Excited to share that I've joined Stanford as Professor in Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine! After ~20 wonderful years at Baylor College of Medicine, I'm deeply grateful to my outstanding trainees, colleagues, collaborators, and staff. Looking forward to this next chapter at Stanford!

California Bill Would Create A $23 Billion Fund For University Research

On my CV and biosketch, I list motherhood (2000, 2002, 2004 - present). Then I wanted my reviewers/critics to know. Now I want ECR women to know. Ask for help. Find your support network. It is critical that us senior women in science support and advocate for ECR #womeninSTEM. PAY IT FORWARD

Good story from Vox on falling numbers of new and competitive renewal R01 grants. [Gift Link] www.vox.com/future-perfe... 1/5

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers. The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

in case you're curious about how angry Minnesota is about ICE, it was -20 today

Under Trump, the NIH is giving fewer grants to fewer scientists. The grants awarded are smaller and scientists have less time to spend them. Projects in cancer, diabetes, aging, neurological disorder, and more are going unfunded. “Make America Healthy Again.”

🔬 Exciting PostDoc Opportunity! 🐁🧠 We - the @sinzlab.bsky.social (sinzlab.org) and @trose-neuro.bsky.social (troselab.de) Labs - are seeking an experimental postdoc to work at @unibonn.bsky.social with cutting-edge miniature 2-photon microscopy and gaze tracking in freely behaving mice.

"Women at Harvard deserve educators who respect them."

NEW: Epstein survivors release the most powerful PSA I have ever seen. Make this go viral so every member of the House of Representatives sees it.

A bad thing is unfolding at NIH this week: It looks like the Trump administration is trying to replace key civil servant scientific leaders, the Institute Directors, with political hires. These directors control the NIH budget, tens of billions. A bit of a video explainer here: 1/ 🧪

🧪This is a must watch. Please watch tonight's episode @60minutes.bsky.social. Joan Brugge is an eminent scientist that was one of the first pioneers of 3D culture in breast cancer. She had two of her grants canceled last spring. We used her protocols to develop our own for our research.

Very well done story on 60 Minutes about the harms of grant terminations and freezes at Harvard with Joan Brugge, Don Engbar, David Liu, and a very compelling young cancer patient, now cured with Liu's technology. Transcript and video here www.cbsnews.com/news/researc...

Scientists point to a long list of findings that emerged out of fundamental research, the type of studies the US government is cutting, and went on to change the world. Nature lists a few of their examples. 🧪

Edward Kravitz, a Harvard biochemist who proved GABA's inhibitory power, passed away last month. He will "be remembered for his humanity, for his social conscience and his desire to help those less fortunate than he,” says Ronald Harris-Warrick. By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social bit.ly/479Ggmo

Sad news: Jane Goodall has died. She did more than any other human for our understanding and appreciation of our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. That chimpanzees are Endangered tells you everything about our species and about what made her so exceptional. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/o...

‘Congress has your back’: US senators tell scientists they want to protect NIH budget www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A functional perspective on astrocyte heterogeneity www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

My quote of the day A Video Quote Medical miracles don't happen overnight. You have to invest in them. Our investments are in trouble. (From Francis Collins on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, July 16, 2025)

I spoke with Jade Hindmon, host of @kpbssandiego.bsky.social Midday Edition, about the consequences of the current administration’s cuts to science funding. Please share to help spread the word and raise awareness. www.kpbs.org/podcasts/kpb...

Yas! Parent F32 (PA-25-423) and F30s (PA-25-426, PA-25-425) are also published. simpler.grants.gov

These are not just grants. This is thousands of people who devoted their lives and careers - taking pay cuts, working long hours, living with uncertainty - all for the chance to try to make people's lives a bit better for you and your loved ones. This breaks my heart.

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Every $1 spent on NIH funding returns nearly $3 to the economy - an almost 200% return on investment💰. Also 99% of drugs developed 2010-2019 were funded by NIH ‼️🤯 Cutting NIH funding not only hurts the economy but will hurt families and patients 😔💔

Man comes to the US from Lebanon. Starts out delivering pizzas, becomes a Nobel winning neuroscientist. Trump freezes his funding, he gets an email from China offering to move his lab “any city, any university I want" with guaranteed funding for 20 years. What are we doing?

