On Being Commented On

It was a Saturday. I was on my way to lunch when a Slack message came in from my PI: my recent paper had received a commentary, written by Dr. Joshua Roffman at Harvard.

My heart started racing. A million thoughts came at once. Did I make a mistake somewhere? Did I overclaim? What if he found the work uninteresting, or not rigorous enough?

I knew the work. I had been deliberate about every decision, methodical in the analyses, and conservative about every claim. But there is a difference between knowing you did something carefully and knowing how it will land once it is fully out in the world.

Once a paper is published, it belongs to the field. Anyone can read it, respond to it, build on it, or take issue with it. That openness is the whole point. Still, it does not stop you from wondering, just for a moment, which direction the response is going to go.

I sat down at the restaurant and read the commentary before I even looked at the menu.

The first time, I speed-read it. Honestly, I was just scanning for anything obviously negative.

Phew — there wasn’t anything glaring.

Then I read it a second time. This time, properly. And I learned a lot from it.

Dr. Roffman framed the paper as an informative example of the genetics-first approach: studying rare but highly penetrant variants, such as 22q11.2 copy number variants, to illuminate biology that may underlie broader psychiatric syndromes. He traced the cerebellum’s underappreciated history in psychiatric research, explained why studying it is technically difficult, and described how a high-resolution parcellation approach allowed us to localize specific cerebellar regions associated with 22q11.2 CNV status and behavioral differences. He also noted that we did not test whether cerebellar structure mediates the relationship between genotype and behavior, but immediately added that such mediation is often difficult to detect in imaging-genetics studies like ours. It was a fair reading of our choices, and one I appreciated.

Near the end, he connected our lobule VIII findings to his own independent work from the ABCD Study, where his group found reduced lobule VIII volume associated with externalizing psychopathology risk in early adolescence. He also pointed to newer work showing that cerebellar genes and cell types vary across both space and development, including single-cell studies that are beginning to map this complexity at much higher resolution.

I genuinely enjoyed reading it. Not just because it discussed our findings, but because it connected them to a much wider conversation: genetics-first research, the cerebellum’s role in psychiatric risk, ongoing work on development and cell types, and the possibility of future intervention. After spending so long inside the details of a project, it was meaningful, and honestly exciting, to see the work reflected back in that larger context.

I have written a commentary before. I did not realize how different it feels to be on the other side — to have someone engage with your work seriously enough to situate it, extend it, and point toward what comes next.

I am grateful it went this way.

This paper is the first in my PhD project series that examines cerebellar structure and function in copy number variants. It is out now, along with Dr. Roffman’s commentary, linked below.

My paper: Convergent and Divergent Cerebellar Alterations in 22q11.2 Copy Number Variants → Commentary: The Cerebellum’s Role in Mental Illness: New Insights From Genetic Studies →