More context here: www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

NSF gleefully stamping REJECT! on grants with the word 'women' in the title.

More on NSF Here are the number grants that were active in each year (at least part) including the effects of grant terminations (data from grant-witness.us) by directorate from 2021-2025. The only directorates showing losses are STEM Education and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.

My grad student, who got RWR and appealed, got an email from GRFP program today that said "Your application was screened by NSF program officers with expertise in your proposed field of study and was determined to be ineligible according to the solicitation requirements." No details were given. 😡

NSF GRFP applicants (and mentors): Was your application Returned Without Review and deemed ineligible despite fitting in the allowed topics? 1) Write NSF 2) Write your Congressperson 3) CC us at [email protected] so we can compile + follow up Details and template at grant-witness.us/grfp-letter

Lecturer in Ecology and Evolution position available in Biology Department at Stanford University. Apply by April 1, 2026. (Photo by Rick Morris) academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31606

This is ... interesting, considering I got not one but two emails from NSF soliciting ecologists as GRFP reviewers

I'm hearing from multiple people that students who submitted ecology GRFP proposals are having those proposals rejected without review, despite ecology being listed as an eligible field. If this is a programmatic change, this is devastating. Ecology is the study of Earth's life support systems.

A number of our students got the following comment back on a rejection for the NSF GFRP. They are in an eligible STEM field. Is this something people in other places are getting too? Is it a quirk or targeted?

How many STEM Ph.D.s were lost from the U.S. federal government last year? My colleagues @mghersher.bsky.social and @policyhound.bsky.social dug into a recent data release to find the answer. A @science.org exclusive. www.science.org/content/arti...

Wow. This is devastating. www.science.org/content/arti...

I have some bad news. One, if you need to use ChatGPT for your graduate application letter, you are not ready for graduate school. Two, no, not "everyone is doing it" and those who don't do it aren't "losing out." ChatGPT is not an advantage.

The National Science Foundation sign on our Eisenhower Av building is now gone. The NSF mural in the foyer is removed and torn off in sheets. We were supposed to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the agency in May 2025. That never happened.

What's Up With COVID and What We Can Do About It: 2026 Edition I've thoroughly updated this public health propaganda zine! With new information about: Adjusting mask fit CO2 monitoring Improving ventilation for infection control Read at newlevant.com/COVIDzine or in the thread below 👇

Getting asked about how academics can continue to do science & inspire trainees even in the midst of a continued (escalated) assault on science, reason, truth, & human rights. I don’t have great answers. I would love to hear from mentors about advice they’re giving to trainees/ colleagues.

Post-Doctoral Opportunity in Evolutionary and Conservation Genomics! If you are curious and passionate about ecology, evolution and the natural world come work with me in the Department of Biology at NYU! More details here! apply.interfolio.com/180051

the discourse on what jobs are acceptable to replace with generative AI reveals a lot about what we think of other people's jobs

NEW article by me! We can now visualize pathogens down to atoms; design vaccines in weeks; manufacture them in microbial factories; engineer them more precise than ever before. We're living through a golden age of vaccine development, but only if we continue to invest in them.

Had to stop a meeting with collaborators today to say I was not okay with any genAI being used for any part of the writing process (including generating title and keyword suggestions) and while it went well, I hate i have to say "it's me or the LLM" as an ECR 🙃

Hey #ornithology Bluesky! Is there an ornithologist out there who'd be up for being interviewed for a piece on how people can help birds that nest in their yards? Dos and don'ts for providing nest boxes, providing nesting material, ensuring safety from predators, etc?

Tired: Everything evolves to be a crab. Wired: Everything evolves to eat ants.

Evolution doesn’t always take thousands or millions of years. Sometimes it happens right before our eyes. Such is the case with the Anna’s hummingbird, a species that has undergone a dramatic transformation in a few generations, thanks to the advent of hummingbird feeders: https://scim.ag/3YMuQQu

WOOOOOOO! Huge thank you to SICB and all of my collaborators on this project!

It’s official: I’m joining the School of Earth, Environment, and Sustainability at the University of Iowa as an assistant prof starting Fall 2026! I’ll be recruiting multiple grad students and postdocs to join my lab, so if you’re into disturbance ecology and conservation science… watch this space!