Senator Ossoff speaking the truth. We need real action

It is hard to conceive of a more anti-American policy choice for US innovation and prosperity in the 21st century.

ASSIGNMENT: COMMENT ON SCHEDULE F 1 week left to comment about Schedule F, potentially making NIH institute and center director essentially political appointees. www.regulations.gov/commenton/OP... 1/n

Huge congratulations to @franciscoblanco.bsky.social (PhD) and Topher Cronkite (MD/PhD) for earning their degrees! Mentoring such outstanding students has been a true honor! Can't wait to see the amazing things they'll do next! @bcmneurosci.bsky.social @bcm-mstp.bsky.social #BCMGraduation

David Liu @harvard.edu beautifully articulates the criticality of basic science funding for developing revolutionary therapeutics like life-saving base editors 👏 youtu.be/8YhJM6zxYDw?...

Harvard today, your institution tomorrow. It's all part of the Project 2025 plan to destroy high education in America. All leading US universities depend on federal funding and tuition dollars from international students. They severely curtailed the former. Now they're eliminating the latter.

DURBIN: How can we give hope to people across the country who are suffering from so many diseases when our government is cutting back on that research? RFK Jr: I do not know about any cuts to ALS research D: I just read them to you! R: I didn't know about them until you told me about them

say it again: 4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities ROI for NIH and NSF for local economies is conservatively 4x, often close to 10x demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

On why we need the NIH. www.physiology.org/publications...

We have updated our database of funding opportunities for Early-Career Researchers (private foundations, federal, international) We have 456 entries, for which we provide $ amount, deadline, eligibility criteria, etc. Download this massive database here for free: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...

"The biomedical research cuts when they’re polled are like 70-30 or 80-20 against. But it’s only on the edges of the news. You want to push it to the center of the news...Let’s have that vote. Push this issue to the top of the news feed and make Republicans own these cuts."

Because no one spends as much on science as the US does, destroying NIH, NSF, NOAA, NASA, EPA, USDA, USGS, etc. is leading to a brain drain, but it's not to other countries but rather from science. This senseless destruction of US science will hurt the US and the world for a very long time.

The Human Genome Project cost taxpayers $3 Billion. Two decades on, it has generated a staggering return on investment of $1 Trillion, with benefits in medicine, agriculture, energy, the environment, & more. If you want to boost the economy, funding science is one of the best things you could do.

Budget released today: 40% cut to NIH 50% cut to NSF If enacted, this will destroy academic research in the United States. It will also have a major trickle down effect on the entire academic ecosystem

This is chilling. The slowing of grant funding to a crawl could, through recission later this year, result in drastically reduced FY25 funding that provides the excuse for drastically reduced science funding going forward. The copy-paste of this strategy to #NSF and others seems likely. 🧪#ChemSky

The trope that universities are "dependent" on the federal government fundamentally misunderstands how vital this partnership has been for the US. The private sector can't replace it. If we kill it, we're all worse off. From @donmoyn.bsky.social and me: donmoynihan.substack.com/p/are-univer...

Ever wonder how many lives have been saved by NIH-funded research - including your own? Enter any medical condition and instantly see how your tax dollars transformed science into survival. www.ourhealthroi.com

Join me, @andreastolias.bsky.social, and many of the incredible MICrONS team members in an AI-driven approach to neuroscience discovery Apply here: www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/42... Or email us at [email protected]

After 7 years, thrilled to finally share our #MICrONS functional connectomics results! We recorded activity from ~75K neurons in the visual cortex of a single mouse, then mapped its wiring using electron microscopy. nature.com/immersive/d42859-025-00001-w/index.html

This is the way to fight back. Not just rejecting illegal demands, but also arguing affirmatively for the value of university research.

McCormick and Fetterman were supposed to do a book tour appearance in Pittsburgh, but canceled at the last minute because they heard people would be protesting. We showed up anyway. The book is about mentoring. As mentors, we are concerned. With @ahmarilab.bsky.social and @goldpainlab.bsky.social

A pie graph worth keeping in mind as the NIH budget plummets jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... for 356 new FDA drugs approved

NIH is the best investment there is. www.forbes.com/sites/michae...