New, from an anonymous NIH insider: Trump is being pushed to spend more NIH money. The White House is ordering NIH to do multi-year budgets for awards. This budget trick means fewer awards, fewer labs funded, and lower paylines for researchers. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/alert-the-...

This album - and others from Do Make Say Think - got me through countless work sessions in grad school. Feels like a fast track to a flow state whenever I listen to it 

Congratulations to Alison Feder on receiving the SMBE 2025 Early-Career Excellence Award! members.smbe.org/news/Details...

New tools! GreenPy and ApplePy are fluorescent biosensors for pyruvate with huge responses (20–40x in vitro) and a range of affinities (10s of μM to mM). These should be game changers for imaging of metabolism! Great work by Shosei Imai @sikmys.bsky.social and team 👏. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to share that our study, on how T cells selectively sense foreign antigens with single-molecule sensitivity, is out! This work was led by the brilliant Will White, and done in collaboration with Jay Groves and David Baker @uwproteindesign.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A particularly cruel effect of cutting funding for tropical diseases is that a billion dollars worth of donated drugs are about to go to waste. #NotEfficient www.npr.org/sections/goa...

Fascinating and important work. Too bad that “all communication related to the paper is under review by HHS, and we do not have approval to participate in press interviews” according to one of the authors. What happened to #FreeSpeech? www.statnews.com/2025/06/05/n... via @statnews.com

I'm a current Harvard graduate student and I found out today that I had my NSF GRFP terminated without notification. I was awarded this individual research fellowship before even choosing Harvard as my graduate school

I wrote this in a week where it felt like professoring while parenting (and equally, parenting while professoring) was impossible. This feeling ebbs and flows. Seems like Mothers Day is as good a time as any to share, maybe it will help someone else feel less alone. The More Paradox 1/8

NSF will award ~1,000 instead of their usual ~2,000 Graduate Research Fellowships this year. NSF slashes prestigious PhD fellowship awards by half www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Suffice to say - if you are a local philanthropist and would like to see infectious disease surveillance continue here in San Diego County, please reach out. Without continued support, we'll lose our eyes on infectious diseases in our county, just as they're likely to surge. Email on website 👇.

"At a time when the world is down to a single drug that can reliably cure gonorrhea, the U.S. government has shuttered the country’s premier sexually transmitted diseases laboratory…& “no one should expect the private sector to step in to fill the gap… There is little money to be made in this arena”

Hot off the presses: big update to our work looking at how adaptive decoders influence neural representations. We added heroic analyses to show in both experiments & models that the structure of what the brain learns is altered by adaptive decoders. Check it out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

SCOOP: You've heard about the NIH terminating grants. I've learned of another, less visible way it's disrupting science: It’s removing some applications from peer review. Not rejecting them, but putting them on hold without saying why or if they'll ever be reviewed. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

Visiting 9 WA legislative offices today with some awesome BioE colleagues to stand up for science! #AIMBE2025 @uwbioe.bsky.social @neuroamyo.bsky.social @lizwaynephd.bsky.social

Had an eye opening day on Capitol Hill with my @uwbioe.bsky.social colleagues. We advocated for science by explaining how federal investment in research advances healthcare & trains our workforce! 💪 Bonuses: rode the Senate train TWICE 🚂 👀 many offices carefully decorated with UW & WSU gear 🏈

There is still time to apply for this funded postdoc position! 👇🏾Applicants must apply using the link in the original post below to be considered. Please apply if interested!

🚨 ALL my remaining NIH grants were just terminated Without philanthropic gifts, this is the end of 1️⃣ my career (as I know it) 2️⃣ @lgbtqhealthexce.bsky.social 3️⃣ our LGBTQ health equity work Yet, reading about LGBTQ families in my kid's class reminded me: love knows no bounds 🌈 You with us?

Incredible opportunity to study some fundamental science that leads to direct translation with a great mentor!

There are days in life that shake you. I’m shattered 💔 to share that I just found out that the US Government terminated my 2024 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (~$2 million), threatening my long-promised assistant professor job at Columbia University & academic career... 1/🧵

It’s been a devastating 24 hours with 3 NIH grants terminated…all focused on the health and wellbeing of trans or intersex youth. If folks have any ideas of foundations that may be interested in supporting the completion of these projects so years of work aren’t wasted, please let me know. 🙏

Today I lost an NIH grant training clinicians to do research about intimate partner violence with perinatal women. More women are murdered in the perinatal period than die of obstetric complications. I didn't just lose a grant. We lost an entire cohort of people building careers to prevent that.

