Breaking NEWS!! Federal judge rules DOGE illegally terminated NEH grants last year in a summary judgment in favor of plaintiffs AHA, ACLA, and MLA, and orders the restoration of 1400 terminated grants

I've just spent the last year on the administrative side of things and here are some of the lessons I've learned (or not learned). #academicsky 🧪

Putting my journal editor hat on: this has become a huge problem since covid. I don’t know what senior faculty are thinking about how they benefited from willing referees in their own career and now just won’t/can’t/sorry-I’m-too-busy. Others ghost editors who write to inquire about late review.

Cool story about restoring salmon habitat and saving fish.

NSF GRFP results are out! Awardees: docs.google.com/spreadsheets... Honorable Mention: docs.google.com/spreadsheets... (Our team members didn't get emails but discovered the lists through Reddit. Confirmed by logging in to the website and checking.) #NSF #GRFP

“There is a massive difference between faculty in their own departments determining that programs are no longer viable—which has been the usual way program closure has been initiated in the past—and such closure decisions being made solely by administrators." Crystal Bartolovich, Syracuse U AAUP

Trump Administration Plans Sweeping Changes to Accreditation https://bit.ly/4vdPCYa

Ouch.

$2.45 billion NIH grant cuts and ~2300 terminated active research grants were DOGE'd in early 2025 Who were most affected? www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... Early career and women researchers

Love reading grant reviews that span "all of this is terrible" to "this just needs adjustments of the last objective" (with the third maybe somewhere in the middle, leaning +). I mean I wasn't expecting to be funded on first NSF submission, but I'm also trying to figure out where to go from here.

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. 🧵👇

“If O’Neill is confirmed as NSF’s director, the Trump administration will further tighten its control over an agency created by Congress to be independent in its work to advance science.” UCS’s Julian Reyes explains why the Senate should work to block this nomination:

I just looked at the NSF awards database today (3/1). 475 new awards since Oct 1 (beginning of the fiscal year). ~30 continuing grants. ~100 CAREER awards. Fewer than 350 new, competitive awards in the first five months of FY26. In FY25, NSF made 8,377 awards total. They better get a move on...

The revised Schedule F policy, finalized last week, will kick in next month. It could reclassify career government scientists—potentially those involved in grantmaking at agencies like NIH and NSF—into at-will employees, and would strip them of whistleblower protections.

On top of the slowdown in grantmaking I wrote about last week - this is another deeply worrisome trend for scientists, physicians, patients, families, and basically anyone who wants new treatments and new tools to promote health. 🆘🧪🥼 open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

For example: if 84% of people already agree that scientific research aimed at advancing knowledge is usually a worthwhile investment over time... Why are you so sure that the real problem is that people "just don't know enough about why research matters" www.pewresearch.org/science/2026...

Improving #species #abundance information from #river #eDNA metabarcoding data: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... 🐜 🧬 📈 🌐🌍

If Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie & $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don't tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff. Democracy dies in oligarchy.

Reposting again because according to Reddit threads, another round of RWR emails went out today.

I'm hearing from multiple people that students who submitted ecology GRFP proposals are having those proposals rejected without review, despite ecology being listed as an eligible field. If this is a programmatic change, this is devastating. Ecology is the study of Earth's life support systems.

Kind of a late breaking MS opportunity in my lab - please share! Hoping to have someone this summer for some of the before data collection prior to a restoration project. Please don't hesitate to reach out with questions.

US Congress set to reject Trump’s sweeping science budget cuts www.nature.com/articles/d41... Significant damage has been done already. But this is a hard-fought win.

The logic laid bare: further degrade the labour of university workers; further degrade students' experiences of learning, thinking, writing; further embed ed tech companies into every remaining crack of the university.

orthogene: a Bioconductor package to easily map genes within and across hundreds of species www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #Rstats bioconductor.org/packages/ort...

For context, this is the graph for the long and short term loss of staff for NOAA southeast fisheries. We had already been losing staff gradually over time due to budgets not keeping up with inflation.

