnsLab, @brangwynnelab, @OylerYanivLab, @JamesKaufman, Maura N. Polansky, Oliver Bogler and @MartinJLercher.
Tim Stearns retweeted
AI has helped resolve an important question in statistics. In the area of multiple hypothesis testing, the goal of controlling the false discovery rate (FDR) has been introduced in a seminal paper by Benjamini and Hochberg (1995). They also introduced a method (the Benjamini-Hochberg or BH method) and proved it controls the FDR. This method has been widely adopted in modern high-throughput science, including in genomics, astronomy, economics, etc. The paper has has garnered more than 130,000 citations to date.
However Benjamini and Hochberg showed FDR control only when the data for the individual tests are *independent*. In practice, these data are often dependent; a good example is data on genetic variants due to linkage disequilibrium. Later work has focused on extending the validity of the BH procedure, e.g., to a form of positive dependence by Benjamini and Yekutieli (2001).
The question of when the BH procedure controls the FDR has remained open. Over the last twenty years, many authors, including Reiner-Benaim (2007), Kim and van de Wiel (2008), Benjamini (2010), Sarkar (2023), Sarkar and Zhang (2025), have conjectured that the BH procedure controls the FDR for two-sided tests using any correlated Gaussian data. These authors have presented both theoretical and empirical evidence supporting, but not directly showing, the conjecture.
With the help of AI (specifically GPT-5.6 Sol Pro), I have settled the question in the negative: The Benjamini-Hochberg procedure does *not* generally control the false discovery rate at the desired level for correlated two-sided Gaussian tests. This was done by exhibiting a Gaussian factor model for which, at a nominal level alpha=0.01, the false discovery rate is proved to be FDR>0.0104.
There is a lot of interesting commentary to be made:
1. This result should be of interest to everybody in the field of statistics. Emmanuel Candes of Stanford University once called the false discovery rate and the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure "one of the two most important developments in statistics after 1950" (the other being James-Stein shrinkage). The present conjecture is probably the most central question about FDR/BH that was unresolved to date.
2. GPT-5.6 one-shot the problem after 90 minutes of reasoning, whereas with 5.5 I was not able to solve it even after iterating with multiple parallel agents for perhaps 20 hours. So the capability improvement is quite real. Exciting times to live in!
3. The argument is not especially surprising, but it does combine an asymptotic approach (standard for FDR analysis, see e.g., Genovese and Wasserman, Efron, etc) with a numerical certificate in a way that would be pretty non-standard in the field. Once we have the specific example, then straightforward simulations also support that the false discovery rate is indeed higher than the nominal value (see attached fig).
4. The current degree of violation over the nominal level is relatively small (0.104 vs 0.1). So the importance of this result is mainly conceptual. The practical implications remain to be determined.
Overall, an exciting development! Preprint is available here (faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp…) and will be on arxiv tonight; supporting code is here (github.com/dobriban/BH).
The public comments are in for the proposed rules change giving OMB unprecedented control over federal grants.
This is an excellent analysis of the >250K comments. The large majority (94%) of were opposed, citing the danger of politicizing the process. techpolicy.press/the-public-…
There is little new in the world. American Journal of Psychology, 1899. doi.org/10.2307/1412661
Tim Stearns retweeted
So happy to see this study “in print”, being part of this discovery has been a delight and it’s great to hear different perspectives on it’s implications
In a new Science study, researchers describe how dynamic and reversible mitochondrial membrane constrictions, called “pearling,” spatially organize mtDNA molecules.
The findings reveal a mechanistic link between mitochondrial membrane remodeling and mtDNA biology.
📄: scim.ag/4bW70JD
#SciencePerspective: scim.ag/4mhEOV1
PerturbFate is officially out in @Nature today! From chromatin to RNA, we dissect the causal regulatory logic linking genotype to phenotype. Huge thanks to my PhD advisor @junyue_cao @Wei_Zhou_1989, and @RockefellerUniv for providing such an incredible research home!
A @Nature study from Rockefeller's @junyue_cao describes a new platform called PerturbFate that reveals how diverse genetic perturbations funnel into shared disease states, a method that could unlock therapeutic targets for complex diseases.
🔗: bit.ly/4thIsRw
Tim Stearns retweeted
New AI paper from us this week. When my student first showed me his initial findings, I really didn’t know what to make of them. I felt that this was an interesting but curious loophole phenomenon that would shortly be closed. I was very wrong.
arxiv.org/abs/2603.21687
Tim Stearns retweeted
We wrote a review on using machine learning to study evolutionary genetics and molecular evolution in Trends in Genetics
@TrendsGenetics . It is open access—please read it if you are interested in this topic sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
David Botstein was one of the giants of genetics and genomics, my mentor, colleague and friend. nytimes.com/2026/03/20/scien…
Tim Stearns retweeted
Most mass spectrometers still analyze molecules one or just a few at a time. Now, a new MultiQ-IT prototype from Rockefeller's Brian Chait described in @ScienceAdvances can cool, trap, filter, and redirect over a billion ions simultaneously.
🔗: bit.ly/47FWUd6
Excellent example of how AI tools can be engines for learning concepts, not just finding an answer: openai.com/index/new-ways-to…