We are recruiting several PhD students. If you are interested in conservation conflicts, population ecology, quantitative ecology, or biodiversity, check these projects out (links in the thread, feel free to reach out):

Pleasantly surprised to discover last week's episode of the ABA podcast discussed our recent warbler hybrid work. Give it a listen! doi.org/10.1080/1559...

ACTUAL GOOD NEWS EVERYONE: The Paleontological Research Institution and the Museum of the Earth have made it through the crisis! Thanks to everyone who shared or donated-every donation mattered! Please share the good news just as widely!⚒️🧪🦑 Together we did #savePRI www.ithaca.com/news/ithaca/...

Huge congrats to my mentee @pfschwarz.bsky.social on her first first-author paper! Three-way secondary contact and mosaic hybridization in darters. Plus a bonus comparison of ddRAD vs lcWGS. @fishgenomes.bsky.social @tjnear.bsky.social #fish #evolution #genomics doi.org/10.1093/evol...

📢 Do you want to do a #PhD using #hyperspectral satellite data to observe climate influences on tundra vegetation in Sweden? With me and @robertgbjork.bsky.social at U of Gothenburg. Apply by 19 Jan 2026. bit.ly/44duvJI

Congrats @jeffgroh.bsky.social et al. Some avocado trees open female-phase flowers in the morning & then male in afternoon. Others show complementary pattern (m->f), to synchronize pollination of two types. Jeff show this to be a >45Mya polymorphism at a transcription factor across 100s of species.

Continuing my tradition of feeding the fish on Christmas! Here is one of our most festive residents this year

Definitely bought some powerball tickets. If I win the lottery I won’t tell anyone but there will be signs… “Sarah sure hasn’t submitted a grant proposal recently”

Don't let any of these slip past you! All the details are on our website. wilsonsociety.org

New Job Search Announcement: Curator of Paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science: careers.share.nm.gov/psc/hprdcg/E...

NEW JOB in #ornithology with @vogelwarte.bsky.social to unravel the demographic drivers of population change in Alpine #swifts in #Switzerland: buff.ly/crV1rT8

I've slowly been reformatting notes from my population and conservation genetics course at Montana State University into a web book—a rough draft is now live here: elinck.org/popgen_conge...

Excited to share the first two publications from our PERSIST (Predicting Evolutionary Rescue of a Species in Space and Time) project. Thanks to NSF-DEB for supporting this work! (1/3)

Hey, fellow evolutionary biologists: If you support trans rights, like, comment, or repost this. I want to show that transphobes like Richard Dawkins are a loud minority that does not represent our community

I am recruiting a MS student in Biology at New Mexico Tech with an anticipated start date of Fall 2026 to work on the applied evolutionary genetics of wild populations with conservation or management concerns (butterflies, bighorn sheep). Please see the attached advertisement for more info.

🧪📍🌊 🦑🍎 Marine Scientist Position – Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), full-time, permanent Marine Scientist position based in Panama. Application review begins February 15, 2026 (open until filled). Early-career researchers are strongly encouraged to apply. www.stri.si.edu

'Tis the season for some festive science songs. If you've ever wanted to hear someone sing about a dimunitive tyranosaur then now is your chance

"We and our students can choose not to use these technologies. Just like we have banned smoking from public spaces, we could foster that process of banning both by choosing to individually quit smoking & by demanding regulation of the tobacco industry” Guest et al. (2025) zenodo.org/records/1706...

I am not sorry. This is simply true. Academics should be able to write fluently and express themselves clearly and academics should do their own work. It’s literally our job. It’s what we trained until 22nd grade to do. This is a simple observation that should require no explanation or defense.

New special issue in Molecular Ecology on Conservation Genomics #popGen #evolution 🧪🧬🖥️ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/1365294x...

What a beautiful paper! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

LISTEN! The number of students of color I informally advise on publishing, fellowship applications, dissertations, job applications, fly outs, etc. could fill an auditorium. And the vast majority do not attend the institution that provides me with a W-2.

Key misunderstanding I want to get ahead of: NCAR isn't really a government agency like NIH or NSF. It's one of the largest NSF grants in history, and is given to a non-profit org called UCAR, whose job is to make NCAR exist (www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...). That means the buck stops with NSF right now

Just decline the peer review invitation. What are you people even doing?