Top N Twitter Accounts to Follow for Genomics
If you are interested in science and want to keep up on the latest happenings in science, it is high time to create a twitter account and follow tweets. This is especially true for following the latest in Next-Gen Sequencing/Genomics, where a few top academics are active on Twitter and share their thoughts on Twitter. Their Scieets (Scientific tweets, a definite bad-itter word) enable real time scientific conversations, be it a model for open publication or arsenic death.
Before Twitter, these conversations were available only during happy hours in the academic corridors. Thanks to Twitter, now they are out in the open. Twitter is for you even if you do not want to actively engage in a twitter conversation. Twitter is probably the only social media where one can be actively passive.
Here is an effort to compile the top N academic twitter accounts (inspired by top N reasons to be in computational biology) to follow for all things genomics. The top N twitter list is very subjective and by no means a comprehensive list. Feel free to add more Scitters. This is only a beginning.
The top N twitter accounts (sorted based on the followers) covers academics at different stages, ranging from full professors to post-docs.
Jonathan Eisen @phylogenomics
Twitter Bio: Biologist & blogger w/ #evolution #microbes & #genomes focus; #openaccess & @plosbiology advocate; @harvard @stanford alum; prankster; cyclist & Prof. @ucdavis
Tweets: over 23000; Followers: over 11000; Following: over 2100
Eric Topol @EricTopol
Twitter Bio: Cardiologist, geneticist, digital medicine aficionado, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine La Jolla, CA · http://www.stsiweb.org
Tweets: over 2000; Followers: over 8000; Following: over 300
Daniel MacArthur @dgmacarthur
Twitter Bio: I work in high-throughput human genomics, and blog about the genetic testing industry
Tweets: over 7800; Followers: over 6400; Following: over 500
Chris Gunter @girlscientist
Twitter BioGeneticist; editor; writer; nonprofit strategist. Director of Research Affairs, HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. Owner, Girlscientist Consulting. Alabama· http://about.me/girlscientist
Tweets: over 9000; Followers: over 5000; Following: over 900
Simply Statistics @simplystats
Twitter Bio: Simply Statistics blog by Jeff Leek, Roger Peng, and Rafael Irizarry. Home to statistics; data; science; and Rafa’s Rants.
Tweets: over 500; Followers: over 2600; Following: over 160
Leonid Krugklyak: @leonidkruglyak
Twitter Bio:Professor of Genomics and Evolutionary Biology. Lapsed physicist. Math and statistics junkie. Occasional mountaineer. Princeton, NJ
Tweets: over 11000; Followers: over 2400; Following: over 600
Stephen Turner @genetics_blog
Twitter Bio: Bioinformatics Core Director at the University of Virginia. Biologist, statistician, patent agent, blogger, 26.2 runner, cook, guitar noise-maker.
Tweets: over 3000; Followers: over 2200; Following: over 200
Michael Eisen @mbeisen
Biologist at UC Berkeley & HHMI; open access advocate and co-founder of Public Library of Science
Berkeley, CA · http://www.michaeleisen.org
Tweets: over 4000; Followers: over 2300; Following: over 400
Misha Angrist @MishaAngrist
Twitter Bio: http://www.amazon.com/Here-Human-Being-Personal-Genomics/dp/0061628336/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0· http://blogs.plos.org/genomeboy
Tweets: over 4600; Followers: over 1800; Following: over 700
Nick Loman @pathogenomenick
Twitter Bio: Bacterial genomes, high-throughput sequencing and clinical applications thereof. Birmingham, UK · http://pathogenomics.bham.ac.uk/staff/nloman.html
Tweets: over 6000; Followers: over 1800;Following: over 300
Titus Brown @ctitusbrown
Twitter Bio Bioinformatician, (meta)genomicist, developmental biologist, regulatory genomicist, promoter basher, Pythonista, climatologist, digital evolutionist – reverse!
Tweets: over 2979; Followers: over 1180; Following: over 29
Paul Knoepfler @pknoepfler
Twitter Bio Cancer & Stem Cell Researcher, Cancer Survivor and Patient Advocate, Science Writer, Soccer Fan, Sci-Fi, 1/2 Hungarian, Dad, blogger at http://www.ipscell.com
Tweets: over 1900; Followers: over 1010; Following: over 450
Michael Hoffman @michaelhoffman
Twitter Bio: Postdoc in computational genomics at the University of Washington Seattle· http://noble.gs.washington.edu/~mmh1/
Tweets: over 6700; Followers: over 800; Following: over 600
Ethan Perlstein @eperlste
Evolutionary Pharmacologist, Open Scientist, Self Publisher. My lab gives antidepressants and other psych drugs to yeast cells. NYC · http://perlsteinlab.com
Tweets: over 6600; Followers: over 700; Following: over 190
Joe Pickrell @joe_pickrell
Twitter Bio:Postdoctoral fellow studying human genetics, Harvard Medical School. https://sites.google.com/site/josephpickrell/
Tweets: over 1200; Followers: over 600; Following: over 120
I’m not an academic, I’m a science writer, but I tweet about genetics and genomics @genomengin and blog at http://www.genome-engineering.com
Thanks for the shout out. Just wanted to mention that I get questions all the time about how to stay current on the latest research, findings, methods, and other happenings in bioinformatics and genomics. I put a list of resources together that I use on my blog:
http://gettinggeneticsdone.blogspot.com/2012/05/how-to-stay-current-in.html
And the author at homolog.us also compiled a similar list:
http://www.homolog.us/blogs/2012/07/27/how-to-stay-current-in-bioinformaticsgenomics/
There’s much overlap with the list you provided above, but both of these go beyond Twitter to things like blogs, RSS feeds, mailing lists, etc.