My thoughts on Director Bhattacharya's Fireside Chat at the NAM workshop (a long 🧵) Overall (1) He clarified what he said that NIH is doing with regard to improving replication. While these are concrete steps, they seem either naive or dependent of unproven technology. Time will tell. 1/30

In the first eleven months of 2025, 10,109 doctoral-trained scientists left the federal government. The losses were concentrated in agencies that fund medical research, regulate environmental standards and model climate. theintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/more-than-...?

The US CDC on the brink: “80% of the CDC's highest positions are vacant, with directors of 20 out of 25 centres having left. An estimated 2000 staff, almost one in five, have been fired, and about 300 are on administrative leave.”

@chanda.blacksky.app: "We are in a fucked up situation right now ... It is easy to give in to despair, but now more than ever, we have to be curious and imaginative about how we might get out of this." organizingmythoughts.org/we-dont-know...

Well, they've finally struck home. #ICE has detained my former #umich student, Yousif Azizi, a PhD student in public policy at Virginia Tech w/a valid visa. He was arrested while taking his children to school in Maryland. After multiple transfers, he is in a detention center in Arizona.

@rikiwilchins.bsky.social [Texas cont] In an additional attempt to suppress LGBTQ+ speech, the policy includes STUDENTS: "no degree-culminating student research within the TTU System will be permitted to center on SOGI topics,” thus extending "Don't Say Gay" to dissertations and theses. 2/2

Still feel like "Musk and his crew of incels destroyed a bunch of stuff they didn't understand and thereby hastened the deaths of millions of children" did not get the public attention it warranted.

A variety of factors have led to the delays in spending: a 6-week shutdown, late appropriations bill. An underreported one is that NSF staff received verbal instructions to spend the continuing resolution at president's budget request levels (i.e. a 57% cut).

NEW: NSF has been funding research at a fraction of its historic rate. Last week, the agency finally began distributing money to its directorates and is now likely to pick up the grantmaking pace. But these allocations also amount to substantial cuts across the sciences. My reporting:

OMB has clearly decided to ignore Congressional intent and implement their own preferred budget at NSF. It's outrageous, unconstitutional, and is gutting our scientific capacity.

I just stumbled across this. Warning: it may require deep breathing to get through. The fact that Bhattacharya continues to tout academic freedom after censoring people, science and projects at both NIH and CDC is wildly absurd. His hypocrisy is astounding. 🧵1/? today.usc.edu/nih-director...

I’ve been lucky to work with Dr Reid for many years, including when I was a UCSF professor He just resigned as Chief Scientist of PEPFAR in protest at Trump’s grotesque policies reimaginingglobalhealth.substack.com/p/stepping-a...

📃New paper in Ecology letters 🐦 I’m delighted to share the publication of the first paper from my #postdoc with @samanthacpatrick.bsky.social looking at life-history trade-offs and #senescence in black-browed #albatrosses from Kerguelen and Bird Island doi.org/10.1111/ele.70384

Applications now open for the UNIL Summer School on Modelling for Evolutionary Biology (31 Aug–5 Sep 2026, Lausanne)! For PhD & postdocs interested in formal approaches to evolutionary ecology (incl. social evo, life-history, species interactions). Scholarships available, Pls RP! shorturl.at/fo1GA

While we're talking percentages, let's talk about the proposed cuts to NASA's science budget. NASA is currently 0.36% of US federal spending. www.planetary.org/space-policy... The proposed budget cuts NASA science by 47%. NASA science is already on a shoestring, and that string is about to break

CIPRES is shutting down at the end of June: www.phylo.org . It's been such a good resource for the phylogenetics community. Thanks to #NSF and Simons for funding it and for all the people who have worked to grow and sustain this for so long.

CDC head cancels publication of paper showing major covid vaccine benefits, already approved by science panel www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/u...

The largest and most diverse collection of Indigenous American genomes 👉🏻 “The evolutionary history and unique genetic diversity of Indigenous Americans” @macscastro.bsky.social @hunemeier.bsky.social @chiarabarbieri.bsky.social @jrockdrigo.bsky.social 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This Earth Day, I'm grateful for the many ways I encounter the living world, from wild landscapes to manicured gardens, sidewalk trees to protected green spaces 🌿🪶 Mt Roosevelt over Snow Lake; the Japanese Garden in the Washington Park Arboretum; a robin in New Haven; a lupine at Sepulveda Basin

🚨 Holy shit, this is a 5-alarm fire. The censorship is extreme. Bhattacharya, who has long been RFK Jr’s most reliable ally, has suppressed publication of a study that showed COVID vaccines are highly effective. It was scheduled to be published on March 19 in MMWR, the CDC’s flagship journal.

Spread the word! We are recruiting for 6 new research professors at UC Davis' California National Primate Research Center. Open rank, open area, but must leverage 🐒 resources. recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07561

The White House’s April 3 budget proposal would reduce NSF & NIH funding significantly. Our analysis shows that the U.S. stands to lose $35 billion in economic activity and 150,000 jobs nationwide. See impacts on your local community: scienceimpacts.org #SCIMaP #NIH #NSF #SciencePolicy

Andrew's talk will highlight the use of @visualpde.com for visualizing numerical solutions to PDEs and related work informing a wide range of interdisciplinary collaborations. You can check out the VisualPDE platform to try out your own simulations. visualpde.com

This is truly an insane thing for a public health person to say. Outright eugenics. RFKJR needs to GO ASAP.

