"For over a year now, more than a dozen groups have been working together to rescue environment and climate data—and the majority are being led by women."

Are they serious with this? New vision for NIAID by the NIH Director and they put it behind a paywall?

We estimate JCV spreads only ~30–60 km²/year, a relatively slow rate for a mosquito-borne virus. This may reflect how univoltine Aedes mosquitoes maintain the virus in restricted areas across years, while multivoltine mosquitoes drive short-term bursts of spread.

Evolutionary history of Jamestown Canyon virus disentangles complex multi-vector ecology https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.09.698726v1

Excited to share a new study published in PNAS! @pnas.org We reconstructed the early, cryptic spatial spread of 2009 H1N1 influenza and SARS-CoV-2 across US metropolitan areas. Link👉https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2518051123 #PandemicPreparedness #InfectiousDisease #HumanMobility

🧪Continuity is essential to scientific discovery as shown by the many projects bearing 🥑🥝🍇🍒this year. Here is the 2025 lab recap! Intermittent, unpredictable and likely to be incomplete 1/?

Inside the federal government as Trump and DOGE pushed it past its breaking point in 2025, as told by some of the more than 1,200 federal workers @hannahnatanson.bsky.social and @merylkornfield.bsky.social have spoken to this year

I know it feels great to check things off your to-do list like submit that manuscript, IACUC protocol, or IBC amendment right before you walk out the door for two weeks.... but maybe wrap up the work then pause on submitting new requests until Jan. Your colleagues want a break, too 😅

Put a perspective piece together on how fever may have driven the evolution of antiviral genes: rupress.org/jem/article/...

In this Perspective, Ryan Langlois hypothesizes that antiviral genes are evolutionarily selected for their function at fever temperatures yet are commonly studied at basal temperatures, a potential blind spot in our understanding of antiviral gene mechanisms. rupress.org/jem/article/... #Virology

You can do this right now: Think of a person who wrote a paper you love, whose work influenced or helped you, or has made your professional life better. Search up their email address. Shoot them a quick email of thanks. It means so, so much. This is a rough time of year, share some joy.

"The only reason I don’t have this funding is because my last name is Rodriguez,” he said. “It has nothing to do with the science." STAT on the betrayal of early-career researchers: www.statnews.com/2025/12/08/t...

We created a database of all published paramyxovirus detection attempts in pteropodid bats! Lots of sampling gaps and avenues for future study ⬇️ Excited to share this PhD chapter with @danjbecker.bsky.social and @viralemergence.org, out last month in @plos.org 🦇🦠🔓 journals.plos.org/plosntds/art...

Applied to COVID-19 in California, the approach yields more accurate and more stable short-term forecasts than RNNs, LSTMs, GRUs, Transformers, and naïve baselines. 🔗 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Species-observer link and kernel density estimation of background points allow for sampling bias correction in bird species distribution models vist.ly/4gc4n #Birds #SDM #SamplingBias

Capsule diversity limits #phage host range by affecting receptor-binding protein (RBP) interactions in capsulated #bacteria. @pilardomingoc.bsky.social &co show that generalist phages evolve host range via RBP mutation & recombination, but specialists remain stable @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/48nvOqY

What makes bird flu spill over to humans? 4y funded PhD in the genomics and molecular virology behind zoonosis of avian influenza A virus, working with @tompeacock.bsky.social and others between Liverpool, Pirbright, and Uppsala! open to applications until next week!

plinkQC: An Integrated Tool for Ancestry Inference, Sample Selection, and Quality Control in Population Genetics www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧬🖥️🧪 R package meyer-lab-cshl.github.io/plinkQC/ #Rstats

Our lab's paper describing the North American H5N1 epizootic is out now in Nature! So thrilled to have this out, and congratulations to @lambod50.bsky.social for all the fantastic work on this: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

NEW! 🦠🦧 We revisited a perplexing paradox: do wildlife really pose less of a risk to human health as they become more endangered? Turns out, it's sampling bias all the way down: conservation risks correlate with disease surveillance blindspots. 🔓 esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

A new release of the mgcv #RStats 📦 is out on CRAN and Simon Wood (U Edinburgh) has added some significant new features despite the small bump in version number: 🌟 scasm() for estimating GAMs with shape constrained smooths. Can be used with any family & smoothness selection is via the EFS method

PSA for people with NIH grant periods starting January 1st (including most NIGMS MIRAs): your RPPR is due Saturday, but they haven’t sent out the usual automated reminders, presumably due to the shutdown

What are the #antiviral barriers to cross-species transmission of #zoonotic #influenza A viruses? @jordanbeckerphd.bsky.social @langloislab.bsky.social &co show that CpG-enriched avian #viruses are restricted by several mammalian proteins, including ZAP & KHNYN @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/47fkMVp

I'm v excited to be recruiting a PhD student to work on badger behaviour and ecology! Starting date is March 2026; see the ad here, or message me for more details: www.gregalbery.me/s/March-2026...

What are the #antiviral barriers to cross-species transmission of #zoonotic #influenza A viruses? @jordanbeckerphd.bsky.social @langloislab.bsky.social &co show that CpG-enriched avian #viruses are restricted by several mammalian proteins, including ZAP & KHNYN @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/47fkMVp

Just updated my manuscript on using #GAMs in #AnimalScience, now on arXiv: doi.org/10.48550/arX... 🐄🐖🪶 Extended examples now show how GAMs go beyond prediction, helping estimate biologically meaningful traits from data. Code: github.com/gavinsimpson... 🧪 #RStats #mgcv #Statistics #OpenScience

New preprint alert!! 🚨🚨🚨in collaboration with the Letko @fviromics.bsky.social and Baric labs! Just in case you're tired of sarbecoviruses, this time we looked at ACE2-using merbecoviruses! specifically the first HKU5r-CoVs detected in mink a couple of years ago. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🔬 Microbiology job seekers 🧫 go to BMA Job Board to view open positions! Have a vacancy to fill? Posting instructions also available (scroll to bottom). blackinmicrobiology....

Friendly reminder: 🎉 Pre-register today & get ready to join our FREE online celebration. Everyone is welcome. To keep #BlackInMicro alive Donate: tinyurl.com/GiveBiM and Register to attend: linktr.ee/BlackInMicro#BlackInMicro(see links in bio) #BiMWeek2025

I have the privilege of working with fed agency folks. They've been jerked around, forced to move, had offices taken, lost resources, put on leave, fired, re-hired, *shot at*, and now furloughed. Still they return each day to help make America a bit more informed, healthier, and safer.

Multiomic analysis of the only megaphage in culture. In press today. Unlocking the genomic repertoire of a cultivated megaphage | npj Viruses share.google/HgU1cjRnaHWv... #phage #bacteriophage

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Stunning work from the Chandran lab!

Super excited to finally share this! #CollectionsAreEssential

Great to have this one published @cp-cellreports.bsky.social !! Some sarbecoviruses can use more ACE2 orthologs than others. The reason? A few sites in the RBD modulating the receptor usage of these viruses throughout their evolution! Worth a read 👇👇👇 www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Our software paper on SpeciesDistributionToolkit.jl is now published in @peercomjournal.bsky.social - peercommunityjournal.org/articles/10....

Excited to share our study reporting the first Sin Nombre virus (SNV) genome sequences from the Northwestern U.S., and the first ever from a vole host. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨 NEW: Climate change is already causing 30,000 deaths per year - a global annual economic loss of $100-350B USD - but the true damage is probably 10x higher. Out TODAY in Nature Climate Change: the first systematic look at the science of "health impact attribution" 🔓 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How do human-wildlife interfaces and seasonality interact during disease emergence? Our team has created a model, inspired by the #spillover of #Ebola, to better understand the interplay. Read more about our research: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Honored to be featured in WSU’s “Q&A with a Graduate Student.” I talk about my path, current work, and the role of mentorship (special mention to my PI, @stephseifertphd.bsky.social) and collaboration in advancing my research goals. Full Q&A: vetmed.wsu.edu/qa-with-grad...

The @panaction.bsky.social just published a fantastic briefing paper about the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing system - take a look if you want the full perspective on what PABS is, and why it matters for both health equity and fair data governance. www.pandemicactionnetwork.org/news/briefin...

Delighted to have this preprint out! It's been a long time in the works, involved a lot of fun discussion, and was a wonderful collaboration with Colin & Cecilia to get it from conception to final form.

New preprint! 🥳🎉 We looked at viral coinfection patterns at the largest scale ever in wildlife. We found a strong association among CoVs, PMVs, and influenza A, and higher coinfection rates in wildlife trade; plus, evidence that bats accumulate persistent infections. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Updating my analysis now that August data should be relatively complete. Not great news... The rate of investment of the appropriation is not increasing and it seems unlikely that the entire appropriation will be committed this year. 1/2

🧐 if you know, then you know www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint! If some merbecoviruses use DPP4 and others use ACE2, what do those hedgehog merbecoviruses use?! As it turns out, neither! In our latest study, we uncover the "missing" receptor for the MERS-related viruses in hedgehogs. [These findings were first shared at ASV this year] (1/6)

Recently tested some de-novo minibinders against two targets (thanks Adaptyv!) designed using our open-source design library, `mosaic`; our best method got hit rates of 7/10 and 8/10 and affinities as low as single-digit nanomolar. Wrote up some thoughts here: blog.escalante.bio/minibinder-d...

New review out in @thelancetplanet.bsky.social from our rodent-borne zoonoses workshop @ciddpsu.bsky.social 🐭🌍 Humans & rodents share a long history and many pathogens -from plague to mpox. Outbreak prevention needs socially + ecologically grounded solutions 🔗 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Breakthroughs happen when diverse expertise is woven together. Collaboration can be messy—different vocabularies, different tools—but it’s worth it. We made a video with @MinuteEarth about it. 🎥 @fviromics.bsky.social @payeldas.bsky.social & Drew Kramer #EEID