They need to STOP locking up the body wash and deodorant at CVS. It’s the summer man PLEASE make it more accessible 🥀🥀🥀

Do you have plans on May 19 11am ET? Consider this webinar to #defendresearch. @michaeldgreen.phd , @jeremymberg.bsky.social , and @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social , can you share?

More of this!!

Multi-year funding, grant terminations, and no clarity on what “DEI-activities” are is holding back ESIs far more than… Holding a K award and receiving an R… As @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social notes in her next post this has been possible since the early 2000s. As a 26 y/o, pretty much my entire life…

Btw, JB is out of step with a change made to K awards in 2003. (ESI was not an identified category until 2006/2007. ) grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

My fault for trying to think about incremental reforms in 2029. Pretty hard to reform stuff when half a billion dollars might not go out the door to labs and researchers on life support. 😭😭😭

So my position is always to be concerned about fair and equal access rather than argue about the severity of any particular filter. We have too many PhDs fighting for too few dollars. Period. Filters will operate. The only question is who gets screened out. Who stays in. Etc.

Thinking a lot about the NIH’s rhetoric about “supporting early-career researchers” Currently in the process of making a few figures on the history of the F99/K00 and DP5 awards. Both (to my knowledge) are the only awards that give PhD students leverage for their next step (u take the money w/ u)

so in 2021, I watched a CSR advisory council meeting and one observation made was that overt negative bias during review was rare but that positive bias, or "halo" effects, that tends to favor white, established PIs at elite institutions was more common

Nothing to see here. The MAHA admin is clearly focused on corporate capture by *reads article* letting “my tobacco guy” strong-arm the FDA commissioner 🥀🥀🥀

Alright I’ll lead the FDA

"In 2023, approximately one in 2828 papers contained at least one fabricated reference. By 2025, this had risen to one in 458 and in the first 7 weeks of 2026, one in 277 papers had at least one fabricated reference." www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

People aren’t going to be perfect. Sometimes courage falters. We have to take people as they come. We can applaud a good choice while still acknowledging imperfect past choices.

Cleansing your feed this AM, walking for graduation this weekend!

He said

Thanks to @rebeccafieldingmiller.com, @abigailmhatcher.bsky.social, @sarahpeitzmeier.bsky.social, and the rest of this team for surveying the researchers in Grant Witness's data and laying out how grant terminations systematically affected minority and underrepresented scientists. 🧪 🧵

Important new study out today highlighting unequal impact of NIH grant terminations. “If the NIH is to serve the health of all Americans, it requires urgent course correction to ensure all scientific careers are sustained without targeted discrimination.” www.thelancet.com/journals/TLR...

MAHA: the government is hiding science from you to keep you sick! MAHA when they’re the government:

I’m tired of the AI-generated pictures on slides 🥀🥀🥀 Especially slides w/ unclear graphs!! I’m telling you the image you have of an anime-looking group of scientists working together is way less useful than putting together some R-code to make sure you are clearly displaying your findings.

“On average, these hospitals paid $15.7 million (SD, $46.1 million) for management consulting services, with each contract costing an average of $6.2 million (SD, $14.8 million). Management consulting contracts lasted an average of 1.4 years” Surely this is more useful than more staffing!

There’s LOTS of ways to disincentivize people from pursing ~certain~ research. Exactly why attaching hiring, promotion, and tenure to federal funding is an acceptance of those terms. Of course everyone would be a fool not to at least try and “pivot”. Where is the corresponding change in incentives?

ICYMI!

#NIH funding cuts & visa crackdowns are driving away talented foreign researchers who normally would have flocked to the US, a @statnews.com survey shows. "It is going to cause a long-term brain drain." www.statnews.com/2026/05/04/t...

Last year I looked at NIH grants for which the the titles had changed in the course of administrative renewal. These title changes were part of the negotiations required between program officers and applicants (a process referred to as "remediation" by Deputy Director Jon Lorsch). 1/5

I just repeated the analysis for grants in fiscal year 2026. I found 98 grants with title changes upon administrative (non-competitive) renewal. Here is the removed word cloud for fiscal year 2026. 4/5

In your late 20s there’s only two weekends: 1) weekends when someone gets married 2) weekends when someone gets proposed to

I find it utterly repulsive that Jay Bhattacharya called my colleague’s research proposal “bad science” (Dr Green’s proposal was to study inequalities in healthcare) I coauthored this piece with Dr Green for @bmj.com on how the war on DEI will worsen Americans’ health: www.bmj.com/content/391/...

