Notebook

Notebook

Publication write-ups, research updates, and technical notes.

April 2026

What Claude Code did and didn't do

I built Transit Gap and this site with Claude Code.

Essay
Mar 2026

Rules of intracellular organization

Notes from the latest Allen Hour talk: are peroxisomes and endosomes randomly distributed inside a human stem cell? Mostly not. Mostly something more interesting.

Research
Oct 2023

Are peroxisomes randomly distributed?

First scientific application of the modernized cellPACK: using rule-based packing to test whether peroxisomes in hiPS cells are randomly arranged, nuclear-biased, or membrane-biased.

Research
Jan 2023

A new mathematical framework for cellular organization

Our database of 200,000 cell images yields a new way to understand the interior design of human cells — published in Nature.

Research
May 2022

Bringing cellPACK out of the box

How we pulled the cellPACK packing engine out of proprietary 3D-animation software, made it open source, and connected it to the Simularium web viewer.

Methods
Apr 2022

Simularium: sharing biological simulations as easily as a link

Our paper in Nature Methods — an interactive web viewer for spatiotemporal biological models, built to remove the friction between simulation and collaboration.

Sci-Vis
Apr 2020

Data → knowledge: the visualization scientist's bet

Notes from a job talk. In every subdiscipline of biology, data is outstripping our ability to analyze it. What does it take to bridge the gap?

Essay
Mar 2020

Communicating motion in static images

Cave paintings, Muybridge, Duchamp. The 4D cell visualization problem is an old one, and the lineage is more useful than the software.

Methods
Aug 2019

Building one cell from many cells

Notes from a year of work on the Integrated Mitotic Stem Cell — how we turned fifteen separately-tagged cell lines into one 3D portrait of mitosis, and what showing it taught me.

Sci-Vis
Apr 2018

Generating 3D meshes and ambient occlusion maps for three.js

A three-stage pipeline — UCSF Chimera, Cinema4D Python SDK, batch processing — for turning microscopy data into web-ready 3D assets.

Sci-Vis
Nov 2016

How do white blood cells move in 3D environments?

A research write-up and interview about our work on fast-moving immune cells — using lattice light sheet microscopy and custom visualization tools.

Research
May 2014

A tool that brings molecular biology into focus

Notes on the Chemistry & Biology cover and the metaphor it set up — kinase substrate pairs, but also everything I've made since.

Research