Wondering if your study section cancelled? I update this sheet daily. As of today, 56/124 study sections that should have met since Jan 2, 2025 have "not met as scheduled." docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Hey @ktelliottmicro.bsky.social @barrlab.bsky.social @ctmurphy1.bsky.social @atkinscolm.bsky.social I'm signed on as NJ team lead for @standupforscience.bsky.social. If you know of folks who'd sign on as team members to help organize send them my way! DM, or email [email protected]

Honored to receive a Sloan research fellowship. So many scientists I admire are among the Sloan alumni list, and it's a bit surreal to see my name there. A huge thank you to the Alfred P. Sloan foundation for their unwaivering dedication to supporting scientific research.

I gave a talk about this book in 2023. rarely do scientists think abt their work as activism. in doing so we don’t allow ourselves to use the tools that people before us have mastered and shared. When you do the work w/o the label, you’re just taking on the load without the tools to handle it.

Happy International Day of Women and Girls in Science. I celebrated by having a senior man attend a meeting with me to repeat everything I say and back me up on leadership decisions. 🫠

1/8. This week I had a few different conversations with scholars who, in the face of the attacks on science and institutions of learning in the U.S., are wondering what to do. One suggestion I have is: keep doing your work. It matters in and of itself. Why do I say that? A few reasons.

There's certainly a lot to do right now, but if you need rest and potato time, make sure to rest and be a potato. Make sure to eat, hydrate, and also make time for joy and offline activities. Do not burn yourself out faster than the world is already pushing you.

Fight for your patients! This is infuriating…

Thoughts for the US scientific community drugmonkey.scientopia.org/2025/02/07/t...

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? Jevin West (@jevinwest.bsky.social) and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take. thebullshitmachines.com

This is a good thread. Indirect costs are a poor accounting tool, create perverse outcomes, and ignore economic realities. Ideally, they should be replaced. But rationally, with phase-in, and at a rate that allows research to thrive

I have a piece half-done on the entire world of indirect costs. It's too big an endeavor to finish now, in the middle of the night, when this problem *that was always a live grenade with a half-pulled pin* is suddenly a topic du jour. Shit of a thing. Here are some highlights.

6. The policy does not just affect funding going forward. All existing NIH grants will have their indirect rates cut to 15% as of today, the date of issuance. For a large university, this creates a sudden and catastrophic shortfall of hundreds of millions of dollars against already budgeted funds.

Just in case you thought that removing DEI criteria would mean that everyone is competing equally: NIH is removing grad students from underrepresented backgrounds from the applicant pool altogether. Their applications will not be considered. Other students, not from these backgrounds, will be.

The CSR comm I'm on just pulled all Diversity F grants from the current review cycle. These apps are reviewed alongside (and by the same criteria) as all other F grants. So, instead of helping these trainees, they will actually be punished by having their grant reviews delayed at least 1 cycle !?!?

I want people to understand this. For many of them, democracy ended when Obama was elected twice and Black Lives Matter rose to prominence. This is them “fixing” a system that felt broken and newly unsafe to them.

My student's diversity F31 has been pulled from study section even though it's the SAME APPLICATION as regular F31s, normally reviewed together in the same panel. Throwing out all the applications from URMs while the ones from white/privileged students get to be reviewed is blatant discrimination.

The exact same thing is happening for R01s submitted to the new/at risk investigator call. It’s THE SAME GRANT.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the nation’s largest private funder of biomedical research, yesterday killed a $60 million program aimed at making universities’ STEM education more inclusive. scim.ag/3EtS0US

"One thing is certain: The changes we make ourselves will be healthier than the ones our adversaries demand." New work for @undark.org: undark.org/2025/02/06/o...

Well just received this email regarding a paper under review:

I'm honored to be a part of AHADI and unbelievably excited that we are launching!

If you have been affected by the fires in LA, or are concerned about your ability to keep precious Drosophila strains going during the latest funding crisis, we will host your strains as a backup. Please email me. Please amplify. If you are also able to host fly strains, add your name as well.

Are you interested in #microfluidics? Check out the amazing speaker lineup for this year's Gordon Research Conference & Gordon Research Seminar in Microfluidics! To be considered for a talk at the GRS, you must submit your application by 2/23/25!!! www.grc.org/physics-and-...

any billionaire buying Wikipedia would be a tragedy, "on the good side" or not. we need to stop divvying up all the important institutions along billionaires and then relying on their good graces — look how it's gone so far.

"In you, I see possibility. I see potential. I see my own live-in box of technological understudies with solutions at the ready. What would I do without you?"

Are you using some form of flipped learning in your classes? If so, I am looking for instructors to interview for the second edition of Flipped Learning: A Guide For Higher Education Faculty. You can have a massive impact! Just fill out this form, and share it widely. tinyurl.com/fl2e-interview