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Tara Eicher

@tarabyte1024.bsky.social
46 followers 52 following 44 posts

Postdoc in the Quackenbush Lab @ Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Follow me for network science, bioinformatics, machine learning, algorithms, neurology and neuro-oncology. All views my own.

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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 18/01/2026
In this NEJM paper, we challenge the current U.S. administration’s claims of an #autismepidemic and propose directions forward in #autism #research, including facilitating involvement in the community, improving #medical care, and reducing #stigma. www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...
nejm.org
Challenging Claims of an Autism Epidemic — Misconceptions and a Path Forward | NEJM
Autism research programs should focus on both causes and effective services and supports. Alarmist claims, chasing of debunked theories of causation, and further stigmatizing autism are counterprod...
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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 14/01/2026
The Harvard Gazette published an article referencing my work. This piece describes the role that changing diagnostic practices play in the increased rates of autism diagnosis, as well as the importance of having a unified diagnosis under the DSM-5. #autism #research news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...
news.harvard.edu
Taking a fresh look at definition of autism — Harvard Gazette
Some families, activists say term is too broad, masks unique issues of most severe cases as surging rates, federal plans turn spotlight on disorder
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Reposted by Tara Eicher
Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) @autisticadvocacy.org · 05/12/2025
At the recent ACIP meeting, members spread lies about vaccines and autistic people. Vaccines are important. They protect us from diseases, and they let autistic kids grow to become autistic adults. We do not need to be prevented; we need support and respect. autisticadvocacy.org/2025/12/asan...
Blue graphic with white text reading "ASAN condemns dangerous disinformation at ACIP meeting." Full statement on website. The ASAN logo appears below.Orange rectangle over a blue background. Text reads, "For the past two days, the Advisory Council on Immunization Practices (ACIP) met to talk about vaccines and things related to vaccination. At the meeting, ACIP members spread lies about vaccines. 

Vaccines are important for protecting the public from dangerous infectious diseases. Vaccines do not cause autism. Vaccines let autistic children live long enough to become autistic adults. 

