This November, like every November, I am teaching basic research proposal writing to the new phd cohort at my institute. Here is the 2 page template we start with and adapt. Link to LaTeX github.com/rmcelreath/P...

Current and former members of the NIH community have valuable personal perspectives to share about the devastation that is happening to US biomedical research, our federal agencies, and our democracy. This starter pack is a great way to hear what they have to say and what you can do about it. 🧪🧬🧠🥼🇺🇸

Got a number in mind? A new pre-print by @lshtm.bsky.social colleagues surveyed 13,000 participants, and found it's about 9 per day in the current era. It also looks at how social mixing varies with age, ethnicity and social economic status. Link to paper:

⚠️ New preprint ⚠️: Two new antibiotics are likely coming for gonorrhea 💊. How should we deploy them in the US to minimize drug resistance? @kroster.bsky.social @dhelekal.bsky.social Eva Rumpler @yhgrad.bsky.social [1/10] www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

THIS. Immigrants are the backbone of US Science. 60% of Postdoc researchers at NIH are Visiting Fellows. Zooming out, 19% of all STEM workers and 43% of doctorate-level scientists and engineers in the US are foreign born. American science runs on immigrant labor. 🌍Global brains, 🇺🇸American gains🧪

Sang Woo (Daniel) Park and I are excited to share a new preprint, "Susceptible host dynamics explain pathogen resilience to perturbations" [1/8] www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I’m thrilled to share our latest preprint! We analyzed >130,000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes from MA to investigate complex transmission dynamics—from statewide patterns, within specific facilities, and at the individual level 🦠🧬 Check out the preprint here ⬇️ www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Working with an interdisciplinary team, we have developed a website to communicate how the White House's proposed cuts to health research would cause losses of $16B and 68,500 jobs. Find out how your community may be impacted. Explore more at SCIMaP: scienceimpacts.org a 🧵

So glad to share this work by @bradfordptaylor.bsky.social from his time working with us. It's a simple but elegant tweak to some of the established ID epi models. Among other things it helps explain why the great majority of 'variants' did not become dominant elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

"No one is coming out of the sky to give you your grant money. Your citation portfolio won’t survive this market crash. Your credentials mean nothing. Everything is going to change." New for @undark.org undark.org/2025/03/06/o...

@npr.org is contributing to misinformation by not contextualizing Musk’s statements with 1) all feds responded to prior required DOGE emails (existence proof) and 2) that some agencies notified their employees of security dangers in responding to the non-mandatory 5 bullet email

Should I stay or should I go? 🎵 In a new opinion piece, Claudia Igler, Andrina Bernhard and I discuss how conjugative plasmids and temperate bacteriophages balance vertical and horizontal transmission: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v... Our framework sheds light on many aspects of MGE biology (1/7)

It's real. Asymptomatic: The Silent Spread of COVID-19 and the Future of Pandemics Pre-order in advance of 10/22 release by Johns Hopkins University Press. bit.ly/asymptomatic... More soon on events and interactions to come. .

There is now a cover. Asymptomatic is available for pre-order, forthcoming from JHU Press on October 22, 2024. www.amazon.com/Asymptomatic...

Cool work from friends & mentors: "we deployed a high-throughput combinatorial screening platform, DropArray, to evaluate the interactions of over 30,000 compounds with up to 22 antibiotics and 6 strains of Gram-negative ESKAPE pathogens, totaling to over 1.3 million unique combinations"

New @biorxiv-microbiol.bsky.social preprint on optimizing experiments to infer multiphasic decay of infectious viruses, led by Jeremy Seurat w/Justin Meyer & team, we leverage synthetic sims to design, implement, & identify a hidden majority of rapidly decaying phage www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A thread on using 'Quantitative Biosciences: Dynamics Across Cells, Organisms, and Populations' & the computational guides in Python, R or MATLAB in a classroom setting (release 3/5/24 via @princetonupress.bsky.social). The central point for students: you can do it! bit.ly/qbios_book

After nearly 10 years in development, delighted to share news that 'Quantitative Biosciences: Dynamics across Cells, Organisms, and Populations' is available for pre-order from Princeton University Press: press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

Ross McInnes, a post-doc in my group, will sadly be leaving in Spring 2024 as we reach the end of a grant. He is now looking for a job. Ross is excellent and has a skill set that includes molecular biology, functional and comparative genomics, and microbiome research: rosssmcinnes.github.io

Are you an undergrad and love math modeling (or tolerate it and want to know more)? One week left to apply for the Workshop to Increase Diversity in Mathematical Modeling & Public Health! March 4-5, 2024 in Boston. #episky #idsky ccdd.hsph.harvard.edu/increase-div...

1/ New paper! “Gender and retention patterns among U.S. faculty” w/ N Laberge KH Wapman @samzhang AC Morgan M Galesic BK Fosdick @danlarremore @aaronclauset: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... A systematic study of gendered rates & reasons for faculty attrition in US academia 🧵

I like to read *real* microbial ecology research periodically to remind me that opportunistic pathogens and model systems exhibit only a narrow range of possible interactions. For example, this makes our fascination with surface-sensing seem small: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“The more uncomfortable truth is that academic science has never been a trade that selects for or supports the best scientific minds in the world.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nobel-prize-debate-misses-the-mark-on-the-real-culprits-ignoring-scientific-merit/

I'm excited to share our most theoretical work yet, led by 3rd year PhD student Paul Torrillo. We revisit the old observation that dN/dS depends on the distance between compared sequences. We arrive at a radically different conclusion than current prevailing theory. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Caught an interesting wnyc bit on the “enshittification” of the internet. Why things like fbook, amazon, twitter etc start off too good to be true and inevitably get worse over time. www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm...