So great to finally have this out!!

Today I found out that my NIH NIAID K99 looking at mosquito basement membrane repair processes was funded!!! Thank you to my mentor @brackneylab.bsky.social, my co-mentor Andrea Page-McCaw, my colleagues & letter writers, the outstanding people at NIH, and everyone else who has been so supportive!!

NEWS: The @entsocamerica.bsky.social Governing Board has elected nine new Fellows of the Society for 2025: Joanna Chiu, Laura Harrington, John Heraty, Margaret Mayfield, Bob Peterson, Paula Shrewsbury, Andrew Suarez, Michael Ulyshen, and Jessica Ware. MORE: entsoc.org/news/press-r...

Our first Wolbachia paper now published in Nature Communications! 🦟 Check out Becky's thread! 👇

So glad to finally have this out with co-author @mallerybreban.bsky.social and very thankful for the many amazing people who contributed to this study and provided materials and input! 🦟🦠1/12 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Likewise thrilled to have been able to contribute to an amazing team effort on this! 🦟

Thrilled to be a part of this study on Wolbachia and multiple blood feeding. Now published! rdcu.be/eyqaG

🦟" #Mosquito #immune cells enhance #dengue and #Zika virus infection in #Aedes aegypti" by David R. Hall, @entomososwin.bsky.social, @brackneylab.bsky.social, @vectorimmunity.bsky.social et al. in @natcomms.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This was such a fun study with great collaborators! Glad to have it finally out. 🎉 We found that hemocytes actually help viruses disseminate to new organs within the mosquito.

Despite all the shit going on, we have to celebrate our victories. New publication with @entomososwin.bsky.social and @vectorimmunity.bsky.social showing that hemocytes play a central role in disseminating flaviviruses to secondary tissues potentially functioning as a Trojan Horse(TBD) rdcu.be/euj4g

New RasgonLab paper (ahead of print) published in Autophagy! By Dr. Sujit Pujhari & other former RasgonLab members "Sindbis virus is suppressed in the yellow fever mosquito Aedes aegypti by Atg6/BECN1 (autophagy-related 6)-mediated activation of autophagy" www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

🧪 Detailed data viz NYT article, out today, on the extent of funding cuts at the National Science Foundation. This "broken pie chart" is neat & new to me: Powerfully shows the slowdown in new NSF awards across areas. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

No photo but saw my first one this morning!

TODAY IS THE DAY! 🧪☀️⬇️ Join us at the Lincoln Memorial or your local site to Stand Up for Science!

WHERE WILL YOU BE TOMORROW?

New paper published with the Benoit lab at the University of Cincinnati! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A large portion of grants awarded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health cannot be funded for the foreseeable future because of an indefinite hold on submissions to the Federal Register, according to an email reviewed by The Transmitter. By @avaskham.bsky.social bit.ly/3X8ngz8

I escaped poverty because I am a scientist. And I am a scientist because of the National Science Foundation. A 🧵:

I’ve been seething and grieving since yesterday’s Friday Night Massacre of NIH overheads, a seeming bit of bureaucratic trivial that will in fact destroy the US university system if unchecked. But I want to get away from budgets and rate breakdowns and F&A percentages for a moment. Humor me?

This mosquito is Uranotaenia sapphirina. Most of the time it looks pretty ordinary (right). But get the light just so (left) and it has a little surprise. (The other surprise is that it feeds on leeches and earthworms. No, really!)

📢New preprint! We studied the impact of successive feeding on inhibition of dengue virus by Wolbachia Key finding: mosquito feeding behavior matters, but Wolbachia remains effective🦟🦠 Study led by @entomososwin.bsky.social and Mallery Breban www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Can any birders help me with an ID? I saw this murre at Crescent Beach SP in Maine on Dec. 28th. I'm btwn a thick-billed murre and a common murre (Merlin thinks thick-billed is more likely and the wing seems to match that better but there's white on the head that looks more like a common murre?

Closeup of the business bits.

This is so cool!!

I created a starter pack highlighting Women in the field of Disease Vector Biology and Ecology: go.bsky.app/E7wuQus Please share and let me know if you’d like to be added! 🦟🦠🪰

Love the TOX shirt!!

My first #entomology starter pack filled up (only 150 fantastic folk allowed) 🎉#Entomology starter pack # 2 is now being populated! 🎉 Did I miss you? Aplogies! Reply to this post and I'll remedy that! #StarterPack #Invertebrate 🪲🐞🐜🐛🦟🪳🦋🐝🦗🪰🕸️ go.bsky.app/JVRwhS1

Made a starter package for vector-borne disease folks! Please feel free to comment if you'd like to be added or see somebody missing. This is just the start and grabbed as many as I could quickly find! 🦟 go.bsky.app/U8D4FV2

During the pandemic, like many others, I picked up some new hobbies-including birding! The other day I got to see two female harlequin ducks, a lifer for me! I don't have a camera set up (yet) but got a few photos through my binoculars.

This was a really cool project and fun collaboration with @vectorimmunity.bsky.social, Hyeogsun Kwon and David Hall! In this work we found an unexpected role for hemocytes in virus dissemination!

Excited to share our latest work! Together with @brackneylab.bsky.social and @entomososwin.bsky.social we demonstrate that mosquito immune cells act as "trojan horses" to help spread DENV and ZIKV infection from the midgut to other mosquito tissues! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...