We are excited to sponsor the “Future of Public Research for Behavioral Sciences” Town Hall hosted by NIH Alumni & Bethesda Declaration Signers including Saturday, April 25th, 10am, in Chicago following Society for Behavioral Medicine Meeting (SBM) www.27unihted.org/events/futur...

DC statehood yesterday

At the end of 2024, the National Academies put out a report concluding the NIH has woefully underfunded women’s health research, and they suggested $15 B should be invested over the next 5 years. Here’s what’s happened instead. Hard to study women’s health if you can’t say “women.” wapo.st/4euUt1c

“Feud with the Pope” is BACK as a likely Wikipedia section heading after a 400-year gap.

Each individual layoff notice that was issued to a postdoc in May of 2025 was itself a greater degree of direct government censorship than Bhattacharya has experienced in his entire life.

The NIH director publicly told a fellow he would meet about the changes to our health insurance and then refused to meet with him. He followed up by unilaterally declaring our union derecognized and our CBA void. It’s hard to have a productive conversation with someone who lied to your face!

The last time I tried to engage with Jay Bhattacharya in dialogue I ended up on administrative leave. 🤷‍♀️

Does greater Albania include the Bronx?

Pleased to share this review on sex differences in longevity interventions I co-authored with Nicole Riddle and @aewebb.bsky.social. We explore how interventions such as exercise, diet, and drugs affect male and female rodents differently www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This is extremely fucked up

WE DID IT! Our illegal union @uam-umd.bsky.social is a lot less illegal today. 12,000 contingent faculty in MD just won the right to collectively bargain. Life-changing win for teachers and students. Only happened bc thousands of people worked together to beat our bosses in the statehouse.

Imagine if science postdocs had NIL and a transfer portal.

In academic science, there needs to be longterm certainty for people who aren’t already wealthy or financially secure to pursue it. Reconstruction reforms will need to make it very unlikely that another fascist will shred everything again in four years.

Brian Donovan had persuaded high school teachers and education researchers that prejudice might be ended by changing how genetics is taught. www.statnews.com/2026/04/07/b...

There are universities in Iran being bombed, the Weizmann Institute in Israel was bombed, Gaza universities destroyed, and US science and universities under authoritarian attack. I have friends and colleagues doing neuroscience in or from those places. Across countries, we have much in common.

A surgery day which means meloxicam for the mice and also meloxicam for the postdoc

Connecticut v the balkans, idk who I’m rooting for

ME: look, a lot went into this set of compensation options. housing. transportation. I'm hoping we can finally end negotiations here - no? God...do you at least have a reasonable counter demand I can actually provide? SWEET BABY: *stoned facedly slides folded paper note across table* NOTE: "Mama"

And when the NIH director started blaming the NIH for COVID, the fellows walked out of his first town hall meeting

Wonderful to have a catnip plant outside so I can just come inside to my cats and be like honey I’m home I brought drugs

Nope nothing at all bizarre about government agency now giving time off for Christian observances.

The Orange Cat Brain Atlas is here. 🧠🐈 Today, we published the first comprehensive cellular map of the orange cat brain. The new atlas reveals a single, specialized neuron responsible for behaviors like staring at walls, knocking objects off tables, and the 3am "zoomies."

OH HELL YES. NEIL GORSUCH, THE LAST JUSTICE OF THE MOCHICANS, ASKS "Do you think Native Americans are citizens of the united states." IF YOU TRIP GORSUCH'S NATIVE AMERICAN WIRES, YOU LOSE. GOOD DAY, SIR!

It’s been a long while since I’ve posted on here. Been working on a lot, some of it’s finally bearing fruit! Excited for my latest review! Sex Hormone Control of Neurophysiology & Behavior #neuroskyence 🧠🧪 www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

You know what all teams in the men's Final Four (and both women's teams in so far) have in common? HERBARIA. UConn is threatening to cut the staff of our nat history collections (plus many other awful budget cuts). If only we cared as much about biodiversity as we do about buzzer beaters!