Autism is not a tragedy to be prevented; it is a way of being deserving of support and respect. ASAN will continue to call out and unequivocally condemn any claims to the contrary."
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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
This article — focused on my mentor John Quackenbush and the state of our lab — summarizes the impacts of the current funding climate on academic research as a whole. #academia #research #harvard #TrumpAdministration www.statnews.com/2025/12/05/r...
statnews.com
His lab was humming with discovery. After one year under Trump, it’s almost silent
John Quackenbush built a lab that is at the forefront of human genetics research and bioinformatics. Trump administration cuts have put it in danger of collapse.
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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 18/10/2025
On November 14th at 12 pm ET, I will be giving a talk at the #NHGRI ELSI Friday Forum focused on what #autism #researchers owe the communities they study. I encourage anyone interested in my work, as well as the topics of #neurodiversity or autism research, to register: elsihub.org/ELSIFridayFo...
elsihub.org
ELSI Friday Forum | ELSIhub
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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 17/10/2025
In the light of the current administration’s claims of an “autism epidemic”, I highly encourage everyone to register for this webinar: sparkforautism.org/discover_art... #autism
sparkforautism.org
Webinar: The Numbers Behind Autism-Unpacking Prevalence, Trends, and Understanding of Heterogeneity - SPARK for Autism
Join us for this webinar on October 23rd, when Karen Pierce, Ph.D., will discuss how we know how many people have autism and why the count is always changing.
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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 23/09/2025
The announcement made today by President #Trump included many scientific errors, as well as dehumanizing and degrading language towards #autistic #children. Here are a few of the problems with his statements and the effects they will likely have:
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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 01/08/2025
www.science.org/content/arti...
science.org
Democrats stage a science fair of canceled grants to show what’s been lost
Partisan fight over Trump cuts heats up as Congress works on 2026 spending bills.
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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 20/03/2025
I just need to take a moment to appreciate the fact that this image was in a Nature Research Highlights article. 😆🍔
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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 16/03/2025
The preprint is out for BLOBFISH, a tool I developed to find connections between genes of interest across sample-specific biological networks! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #biology #genomics #networks #graphtheory
biorxiv.org
BLOBFISH: Bipartite Limited Subnetworks from Multiple Observations using Breadth-First Search with Constrained Hops
In analyzing gene regulatory network models, a common question is how members of a particular set of genes are connected. For example, one might want to explore network relationship between a set of d...
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Reposted by Tara Eicher
Carolyn Bertozzi @carolynbertozzi.bskyverified.social · 06/02/2025
Check it out! Another novel RNA modification - ADP-ribosylation - that was previously only known on proteins. A cousin to #glycoRNA 👏 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Graphic showing modification of mRNA with ADP-ribose mediated by bacterial enzyme cmdTAC
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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 06/02/2025
😔
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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 03/02/2025
I’m excited to see a study that focuses on the impact of interventions on #mentalHealth in #autism. Classically, many studies have focused more on #behavioralOutcomes, something #autismAdvocacy groups have pinpointed as a problem. This study shifts the focus from presentation to internal experience.
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Reposted by Tara Eicher
Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience @kingsioppn.bsky.social · 03/02/2025
How do children develop their 'me'? Dr Salim Hashmi explores how young people form their identities, from the age of five, through play, imagination, art and technology for @place2becharity.bsky.social's #ChildrensMentalHealthWeek #PsychSky
kcl.ac.uk
Becoming me: How children develop their identity
What makes us who we are? Our ‘identity’ is a combination of lots of different parts – some that make us similar to other people and some that make us unique. When all of these parts come…
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Reposted by Tara Eicher
Ensembl @ensembl.org · 27/01/2025
Ensembl is 25! 🥳 Join us in celebrating our silver birthday by trying out our new browser - beta.ensembl.org 🎂 Silver carp 🩶🐟 and silvery gibbon 🩶🦧 genomes await!
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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 01/02/2025
#DeepLearning methods often don’t work well for #genomics research because they are difficult to interpret and require more training data than anyone in the medical field could possibly collect. Classical #MachineLearning, in turn, does not adequately model the complexity of the data.🪡
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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 23/01/2025
Interesting 😂
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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 20/01/2025
In short, #LLMs have been applied to biomedical text analysis as well as analytical tasks involving #sequencing data. However, the following challenges still remain: arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06271
arxiv.org
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Reposted by Tara Eicher
Christie Wilcox @nerdychristie.bsky.social · 17/01/2025
Small AI-designed proteins neutralized one of cobras' nastiest venom toxins. The findings raise the question: Could AI bring antivenoms into the 21st century? That and more of the best from @science.org and science in this edition of #ScienceAdviser: www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪
So-called binder proteins (right), designed by AI, protected cells and mice from lethal doses of 3-finger toxins better than the antibodies used in conventional antivenom (left).  Timothy Jenkins
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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 11/01/2025
I come across the #fourierTransform in many of the algorithms I study, but it was not intuitive to me when I first encountered it. This video makes it intuitive. #math #engineering youtu.be/r18Gi8lSkfM?...
youtu.be
Fourier Transform, Fourier Series, and frequency spectrum
YouTube video by Physics Videos by Eugene Khutoryansky
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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 31/12/2024
A preprint is now available for Graph Ensemble Neural Networks (GENN), a novel #MachineLearning architecture I developed during my PhD! GENN finds an optimal #subgraph of #multimodal data associations (e.g. gene-metabolite) to predict outcomes (e.g. drug response). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
Finding Salient Multi-Omic Interactomes Relevant to Multiple Biomedical Outcomes using Graph Ensemble Neural Networks
Although multi-omics integration relevant to patient outcome is typically characterized by an analyte interactome, current multi-omic integration methods either (1) model outcome without directly incl...
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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 23/12/2024
A nice overview of the problems with Andrew Wakefield’s “research” with a deep-dive into one of his fabricated results. #Vaccines don’t cause #autism. www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXtA...
youtube.com
Wakefield's Smoking Gun
YouTube video by C0nc0rdance
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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 23/12/2024
#machineLearning research should focus more on solutions for high-dimensional low-sample-size data. The majority of real-world data sets do not have enough samples to train deep neural networks.
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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
A little bit of info about #genetics : We often speak of people “having a gene”, but in reality that isn’t how it works. A gene is a location within the DNA that gets transcribed into RNA and then gets translated to make a protein, which then interacts with other proteins and compounds 🪡
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Tara Eicher @tarabyte1024.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
Biological networks provide information about biomolecular interactions that cannot be obtained by analyzing omics measurements (e.g. differential expression) alone. Here is my take on why they are not used more frequently in analysis: NetworkScience 🪡
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