Not gonna let the Hessians take the Dunkin! #battleoftrenton #patriotsweek

Merry Christmas from Goose and the Chaos Crew at Chez Barbèr!

Everyone’s in their pajamas and waiting for Santa! 🎄

Grannika’s little elves are here to help make Christmas cookies! 🍪 🧑‍🎄 🤶 🎄

💜

Husband: Goose’s sweater makes him look like a hamburger. Me: It does not! Husband: 🐶 🍔 📸

We have a new initiative to make all material on the online learning platform accessible to low-vision students. Good plan, right? Except...there will be absolutely no admin support for this. Every individual professor needs to DIY, including alt text on any uploaded slideshows. #academicsky

This made me laugh because imagine science reporters breathlessly repeating everything from our grants

Providing a liberal arts education for the floor, where many scientists are multilingual! 🪰

It was a delight to return to Thomas Jefferson University, my grad school alma mater, for a seminar visit yesterday. I had too much fun to remember to take pictures, except a selfie with my old rig in my grad advisor’s lab (10/10 advisor, would choose again).

I don’t wanna influence people. I just wanna hang out with interesting people and see some science, and maybe some cute animals or interesting plants. I wanna celebrate my internet friends’ promotions and gardens and holidays. I do not have instagram or TikTok and it’s a nice life!

Came to the snowy, cold, windy Washington’s crossing reenactment with a thermos of hot chocolate and flagons to drink it from! Alas, the river was again too low for actual crossing. 😭 🇺🇸 🥶

First snow! And it turns out Goosey loves it! ❄️ 🐶

We didn’t win the institute snow globe contest, but we had fun doing arts and crafts! And paying tribute to the cobra chickens of campus.

Do yourself a favor and click through to read the comments. Gotta at least get the laughs we are entitled to on this timeline.

I had a long talk with someone yesterday about how all prior logic and norms about the labor market have been called off because capital is in the final push to finally casualize white collar workers the way they’ve long wanted to do. From AI to non-competes to this. They smell blood in the water.

Take-my-nephew-to-lab day was highly successful. Nephew asked (loudly) as a colleague went by, “Is that the grumpy old scientist?” Goodnight Lab book really set that expectation. 😂 Shoutout to colleague for saying “publish or perish!” to him in a grumpy voice. It’s his new favorite phrase. 💀

Such a sweet Swedish Christmas program at the Philadelphia American-Swedish museum! And I ate my fill of Lucia bullar! Nephew loved that they sung the tomte songs he knows. 🎄 🕯️ 🇸🇪

My nephew (age 3.5) is coming to visit my lab next week and his top priority is checking whether or not I have all the items in @csferrie.com's "Goodnight Lab." I made sure I know where the multimeter is and I found a spectrometer down the hall so he won't think I'm a fraud! 📘🧪😂

Gift link for NY Times article on cuts at NIH and NSF: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

I went out running in the wintry mix and then drove to work this morning. Goose snuggled on a heat pad and blanket. Goes to show having a PhD is no indicator of good life choices! 😂 😭 🐶

22% fewer NIH grants

Tech bros 🤝 eugenics

It’s useful to think about things like this in numbers of tenure track professors. $33M is 358 assistant professors. Or about fourteen percent of the total number of full-time faculty at Michigan State.

6th times the charm. And still couldn’t get Novovax, even tho pharmacy website explicitly said they had it. So that means I will be absolutely flattened until Tuesday. Infuriating.

Today was my *fifth* attempt at getting my flu/COVID shots. And once again failed. Today’s reason is that “your insurance company servers are down so we can’t bill.” If I can’t get vaxxed in 5 tries, imagine how many people are just giving up?

“What if redemption was just letting someone else have the chance.” 💯

I get my book recommendations from friends, from lists (including awards long lists), and from Reddit in r/suggestmeabook. Reddit has helped me come across lots that I’d otherwise miss.

If you’ve seen me at a conference or symposium in the last decade, you’ve probably seen me making one of these! The hard proof that I love my children and grandchildren 😂. Cuz these take me 50+ hours each. 🪡

Obviously, I already think my students are pretty great. Then application season rolls around and I get to read their full personal statements and I'm always gobsmacked at how accomplished they are outside of lab and how much they invest in their families, service, and community. 🤩

We @uam-umd.bsky.social won. Faculty packed town halls, talked to their colleagues and collected hundreds of petition signatures. Now UMD is coughing up $8.75m, during a deficit, to fund faculty whose research is under attack. Not enough, but a helluva thing for a union the state calls illegal.

#OnThisDay in 1859, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was first published. Much of the original manuscript was used as scrap paper by Darwin's children. On the back of this painting of a house is an original manuscript page from Origin! #CambridgeUniversityLibrary (DAR 185)

Check all the NIH review deets for deadlines during the shutdown here! 🧪

My student @sergiocrespo.bsky.social brought me one back! I’m framing it to hang on the wall. Purple *and* axolotls??? I think the Mexican treasury had me in mind! 💜

Tbh I’d just eat mac and cheese and yams. Which are suspiciously absent!

It’s blowing my mind that schools, universities, public services would run headlong into this. We spent 15 years documenting black boxes. This is a black box in a black hole!

“Does this sweater make my head look big?” ~Goose 🐶

In third grade I learned about space and decided to be an astronaut. When I was 12, I interned in a biology lab to decide if I wanted to be a pilot or a mission specialist and I’ve been in lab ever since.

I wanna invent time travel and then require every high school student to take a class called "All The Shit We Fixed Before You Got Here" where they tour smog-filled US cities, polio wards, pre-vaccine hospitals, buildings with no safety regulations, kids working in mines, etc.

Wildly expanding my horizons at the Labor Education Action Research Network collective bargaining training. Really bending my scientist-brain! 🤯 Academics - go join your union! #AAUP #unionstrong #academicsky

Goose likes to sit on a blanket. He’ll count almost anything as a blanket. A paper towel. A piece of dirty laundry. He even prefers to be on a small blanket on top of larger blankets.

Amazing seminar day at NJIT Center for Injury Biomechanics, Materials, and Medicine! They’re doing fascinating and lifesaving work on blast injuries in a wide array of model systems.

Prohibiting mentorship of Chinese students even as Trump says he wants to bring in more Chinese students. Make it make sense. www.cnn.com/2025/11/10/p...

I just love the phrase “sponge sisters.” But I’m also happy being sister to a comb jelly. 🧽 🪼 👯‍♀️

Even with the gov't open, study sections won't be able to instantly restart. Apart from rescheduling, sections scheduled to meet in the next week or two would have been paralyzed by the shutdown with reviews not yet assigned, reviews not yet come in, discussion order not set, etc. 🧪

counterpoint: medieval manuscript

I didn’t know this and now I need someone to put together a musca depicta fine art traveling exhibit to come to my city!!! 🪰

Up to 323 cancelled CSR study sections. That's more than the 204 sections cancelled earlier this year. Rescheduling is going to be a hot mess with NIH staff reductions and study section members heading into finals and holidays that limit availability. 🧪

So glad I was raised on phonics. Still have snippets of some of the phonics poems carved into my synapses..."boiled or broiled, baked in tinfoil, unavoidably they'll be disappointed."

#medalmonday for the three of us in the lab who ran the Princeton Half Marathon! A successful first half marathon for @keisukefukumura.bsky.social and grad student Sergio! 🏃‍♀️ 🏃 🏃‍♂️