A Trump administration change to how the National Institutes of Health awards grants has sharply reduced early-stage investigators’ odds of securing funding, new data from the agency show. Teamed up with @aniloza.bsky.social for this @statnews.com story www.statnews.com/2025/12/18/n...

Late job posting: My department is hiring a tenure-track faculty member in microbiology! Please share with anyone interested in working at a PUI. We have a preference for someone who can teach Medical Microbiology, but other than that the focus is open-ended. Happy to answer qs.

👏👏👏the biggest congratulations to super postdoc Ruth on her faculty position at Macalester!! Ruth is so terrific as a researcher, educator, mentor, and all around good person. Future Macalester students...you're in luck!! #proudPI

Melissa Hortman Died in a Shocking Act of Political Violence. This Is the Story of Her Life The Minnesota Speaker’s closest friends and family open up for the first time. Read @stephenrodrick.bsky.social's exclusive: www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

🚨New faculty job opportunity 🚨 Please share this ad for a faculty position in our department at UC Irvine, in the fields of microbiology and infectious disease. MD/PhDs and PhDs are desired and should apply! recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09954

Me for the last month: let's touch base about this after Thanksgiving! Me this week: hmmm

The NSF Bio Anthro Program DDRIG, Cultural Anthrpology DDRIG, and Archaeology DDRIG have all been archived (as of yesterday afternoon). Please speak with your grad students and plan accordingly. To say I am angry and depressed about this is an understatement.

So happy to announce our new preprint, “A geothermal amoeba sets a new upper temperature limit for eukaryotes.” We cultured a novel amoeba from Lassen Volcanic NP (CA, USA) that divides at 63°C (145°F) 🔥 - a new record for euk growth! #protistsonsky 🧵

‼️🚨🗓️ CONTAMCALENDAR 2026 🗓️🚨‼️ Excited to say the ContamCalendar is back for its fifth edition! We’ve created a fresh new design, folding out for an A3 monthly spread. It’s our best yet, we hope you’ll love it 🗓️🦠🧫🍄 Get yours here ➡️ www.contam.club ⬅️

About that exclusive, "closed-to-press" MAHA summit last week with RFK and JD Vance: I got in. Here's what I saw. 🧵 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

JAMA study: NIH grant terminations disrupted 3.5% of active clinical trials, affecting over 74,000 patients and resulting in a $1.81 billion funding loss. More than 115 active cancer trials were disrupted. www.ajmc.com/view/nih-gra...

Two unrelated Pseudomonas aeruginosa phages require the exopolysaccharide Psl for infection NPJ Biofilms and Microbiomes from Courtney Reichhardt and @micheleleroux.bsky.social and colleagues www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It’s World AMR Awareness Week, and this year I had the honor to re-imagine and doodle the antibiotics in the antibiotic personality quiz 😇🖍️ Thank u @brxad.bsky.social for this amazing and fun opportunity! C’mon, take the quiz, it’s a #WAAW tradition 😉💊 #IDSky quiz.tryinteract.com#/59e68e3a8ec...

Why does daptomycin resistance appear so fast in Enterococcus? We finally have a clue. DAP resistance in enterococci pops up quickly. What’s been missing is why resistance-associated membrane changes look the way they do, and why the classic path of mutations is so predictable.

Merck is accepting applications for its 2026 Future Talent Program - these are internships and co-ops in a variety of areas including drug discovery, vaccines, clinical trials, biostatistics, epidemiology, HEOR, data science, regulatory affairs, and more #chemsky 🧪⚗️ jobs.merck.com/us/en/search...

In my dozen years on NIH study sections, grants pulled out of the triage bin for discussions never moved into funding range. But there’s a huge difference between getting ND and getting serious critiques that can help scientists refine or redirect their efforts. This is a loss esp for jr scientists.

NIH grant applicants: October and November grant application submission *deadlines* will be rescheduled (🤯). Specific dates TBD. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Holy crap. They're triaging 2 out of 3 applications that are submitted. 2 out of every 3 applications will not even have a chance for discussion.

Up to 323 cancelled CSR study sections. That's more than the 204 sections cancelled earlier this year. Rescheduling is going to be a hot mess with NIH staff reductions and study section members heading into finals and holidays that limit availability. 🧪

The shutdown put incredible strain on so many families and dedicated civil servants, but at least it was all for fucking nothing.

How about we shut down the government for this very popular and specific goal and then, hear me out, we hold out for like a month and a half and then, ok this part is important, after a watershed election where we ran the table, ONLY THEN, fold and don't get the one thing we said we wanted.

Delighted that our review on resistance to last-resort antibiotics in Enterococci has been published in FEMS Microbiology Reviews academic.oup.com/femsre/advan... (accepted manuscript version) TL;DR: the Enterococci are really good at evolving resistance to antibiotics in new and creative ways.

