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...

Good news to your end your week ✊ Dr. Thomas Alter is set to be reinstated at Texas State University after an initial court victory. Statement from @texasaaup.bsky.social President Dr. Brian Evans and Texas AFT President @zephcapo.bsky.social 👇 www.texasaft.org/membership/h...

NSF GRFP solicitation out. App deadlines now in November. As others noted, eligibility rules for current graduate students now exclude 2nd year grad students. See the solicitation - they’ve emphasized “first year” and “less than one academic year” in grad program. www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

On top of this, no hiring of PhDs with H1B visas means a huge shortage of qualified instructors and researchers, and all the revenue from international students will all but disappear. Universities are not taking any of this seriously enough. We are conducting business like perfect boiling frogs.

📢📢Rally for Dr. Tom Alter and #FreeSpeech TODAY 11am! Details below! 👇

"you are the ones with the most to lose. My colleagues & I may have to leave this cherished institution & that would be a great loss for us. But we have already lived lives of consequence and can find other pursuits. You, however, would lose the education you deserve." 🔥 thebatt.com/news/anonymo...

We're delighted to announce that Ankur Gupta has been selected as the recipient of the 2025 Soft Matter Lectureship! This award honours an early-career researcher for their contributions to the soft matter field. Learn more about Ankur and his research on our blog 👉 blogs.rsc.org/sm/2025/09/1...

Student-led demonstration for #academicfreedom TOMORROW at Texas A&M 6pm! 👏✊👇

I have to keep this deliberately vague, but this is a total disaster for academic research. And imposing it so suddenly is just cruel. I’ve got friends scrambling to get back to the US before midnight tonight. Do you know how hard that is to do on 36 hours of notice?

This one presents information with the help of tables, which may work for some people’s brains infosecforactivists.org

Another useful guide in the form of a checklist activistchecklist.org

Lots of good information about digital operational and information security here www.turnoffyourphone.org

No more postdocs on H1B visas, that would seem to be an obvious outcome. Probably not at the professor level either. m.economictimes.com/nri/work/tru...

How do you prevent cacio e pepe sauce from congealing? A thoroughly researched answer earned its authors a prize!

The @aaup.org just shared guidance for academic workers on how to protect themselves online www.aaup.org/news/advisor...

Our NIH ESTEEMED grant may have been reinstated this year, but that doesn't mean the impacts to our students have disappeared. Nor does it come with any guarantees... Thanks @rhodeislandcurrent.com for the follow up coverage and focus on the students bearing the brunt of these decisions.

@aaup.org has prepared materials for faculty who face these threats and harassment. 6/ www.aaup.org/issues-highe...

Another professor in Texas is fired, this time after a selectively edited video of a talk he gave was posted on X, with the bogus claim that he was inciting violence www.texastribune.org/2025/09/10/t...

The 2024 Chemical Engineering Faculty Jobs List (run by Arvind Ganesan and Todd N. Whittaker) has 14 research/teaching positions and 5 teaching-only positions: docs.google.com/spreadsheets... #facultychemEjobs

Related If your dept head or dean can remove your colleague for teaching in their area of expertise, claiming tenure and academic freedom is contextual and only if you are "good for" the university, you also don't work at a university...

More women have nearly bled to death during miscarriage under Texas’ abortion ban. Experts say the trend paints a troubling picture of the harms of unnecessary delays in care. “This is striking,” one doctor said. “The trend is very clear.” (Published July)