WHAT IF WE HAVE A PLACE WHERE EVERYONE ISN’T JUST POSTING FOR CLOUT ALL THE TIME bsky.app/profile/astr...

The total NSF budget was 9 billion. I doubt they spend 89% of it on quail.

"One email at a time, one informational interview after another, I became comfortable, confident, and strategic in building my network of mentors." One mentor isn’t enough, wrote Erika Moore in this 2021 Working Life essay. https://scim.ag/3Zfm0e8 #NationalMentoringMonth

NEW – Analysis: The climate papers most featured in the media in 2025 | @rtmcswee.carbonbrief.org @ayeshatandon.carbonbrief.org Read here: buff.ly/sF3cD1c

It's late & it's been a horrific day, but the Trump admin has pulled the US out of all the international environmental institutions I have been deeply involved in: IPCC, IPBES, IUCN and many others (UN Water, UN Oceans, UNREDD, ITTO, etc). And of course UNFCCC too www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

Timeline cleanse.

With misinformation nearly everywhere, one professor tested a simple fix of 150 minutes of fact-checking homework – and it worked, boosting the students’ ability to spot misinformation by nearly 20%. theconversation.com/college-stud...

It’s 2026 and one of the first things that has happened is that a major news outlet has announced that it will no longer seek information from experts. I don’t think this is gonna help with what I think is the most existential threat to our society currently: disinformation.

As someone who has been on many faculty search committees… (Dies of laughing)

Canvas used to be helpful but that time has passed. Last semester I gravitated some of my course materials off Canvas. This coming semester I will pull off even more.

THIS THIS THIS. ALL OF THIS THIS is why faculty resist technological strategies for teaching. There is no engaging with Edtech without this context

#popgen #evolbio #genomics #consgen

working at a university

Student Success | First-Year Persistence Continues Slow Climb Back From Pandemic Drop Nearly 84 percent of the first-year students who enrolled in fall 2023 persisted at their institution to the spring term, though 14 percent left higher education entirely. https://bit.ly/4pfWLDj

In what quite discouraging, this semester's course evals have by far the greatest amount of factually incorrect things in the comments with regards to course structure, policies, and content. Do they honestly believe these things? Is it a lie? I just don't know.

NSF now planning to let POs largely decide what gets funded, and to send PIs reviews that are only 3-5 sentences long. They don't have to use outside reviewers (except maybe 1) and don't have to convene panels. (1/5)

Key misunderstanding I want to get ahead of: NCAR isn't really a government agency like NIH or NSF. It's one of the largest NSF grants in history, and is given to a non-profit org called UCAR, whose job is to make NCAR exist (www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...). That means the buck stops with NSF right now

I think the decision has to be seen in light of the "one outside reviewer and no panel review" that came out 2 days ago. Last step is allowing awards to be granted to orgs other than an academic or non-profit ones.

How much of the observed global warming was caused by humans? Science's best estimate: ALL OF IT

Need suggestions: favorite eco-evo journals that don't have crazy open access fees required? Have some of my first students getting excited to submit chapters, but they were not on grants where we have $4K+ to pay per pub. Bummed to see how many of my favorite journals have gone OA required.

It appears that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has, within the past week, scrubbed a large amount of climate change content from its official website, as well as *removed human-caused warming* from the discussion on its "causes of climate change" page.

Really happy to share that the Second Edition of our book, "Spatial Ecology and Conservation Modeling", is now out and available online! We provide a foundation for applied spatial ecology with a focus on learning-by-doing. @camzoology.bsky.social @conservation.cam.ac.uk

Our Editorial for our upcoming special issue in Molecular Ecology: Conservation Genomics—Making a Difference onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

As a US journalist, it is notable that the most accurate headline in this collection is by the non-US Guardian. Which is owned by a trust, not a billionaire. (The NYT hed is not bad, but as the thread notes, it was a lot worse and was changed post-pub.) Support non-billionaire news.

Made a Bluesky feed to keep up on all things #25DaysofFishmas this year! The more fishmas-es, the merrier - just use #25DaysofFishmas hashtag to be included! bsky.app/profile/did:...