A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death. Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written." Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating. 🧪🧬🧫

Raise a glass for Rosalind Franklin tonight and honor her memory and scientific contributions

Director Bhattacharya "Let's fund emerging investigators" Yeah, who's the idiot running NIH who allowed 15% or few fewer early stage investigators be funded in FY2025 compared to FY2024? (Estimate: The official numbers are not yet available (at least publicly)

Zara Weinberg passed away earlier this week. She joined my lab earlier this year when her postdoc lab formally closed. She was a brilliant scientist, supportive mentor, dear friend, avid music fan, rabid believer in public transit, open science champion, and above all just an amazing human.

The #FindThatLizard Scholarship is accepting applications until 12/10. We fund girls, women, and gender non conforming persons pursuing herpetology🦎🐍🐸🐢 I can’t wait to read your application! earynmcgee.com/findthatliza...

New week, new episode of #MattersMicrobial. This time, Dr. Jessica Mark Welch of the Forsyth Institute joins the #QualityQuorum to discuss the microbiogeography of the human tongue and related issues. Please spread the #GoodMicrobialWord! youtu.be/VGD8jkNJHKo?...

Doing RNAseq analysis on Halloween

While the feds continue to play stupid games, SNAP recipients are set to lose food aid for the next month. In the Bay Area, a growing number of restaurants are stepping up to help, and we're maintaining the list. Share with anyone who needs it. www.coyotemedia.org/these-bay-ar...

Walz: "They are paying contractors to pay down the East Wing but they're not putting money into the food bank. So if there's a sense of frustration in America, it's very real ... when the White House press secretary said their top priority is the ballroom, we could not disagree more."

If I were running the DNC, there would be Democratic Party sponsored food relief banks across the country right now that specifically welcomed anyone regardless of party affiliation. Along with the food, there could be voter registration and links to runforsomething.net

Come be my colleague! We have new faculty searches in Virology & Fungal Biology/Medical Mycology. UMN has great people & the Twin Cities are beautiful year-round! Virology: hr.myu.umn.edu/jobs/ext/365... Fungal Biology / Medical Mycology: hr.myu.umn.edu/jobs/ext/36547 6

@joann-trejo.bsky.social, @marymunson4.bsky.social and I have a commentary in @natcellbio.nature.com on recent attacks on DEI in biomedical research: "If scientific research, especially biomedical research, is meant to serve everyone, then it requires that everyone has an opportunity to participate"

Postdoc at the Minnesota Population Center, @minnpop.bsky.social Applications open now and being evaluated on a rolling basis. Pass on to demographers you know! (This one requires folks to relocate to the Twin Cities, because it involves work in the restricted data center)

👇👇👇 come to #mmpc2026 for the science, stay for the Minnesota Microbiology shirts (iykyk)

I am so proud of @spasqualetti.bsky.social and this BioRxiv paper! I have to prep for class, but later today I'll highlight some of her findings about a stickleback gut isolate that can degrade plastic and other microbes that inhibit it's ability. 🦠🔬 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #microsky

41 million people (including 20 million kids) will lose access to food in a few days while a new 90,000 square foot ballroom is being added to the White House. This political moment is profoundly disgusting.

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs - Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75% - Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60% - Social Sciences by 50–70% - History by 60% - Biology by 75% - The German department will lose all PhD seats - Sociology from six PhD students to zero

No money for science because….

I feel like maybe a billionaire's Internet company should not be running the global backbone of education

That’s about 45 5-year R01 projects. For Noem to gallivant around the world for cosplay photo shoots.

Dismantling the Institutional Review Board (IRB), that oversees all human subjects research, is bad. Really bad.

The University of Minnesota has asked all departments to cut their budget by 7-10% this year, so it's good that the school at large is being fiscally responsible by......paying $15 million for a new school slogan 🤡🫠 racketmn.com/ski-u-market...

"These fellowships, in the vast majority of cases, are being applied for by undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who are already in place, working on their various projects. These are not future or theoretical workers, these are current workers."

I was supposed to serve on study section today and can't because of the shutdown Blame the GOP and this regime for stalling science so that they can terrorize immigrants and anyone who is brown or black, give tax breaks to billionaires, cut essential social services and raise costs on healthcare

Director Bhattacharya has repeatedly spoken about his commitment to early career scientists. This commitment is not evidence in these data. 10/12

The breakdown of new awards by mechanism. F30 (Predoc, MD/PhD) FY2025: 196 FY2024: 253 F31 (Predoc, PhD) FY2025: 670 FY2024: 1054 F32 (Postdoc) FY2025: 216 FY2024: 350 6/12

Fellowships (F mechanisms) Total investment: FY2025: $171 M FY2024: $202 M Number of trainees: FY2025: 3396 FY2024: 4117 Number of new trainees: FY2025: 1105 FY2024: 1733 5/12