Tom Chivers is a London-based science writer. He grew up in Oxford, before graduating from the University of Liverpool with a first-class degree in philosophy; he then took a Master’s degree at the King’s College London Centre of Medical Law and Ethics. He worked for the Daily Telegraph for seven years from 2007 to 2014, and was a science writer at BuzzFeed UK from 2015 to 2018. He has received several awards for his journalism, including the ‘Explaining the facts’ category in the Royal Statistical Society’s Statistical Excellence in Journalism awards, and was nominated for the British Journalism Award in science writing in 2017. His first book, The Rationalists: Artificial intelligence and the geeks who want to save the world, will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in summer 2019.
Tom Chivers
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Studying genetics in the age of big data
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Studying genetics in the age of big data
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How to teach this paper: ‘Neurotoxic reactive astrocytes are induced by activated microglia,’ by Liddelow et al. (2017)
Shane Liddelow and his collaborators identified the factors that transform astrocytes from their helpful to harmful form. Their work is a great choice if you want to teach students about glial cell types, cell culture, gene expression or protein measurement.

How to teach this paper: ‘Neurotoxic reactive astrocytes are induced by activated microglia,’ by Liddelow et al. (2017)
Shane Liddelow and his collaborators identified the factors that transform astrocytes from their helpful to harmful form. Their work is a great choice if you want to teach students about glial cell types, cell culture, gene expression or protein measurement.