I'm back home with my dad and have thoughts about being an Indigenous scientist and academic. I'm writing this in real time so it might get disrupted and will have typos. I am fairly successful by academic standards. I have a tenure track job, wrote papers, have grant funding, mentor students.

Suppose you are a philanthropic foundation committed to supporting US science. Under Trump, science is suffering an existential crisis—so ROI right now is way higher than before. Moreover, the human capital and infrastructure you were counting on for future investments will be gone. What to do?

Come the fuck ON, @hhmi.org! You have money and you have lawyers.

"Look for private foundation funding..."

This statement did not age well

Just got news that @hhmi.org decided to not review Hanna Gray fellowship applications. I am sorry but that’s fucked up. People spent months working in those. So now you disadvantaged these candidates even more. They could have used the time to advance their research instead.

"Pause all competitons..." is something I missed on my first read through that someone pointed out to me and...👀👀👀

We're driven by our values to promote inclusion in the academy but ya know, only as far as it's cool with those up top and our tax exempt status isn't at risk...

Now that I have a "not discussed" with a pretty disappointing summary statement, I can only hope that "the world was on fire and NIH haywire" is a valid excuse to extend my ESI status to whenever *checks calendar* all of this *waves hands around* has passed us by...

I don’t think cis people understand the amount of pressure and coercion trans people face to not come out, to not transition. How swiftly and strictly gender is policed. How something as simple as listening to a song, a line of eyeliner, playing with the wrong toy meets stern correction.

I must once again repeat: CONTACT 👏🏽 YOUR 👏🏽 OFFICE 👏🏽 OF 👏🏽 SPONSORED 👏🏽 PROJECTS 👏🏽 TO 👏🏽 FIND 👏🏽 OUT 👏🏽 HOW 👏🏽 TO 👏🏽 INITIATE 👏🏽 AN 👏🏽APPEAL 👏🏽

1. I study how science works as a collective endeavor to make sense of the physical world. I also study how misinformation about science spreads and affects society. There are fewer examples more poignant than a Minnesota bill that would criminalize mRNA vaccines as weapons of mass destruction.

When you're writing the intro to a paper but you start going off so you keep going even though you know it will likely get edited at a later stage 😆

Dr. Felicity Ender's work on Population Conscious Analysis at #ACTS2025 is some of the most brilliant work I've heard at a conference. ICREDIBLY excited for the paper

@carlbergstrom.com a few years ago you posted about a study that looked at expert knowledge of standard deviation and SEM and how this affected interpretation of effect size. A preprint at the time. Can't find it now 😭my first and only attempt at using ChatGPT only yielded hallucinations. Help?

Second time around watching the Buest Guess music video by Lucy Dacus and yet again it has me blushing and smiling 🥰 Go watch it if you want some queer joy in your life

A month off social media did wonders for my mental health...huh🧐

The fact that federal funding for biomedical work is a huge part of the economy of and in many cases saved cities in deep red states that lost e.g. former manufacturing industries, feels like a story we gotta tell more

These grants survived intense scientific competition and scrutiny by expert peer scientists. It’s a sham to suggest they are unworthy. Pure bigotry to revoke them.

Friendly reminder that Ramadan starts tonight and our Muslim students may need a little more support and grace as they observe their fast. Especially if you have afternoon or evening classes, please try to be aware and (ideally) flexible. Ramadan Mubarak!

Louder for the academic gatekeepers in the back👏🏼

"We have installed the world's hardest game of limbo between people and their work that has nothing to do with limbo....which makes us highly selective and rigorous!" is also not good strategy thinking

You know a really handy cognitive trick for being less wrong? Training yourself to ask not just "can x lead to y" but "how much of the time does x fail to lead to y" Seems simple but will save you a world of grief I truly believe

The breadth and scope of cowardice amongst our scientific leadership is staggering.

I'm seeing a lot of support for fired scientists and environmental professionals, which is great But a lot is phased is "just keep doing your important work," and I need you to know that these are early career people with student loans and no savings, and they need income for food and shelter.