With the help of the Sandy Hook families, The Onion has reached a long-awaited deal to take over InfoWars. We've enlisted the help of @timheidecker.bsky.social, who will be InfoWars' Creative Director. Please stand by for more.

Pls read this editorial by @kirstenweld.bsky.social about how our Provost's plan for "viewpoint diversity" hires further erodes faculty governance at my university. (And never mind "veritas"!) 8 hires--but humanities hiring generally has been frozen since 3/25. www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

The task of de-Trumpification of science and public health will take a generation and a "Marshall Plan" to rebuild. Without a bold, expansive vision to guide us, there is no coming back. Small-bore, poll-tested versions of the future will not help us. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

New, from me: Take the Palantir manifesto seriously, if not literally. It reveals that our tech philosopher kings want public money, but without public accountability. This creates a dilemma for governments unaligned with its techno-fascist vision. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/palantir-w...

I was preparing for a talk I gave last evening to a lay audience and came up with this graphic to explain multi-year funding and why it leads to fewer competitive awards and funding investigators and projects. 6/8

@willbunch.bsky.social is so good. For all the praise of last week's report on public trust in higher education from Yale faculty, the writers deserve a D for ignoring the elephant in the room. www.inquirer.com/opinion/yale...

Thrilled to have been able to review 'The Paradox of the Organism: Adaptation and Internal Conflict', a volume edited by @arvidagren.bsky.social & Manus Patten. "...the reality that complex organisms function at all feels like pure magic, with the powers of molecular evolution behind the curtain."

New OpenFold3 preview out! (OF3p2) It closes the gap to AlphaFold3 for most modalities. Most critically, we're releasing everything, including training sets & configs, making OF3p2 the only current AF3-based model that is functionally trainable & reproducible from scratch🧵1/9

I don't worry that residential higher ed will be outcompeted at *instruction* by something like the Khan TED academy. The in-person experience will hold value as it did against MOOCs. But to be more than glorified camps, universities need to retain intellectual leadership, & about that I worry. +

As we read this about the Roberts Court let’s remember the shadow docket grievously harmed American scientific research, cancer cures, and public health over the past year. For ex, KBJ’s “Calvinball” quote was in an NIH case. More, short 🧵 1/

U.S. infectious disease research is on the brink. Without immediate action from Congress, much of it will cease to exist within a year. For example👇 1️⃣ No collaborative RFAs posted for >1 year (normal: many / year). 2️⃣ No foreign collaborators allowed on grants. 🧪🪦 www.idsociety.org/globalassets...

It’s hard to express how important Iris was to ACT UP’s scientific development. She was the catalyst who started it all. Iris Long, Scientific Mentor to AIDS Activists, Dies at 92 www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/h...

👋 👋 SSE members, I hope you'll join me May 21 for the virtual SSE Presidential Symposium: Navigating Uncertainty: Individual Resilience and Collective Action in Evolutionary Biology Pls RT to help get the word out!

Why is the stock market shrugging off... everything? Well, maybe it's betting that AI will save it and that the government won't let AI fail. Call it the AI put. My new piece in NYT Opinion on the market's reliance on getting rescued: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/o...

And here’s a gift link to the remarkable story about the FBI Director from @theatlantic.com. www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

A badly worded poll is making vaccine skepticism look more common than it is. www.statnews.com/2026/04/17/v...

I'm hiring a postdoc (start date flexible) and a PhD student (for Fall 2027) to work in any area of computational phylogenetics! More info here: mhibbins.github.io I will be attending both PEQG and Evolution in June, so please reach out if you want to chat at these meetings!

"We've ended DEI - but we need you to give $10 million to pay for conservative professors."

No one is going to close Yale if the anti-university flames are fanned even higher. But small public colleges are put at real risk by this largely manufactured narrative. It would help us all out if the wealthy, elite institutions would at least refrain from reinforcing the attacks on higher ed.

In the Stanford Daily today. stanforddaily.com/2026/04/13/a...

“Russ Vought set out to ensure a second Trump term would not be hampered by checks and balances: ‘I don’t want…Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral.’” @propublica.org 10/17/25… 1/ www.propublica.org/article/russ...

This profile of star science education researcher Brian Donovan, who worked to reform systematic teaching of "genetic essentialism" (which undergirds racism), is terrific. Even better, his work itself: empirical studies of curriculum interventions that work. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Today, the AAUP & @aft.org launched our national policy platform to win back an American higher education system that protects the freedom to teach & learn & strengthens our democracy. Read it in full here: www.aaup.org/blueprint-st... 🧵

Woohoo, here's my essay with my fav co-author on 30,000 fellowship wins across the Guggenheim, Stanford CASBS, NAEd, National Humanities Center, RSF visiting scholar, and Harvard Radcliffe. Spoiler: it's the people working at prestigious universities www.publicbooks.org/who-gets-gug...

When you add it all up, the collapse in immigration looks like this: a decline of roughly 50K for illegal (even including the people arrested and not released) and a decline of about 132K for legal. Over 70% of the cut in immigration has come from LEGAL immigration.

NEW—I got an exclusive excerpt from a USAID whistleblower's new book that made me gasp multiple times. It details Trump's dismantling of the humanitarian aid agency & his team/DOGE's shocking ignorance to public health. 'Into the Wood Chipper' by Nicholas Enrich is out tomorrow. Read excerpt here: