🧪⚛️ NSF is seeking community feedback on their draft strategic plan for the next few years. Now is the time to make your views known. (Maybe disbanding nearly all advisory committees wasn’t the best idea.) www.nsf.gov/od/updates/n...

Meanwhile those of us still employed in US higher education have to do required trainings about how collaborating with scientists from China is bad.

Were your Texas college courses reviewed or changed this semester? Amid new policies restricting instruction on race, gender and sexuality, The Texas Tribune seeks examples of college course changes from students and instructors.

this is a fascinating article, featuring a ton of analytical chemists arguing with one another #chemchat

Do you care about the future of the US NSF and science in general? The agency is seeking feedback on the draft Strategic Plan. www.nsf.gov/od/updates/n...

3D printing meets fluid mechanics! Thrilled to see our Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics article on direct-ink writing featured by @utknoxville.bsky.social. With Brett Compton & @raytyler.bsky.social : tickle.utk.edu/mae/news/com... @annualreviews.bsky.social @univofmaryland.bsky.social

🤠 Hey, Texas faculty! As you prep for the spring semester check out our blog for tips + advice. 👇 1) Don’t self-censor, know your rights! 2) Report censorship of your teaching, research, or expression. 3) Organize your department. We are stronger together! aaup-texas.org/blog/f/2025-...

Currently writing about @asymptotia.bsky.social's The Dialogues and while I've read it before, writing about it has really made me appreciate how brilliant this book is as a work of #scicomm. If you're looking for an accessible and FUN introduction to big ideas in physics, get this one. #booksky

The 2026 Chemical Engineering Faculty Jobs List (run by Arvind Ganesan and Todd N. Whittaker) has 92 research/teaching positions and 19 teaching-only positions: docs.google.com/spreadsheets... #facultychemEjobs

An open computational materials position at Rice - please spread the word! nanoscale.blogspot.com/2025/12/an-o...

Congratulations to the 2025 class of APS-DNSP Fellows! 🎉 DSNP also takes this opportunity to thank the selection committees for their dedicated work.

These are understandable concerns, given all that has happened at NSF, so I think it's worth addressing. Here is the exact language about internal reviews: "in those rare circumstances when an ad hoc or panel review request process fails to produce the minimum of two external reviews."

The new policy also shortens rejection feedback from a page to 3-5 sentences. This will particularly hurt early-career researchers who benefit from detailed guidance to improve proposals. We can't cultivate the next generation of researchers by eliminating the mentorship embedded in thorough review.

Or the related front-facing skeptical squint-eye.

The destruction of the enterprise of US academic science has been one of the most confounding aspects of a hugely confounding year. My @statnews.com colleagues are writing about the consequences for individuals & the country. You want to read this series. www.statnews.com/american-sci...

Interesting model here. “If universities genuinely want to realize their potential to solve societal challenges, they must create mechanisms to recognize publicly engaged research in the P&T process” www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

🎉🧪 Some rare GOOD news (🙃): the National Defense Authorization Act language that's just been released seems to have eliminated the "SAFE Research Act," which would have barred any scientist from federal funding if they had Chinese collaborations in the last 5 years rules.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

Delighted to announce “Hydrodynamic Approaches to Active Matter: Successes and Future Challenges”, will now take place on 6–10 October 2025 at @mpipks.bsky.social, on the occasion of John Toner’s 71st birthday. We hope you will join us. www.pks.mpg.de/haam26

Our manuscript on Dps:DNA condensates is now live on bioRxiv! With @abbondanzieri.bsky.social @meyerroc.bsky.social Check it out at: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We present a unified, multi-scale framework connecting yarn mechanics, stitch geometry, and fabric-level behavior in a new paper published in Extreme Mechanics Letters www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti.... Another great collaboration with Cosima du Pasquier, Allison Okamura and Skylar Tibbits.

For everyone who missed it: My BPPB talk is now available on YouTube! If you're curious how we propose to think about ternary lipid mixtures in the presence of membrane asymmetry—including differential stress!—then this is probably a good place to start! 🧪

I am looking to hire PhD students to join our Multiphase & Multiscale Flow Lab in Mechanical Engineering @univofmaryland.bsky.social Background in ME, Physics, ChemE, Civil (or related), interest in fluid mechanics/soft matter, and hands-on lab work are key. Please help spread the word!

Just out in Science Advances! Sophia Fricke and the Reimer Lab lead our collab study on plastics deconstruction, extracting fractal surface dimensionality and reaction wavefront velocity, properties inaccessible with standard diffusion measurements. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I am honored and excited to present our recent work on mixed AND asymmetric membranes at @bppbseminar.bsky.social! 🧪 My online talk will be this Friday, 11/21/25, 11am US Eastern time. Many thanks to the organizers for putting this together! More details here: sites.google.com/view/bppb-se...

I am … grateful? … that Harvard’s Graduate School Fund reached out to me with a fundraising solicitation yesterday, because it helped me to organize my thoughts on an event near the end of my PhD (2005). Here is my response, just emailed to the fundraisers: (1/9)

📌 Join us for the next klogW seminar on November 18th at 12PM EST (register below) by Roya Zandi (UC Riverside) on "Physics of Viruses". Registration link: engage.aps.org/dsnp/resourc...

🧪⚛️ Vortices and this year's APS Buckley Prize - a brief write-up. nanoscale.blogspot.com/2025/11/vort...

Dear Physicists and Physics fans, I would like to encourage you to celebrate #WomenInPhysics Day this Friday, November 7th. Why November 7th? Because it is the birthday of two of the most impactful women physicists of the 1900's: Marie Curie and Lise Meitner. 🎢 ⚛️ 🧪 👩‍🔬

Are you interested in how #living and #synthetic systems navigate chemical gradients, from #bacteria to #active #colloids? Click here: doi.org/10.1002/anie... #EngineeringBiology #SyntheticBiology #ActiveMatter #SoftMatter

Curious about the latest advancements in soft matter physics by young researchers? Join our Students’ Virtual Conference, on November 6th from 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. ET! We have a great lineup of 20 speakers covering a wide range of topics. Register via the QR code or via tinyurl.com/DSOFTConfere...

APS Meeting abstracts for Denver deadline was extend to October 31! Consider submitting to the "Engineered Biopolymers and Living Materials" focus session organized by Melody Morris and me. We invite abstracts covering research using polymer physics for engineered biopolymers and living materials.

We are happy to announce the DSOFT Students’ Virtual Conference, on November 6, 2025 from 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. ET! We have a great lineup of 20 speakers covering a diverse range of topics in soft matter physics. Register via the link or QR code to participate! tinyurl.com/DSOFTConfere...

“Cellular Olympics” our catalog of freeky ultra fast cellular superhero’s is freely available “Ann Rev of microbiology” www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... This is a compilation of world’s fastest single cell organisms - enjoy this buffet of rare delightful protists with mind bending speeds. 🧪

Final version of our paper on ciliary metachronal waves out now in Science Advances! doi.org/10.1126/scia... This is the main thesis work of my PhD student Rebecca Poon, who caught many #platnereis larvae and tirelessly ablated them with a laser. THREAD

Our paper on chromosome segregation in the archaeon Sulfolobus Acidocaldarius has been published in PNAS! This has been a great collaboration with @joeparham19.bsky.social and the rest of @buzzbaum.bsky.social's team. Stay tuned for more to come!😉 @istaresearch.bsky.social doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

SCIENCE POLICY NEWS: During Yom Kippur, all the members of the High Energy Physics Advisory Committee (HEPAP), myself included, received a letter thanking us for our service and telling us essentially that the almost 40 yo standing federal advisory committee was no more. ⚛️🧪🔭 Why that matters 🧵

Folks whose jobs, postdocs or grad school fellowships or applications were cut short--drop them a line

Excited to be hosting the BPPB seminar tomorrow after a while (last semester I was teaching during seminar hour). Looking forward to a stimulating talk by Gautam Reddy (Princeton University) on the physics of learning. Hope to see some of you there

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

I thought I'd put the administration's proposed "compact" with universities in context, so I wrote the blog post below. It's especially for journalists covering this story! Many details about how the compact itself works and why the administration has retreated to this strategy.

"This is extortion, plain and simple.... The only solution is solidarity and collective action against this effort at federal control over higher education." A sobering analysis of the illegality of the administration's "compact" and its stakes for higher ed. 🎁🔗 www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/o...

Some problems have simple solutions. This new “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” is one. The answer is simply saying no. Simple does not mean easy. But Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, Vanderbilt, Univ of AZ, UPenn, USC, UT Austin & UVA must understand what they’ll lose if they sign on.

As always, @edyong209.bsky.social is on point!! I wish the University admin understood this point better. PS. If you don't know Ed, he is currently my most favorite author. Highly recommend his books and articles. His COVID coverage was impeccable.

So, at the very least, we all need to be joining or starting an AAUP chapter: www.aaup.org/chapters/fin...

YES! THIS on GenAI! Please read this absolutely splendid piece of writing that had me cheering, a little bit weepy, and writing in the margins: "An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny."

Any academic folks on H1B visas (even with stamps in passports) please get legal advice from your University attorneys before leaving the US.

From @benjaminhjohns1.bsky.social: If you want to understand the increasingly authoritarian grip that the Republican establishment has on this state, and the increasingly destructive ends to which it is using its power, no figure from our past is better suited than Homer Price Rainey.

Johns Hopkins, University of Maryland to feel brunt of Trump’s new $100K visa fee

Comment period ends on Monday for a proposed rule change that would terminate student visas after 4 years. It also puts limits on exchange visitors and reps of foreign media, and shortens the length of time at the end of the visa from 60 days to 30 days. www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

🗣️🗣️What is happening at Texas Tech is part of a national campaign to erase the existence of trans people. Faculty and academic leaders across the country must stand up now: this suppression of #FreeSpeech and #AcademicFreedom will not be confined to Texas! www.texastribune.org/2025/09/26/t...