👏🏼Phenomenal presentation by @deanspade.bsky.social on mutual aid 101. So so grateful for the wisdom...feeling a lot more empowered and less helpless 🔥💜

So uh, I've been catching myself tensing/clenching my jaw a lot lately...just a gentle reminder for you to untense the jaw too if like me you're a teeth grinder under stress and anxiety 💜

There are actions in: Atlanta, GA Austin, TX Boston, MA Chicago, IL Los Angeles, CA St. Paul, MN Newark, NJ New Brunswick, NJ New Haven, CT New York, NY Philadelphia, PA Portland, OR Seattle, WA State College, PA St. Louis, MO and Washington, DC if you can make one of these actions, please join! 🧪

Firings are happening right now at the National Science Foundation. Essential staff are being cut. This isn’t about the budget. If it was, they’d be going after the military (17%) or state appropriations (38%). NSF is 0.7% of the federal budget. All federal employees make up only 4% of the budget.

i know institutions are falling over themselves to comply with this, but gotta admit, i feel like someone in the DEI office snarkily suggested this name and a clueless admin ran with it

it's people who don't understand how things work making decisions about how things work 🫠

SUPER impressed with the wide range of higher ed, ed and union leaders at this webinar organized by @higheredlabor.bsky.social, demonstrating the solidarity and organizing that will be required for this fight to keep knowledge and education as a public good 🙌🏽

Feeling wistful and concerned at the news of Larry's retirement was not on my Bingo card for 2025

So once again, so called DEI efforts were just tepidly making up for long standing bias in NIH grant award.

Gatekeeping does NOT benefit detrans people. Our paper on gatekeeping and detransition is now out! I’m immensely hyped for this paper, written in collaboration with wondrous scholars and including co-authors who have lived experience with detransition. Official link: doi.org/10.1080/1553...

And all y’all arguing about inefficiencies in the system: THEY WANT TO GET RID OF THE SYSTEM. Knowing who to be mad at is a skill.

Mindful 5 - 10 minute break from your doomscrolling: 1) Feel/notice the ground under your feet or chair under your tush 2) Stand up and do a BIIIIIG stretch (think of a pup or kitty getting up after lying down for a while) 3) Drink some water 4) Call your reps

Having funded teams/contracts that required six figure+ funds a few times now, these numbers SOUND really huge in isolation to normal folks but they're not! Don't make floating numbers! I like to say things like this: "A cancer lab is basically a small business, with many jobs created by each grant"

"Anyone who has studied science under the Nazis...cannot fail to be dismayed and alarmed at the parallels in the response so far of scientific institutions and academies to the purges and abuses of power following Trump’s executive orders" 🧪 #scicomm www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/scie...

Interpretation for the non-scientists: When faculty get NIH grants, the University gets some extra cash to make sure the research is supported. NIH just cut that $$ by a LOT. That means Unis are less likely to support research. Most research in the US is done at Unis, so... it's bad 🧪

👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽

I’m going to talk about MY accountability as a university educator and scientist under the current federal regime. 🧵 It’s clear that the feds would like *us* to voluntarily wreck and re-segregate the research and education system before they destroy it completely. Compliance will not save us.

5/5 I told my faculty colleagues that this is an accountability statement: if you see me crossing the line, selling out or trainees, and compromising our mission, please call me on it. CHALLENGE: I wish the leaders of my institution would make a similar accountability statement. That’s all thx ✌️

Plenty of us are practitioners with experience designing, implementing, and evaluating educational and training interventions, as well as facilitating workshops. A significant # of us also have biomed expertise and training to boot...

Those of you in positions of power in industry should start thinking about all of us in academic space who study cultures and sociology of science. Want to make meaningful change? Double down and hire those of us with psychology and sociology expertise to improve your research cultures.

People sitting in these study sections - ask why these applications are being taken out? If provided no answer by the SRO, ask bluntly if these applicants are being taken out on the basis of their race. If no answer, refuse to move forward with the review until an answer is provided...