It’s so hard to know, because Bhattacharya and Memoli refuse to define what they mean when they say DEI. They just apply the label to whatever they/the admin doesn’t like. Is it DEI? Even if it were, diversity, equity and inclusion were fundamental values of our country.

Is the road to single-payer healthcare just having one health system gobbling up all the rest?🫣

Notably this is the “bad science” I was accused of doing a few months ago. Here’s some statements from the NIH Director justifying meddling in already vetted research because it is “DEI”. Please let me know if you think that studying unequal treatment in healthcare against all adults is “DEI”?

My favorite dissertation paper is out! TLDR: Discrimination in healthcare is associated with ASCVD risk. The novel part is prospectively looking at discrimination specifically reported in healthcare. Like all studies, there’s more nuance than the title. www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/...

My favorite dissertation paper is out! TLDR: Discrimination in healthcare is associated with ASCVD risk. The novel part is prospectively looking at discrimination specifically reported in healthcare. Like all studies, there’s more nuance than the title. www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/...

This is a straightforward question and deserves a public answer on the NIH website. The simplified review framework cannot also mean using a double-secret probation mechanism operating in the shadows to determine outcomes.

Very glad to see people talking about this. It’s been reported for a year or so that there is a Trump NIH/OMB text scanner tool that screens all grants, but I have rarely found colleagues outside NIH who were aware of it.

Also hard to stomach when funding cuts are being justified by a claimed lack of “meritocracy”. One of the many reasons why I hate how that term has been weaponized. Qualifications and experience really matter, until it’s time to be in one of the most complex executive roles in the US…

(3) Receive your grant 6 months later than expected even when you make it through the text analysis tool and study section. Narrator: Where does the money come from in the interim ?🫣🫣🫣 Audience: Have you considered “diversifying your funding sources?”, “how expensive could it be?”, “try using AI?”

Sharing this screen grab from a friend at NIH (with permission). This is a checklist program officers have to complete before a grant can be awarded. The first question: "Is this grant All Clean/Clear in the NIH Text analysis Tool?" 🧵1/3

Competition for NIH grants is stiffer than it has ever been. Researchers we surveyed are scrambling for alternatives — but even pivoting is hard, because of a lack of NIH solicitations for awards To some, things feel bleaker than they did a year ago www.statnews.com/2026/04/30/n...

I too would like clear rules and priorities. Maybe even some data to back up those things! Sadly, culture war topics and shrinking science seem to be the only clear objectives these days. @aniloza.bsky.social @kaytesb.bsky.social

With federal research funding cuts, the first year of Trump 2.0 was tough. Year 2 is in some ways grimmer, a @statnews.com survey shows. Bridge funding is drying up, existing grants are ending & competition for fewer new grants is steep, @aniloza.bsky.social reports. www.statnews.com/2026/04/30/n...

Listened to this yesterday and was struck by Larsen’s claimed respect for both all the people in HHS (Oz, Chris Klomp, etc) and innovators (AI CEOs, etc), then saying their “attitudes” will fix healthcare through AI. There’s plenty of innovators in healthcare. Many of our issues are systemic.

"I suspect that the scientists who complain about 40% of their time taken up with non-science tasks are referring to the grant chase. The amount of time devoted to writing and submitting grant after grant after grant...The strangling of scientific productivity is because of the grant chase."

Speaking about the dismantling of science by political actors is hard b/c the consequences are 1st felt by those connected to the system. Long-term we are all harmed. Dr.Ginexi (an NIH employee for 20+ years) did a masterful job explaining this on a podcast that came out 2day. @forkingoff.com

96% of respondents reported that federal policy changes negatively affected their career stability. And this is a sample of people who already have some funding 😬

Hard to say “trust me” when your actions are erratic and your words do not align w/ our reality. The experience of investigators (especially early-career ones) is blatantly dismissed as hysteria and political. The research staff, scientists, etc., who lost their jobs are rightfully upset!

How it started / how it’s going — Jay Bhattacharya edition. 2025: “We will never use this agency to censor scientists who disagree" 2026 : Bhattacharya “has canceled the publication of a study that found that the Covid vaccine sharply cut the odds of hospitalizations and emergency visits”.

I’m working on a K99. Outcomes like this happen, but in the past the response I would typically see is “keep on trying” and/or fairly specific advice on what needs to be changed. Nowadays it’s just “these are hard times, submit MORE” Does that lead to better science? How do you “slow down”?

😭😭😭

Most journals ask if the funder had any influence on study findings/methodology. Typically, this is to understand potential “industry influence”. This type of interference from the government quickly approaches the worst nightmares of the people who are afraid of “corporate capture” in research.