“What I see is one person trying to run science like a king, deciding which research is acceptable based on political ideology rather than scientific merit”. Totally 🔥quotes from @michaeldgreen.phd in this excellent article by @melodyschreiber.com.

Can you ask how union busting the fellows or increasing our healthcare costs enhances rigor and reproducibility?

😒

Yesterday we hosted FRS speaker Dr. Catherine Kaczorowski who gave an outstanding seminar on the role of dietary restriction and genetic determinations on cognition. Thank you Dr. Kaczorowski!

Anyway it's probably not great that senior faculty are looking at LLMs and thinking, "Now we don't need to train anyone new to enter the field."

I defended my PhD 10 years ago today. That was the least remarkable thing that happened that day. Sharing something I wrote about it last year. Since then "the horrors persist but so do we." And with dignity.

Project 2025 wants women out of public life, this is one way to do it.

First “all our own” Barber lab data paper up on BioRxiv! PhD student Naureen Hameed identified peptidergic communication from clock neurons to non clock neurons, and PhD student Sergio Crespo Flores did connectimic proximity analysis to estimate signaling distance. 🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

"The other way to put this is that NIH funded 33.1% fewer Hispanic trainees and only 6.3% fewer Non-Hispanic trainees in FY2025...we probably don’t have to think about this too deeply. The anti 'DEI' agenda of the new regime...is probably sufficient"

Grant terminations had deep impacts on all early career scientists, running counter to Bhattacharya’s stated interest in supporting them. The terminations disproportionately harmed early career women. www.fiercebiotech.com/research/nih...

TODAY at 2 pm ET: join me & my fellow Zoonati as we catalog and correct all the inaccurate claims that climate change-denying, tone policing, British pheasant sex expert Matt King Coal is as good at virology as he is causing historic bank runs. Rasmussenretorts.substack.com #NIHFFS

The really fucked up thing is Black investigators had been encouraged to apply for the grants than then got canceled for being “DEI”. Our director doesn’t care to understand how these programs work or how canceling them disproportionately impacts the ECRs he claims to care so much about.

Let he who has never time traveled to a diner cast the first stone

@saveamericamvmt.bsky.social @standupforscience.bsky.social and @27unihted.bsky.social are co-sponsoring an event covering this lecture with the first NIH Freedom From Science lecture with scientists who have actually worked to find evidence and unravel the origin of COVID-19 #NIHFFS 2/3

Join us March 28th 2026 for a very special @nihvigils.bsky.social and food drive! Musical guest @allstrike.bsky.social Link to register: www.mobilize.us/27unihted/ev...

Happy St. Patrick's Day, New York.

Genuinely just bonkers to watch the USA do this to one of the most successful and innovative hubs of scientific research the world has ever seen. All those years of Free Speech On Campus debates and it turns out they actually wanted less cancer research. Absurd.

“The NOFO collapse accomplishes administratively what could not be achieved legislatively. It strips institutes of the autonomy that made them distinct. It centralizes decision-making under political appointees…it does all of this without a single congressional hearing or recorded vote.” Seems bad!

Hey Hypothalamus heads! We are now accepting abstracts for the HypoGRC this August (now at the lovely Sunday River location). We have an exciting program planned for you so that we can really wild out about our favorite subcortical region. www.grc.org/hypothalamus...

A heads down approach will not save science. We need to speak up, live our values, and demand integrity. www.statnews.com/2026/03/12/n...

Also waiting for the article analyzing the fact that the new Pokémon game is set in a climate post-apocalypse

Didn’t need capitol weather gang for this one, i am evolutionarily programmed to detect upcoming weather changes via searing eyeball pain and nausea

Could write a novel on b, featuring my large wrench of yes scientists are workers

The NIH has arbitrarily defunded grant recipients on baseless claims, forcing scientists to sue the Trump admin and their "war on science" to restore funding for terminated grants. Read the latest by Minoli Perera and Northwestern's AAUP Dispatches, a column dedicated to academic freedom: