She let me know that they recently received guidance that, ONLY for the January EI deadline (1/27/2026) and the February ESI deadline (2/3/2026), PIs can submit MIRAs even if their previous application (R35, R01, R15, R21, and R37) is still considered under review.

This is gonna be fucken awesome when there is only one reviewer. Gotta tailor that evolutionary genetics grant to your venture capitalist reviewer.

The de-emphasis of the educational mission is worrying.

I ***love*** suppressor genetics. This is a great example.

Sigh. What's really sad is that the actual evolutionary genetics story is far more interesting.

Super excited to share our latest work on the Hsp70 chaperone code "Mechanosensor-mediated Hsp70 phosphorylation orchestrates the landscape of the heat shock response" out now in Nature Communications: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

GWAS has been an incredible discovery tool for human genetics: it regularly identifies *causal* links from 1000s of SNPs to any given trait. But mechanistic interpretation is usually difficult. Our latest work on causal models for this is out yesterday: www.nature.com/articles/s41... A short🧵:

After some time pedaling… MFer those supplements are not even actually awarded to the trainee. They go to the PI, which by the system is often white men, to increase their productivity. The good faculty at least created a strong training plan to support someone for a part of their training.

Oh I have a comment: “Loss of promising talent supported by these [DEI] programmes will substantially weaken our research capacity, limit innovation and substantially reduce discoveries important for driving scientific advancements.” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41131402/

As a both a PI that received a Diversity Supplement to support a student on my R01, and a PO that reviewed them, they were never about "handing out money at the end of the year based on race" and always about the training potential and commitment.

For those of us sweating this, the Jan/May submission dates are intact as forecasted.

I think some folks might be happy to see this. NIGMS MIRA R35 for EI/NI has been published. PAR-26-121 files.simpler.grants.gov/opportunitie...

Please note that it's not clear when this will impact grants/solicitations.

NSF reorganization is, frankly, a bit odd, and we haven't run a story on it partly because it's hard to know what to make of it. The impetus for reorg, as I understood it, was to limit the siloing that occurs because NSF has so many (35ish) divisions. Now there will be 50+ sections.

This is super helpful for folks applying to NSF.

🚨 New preprint! 🚨@haploteam We built a barcoded collection of 520 natural S. cerevisiae isolates and screened 600+ natural compounds. Six functional response clusters and 100+ GWAS associations reveal how natural variation shapes chemical sensitivity. 🔗 Read the preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202...

Can the average N.I.H. peer reviewer ignore levels of the Investigator’s past accomplishments?

Amazing video. Highly recommend.

The first paper of my PhD is now available as a preprint! 🎉 Transposable elements (TEs) don't just jump within fungal genomes, they also move extensively between species. In this study, we screened over 1,300 fungal genomes and found a conservative estimate of 5,500+ horizontal transfer events.

Fun new preprint from the lab, headed up by two incredible undergraduate researchers: Using Experimental Evolution to Correct Mother-Daughter Separation Defects in Brewing Yeast. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint with @rokaslab.bsky.social! We used genomic, metabolic, environmental, and phenotypic data sets from 1,154 Saccharomycotina strains to asses filamentation variability and predict filamentation types across the subphylum. 🧩 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our paper is out studying premature aging (a hallmark of Down syndrome) in aneuploid yeast. Who knew part of the problem is in Ribosome Quality Control. Congrats to Leah Escalante for leading this tour de force. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Jeremy & Brian are prolly my favourite team-up. Always thoughtful, rigorous, and consequential.

NIH is getting rid of LOIs, and the need to get permission for $500K in directs per year. I understand that budgets haven't kept pace with inflation, but I'm also suspicious that this is another way to reduce the number of awards and/or reduce oversight. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

NIH is getting rid of LOIs, and the need to get permission for $500K in directs per year. I understand that budgets haven't kept pace with inflation, but I'm also suspicious that this is another way to reduce the number of awards and/or reduce oversight. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Very interesting paper from Yi Liu's lab. Translation initiation regulation through 5' UTR can turn off codon usage effects in viruses. Adds to previous work in field that codon usage control feeds back to translation initiation www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Yup. And lack of generalization is not a crisis at all. In fact usually the opposite--an opportunity to learn something really interesting about biology.

The first one is not a test of replicability. It is a test of generalization. It is important to stop conflating these.

Peer review “must also recognize the rare discovery that introduces anomalous findings or challenges established frameworks, by assessing not whether the rules were followed, but whether they still apply. Humans can, at least in principle, perform both functions. AI might not.”

Looks like the study section I serve on (CSF 1) AND the study section reviewing my MIRA (ZRG1 CDB-E) will held over two days and not one. I am SUPER grateful to the flexibility of other reviewers to be able to do this on such short notice with an accelerated timeline

There is zero pedagogical relevance or value in distinguishing between between a student who gets the right answer or composes a thoughtful response in 5-10 minutes and one who does it in 15-20. There is a lot of bullshit about answering fast coding as "smart." Haven't seen it.

New York Times article on science funding with some depressing but familiar curves with interactive graphics. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

White supremacy and misogyny, particularly "the double bind" of racism and misogyny, confounds meritocracy in academia

Preprint your manuscripts folks. Way more impactful to cite a preprint (that the reviewer can look at if they so choose) than to say "manuscript submitted."

This. There is no longer any excuse for vaporware. …but this dovetails in an interesting way with the idea a grant has to be half completed in order to get funded.

I forgot about this one, written in Jan of 2014. You know, years before the Hoppe analysis was published. Huh. From the Archive: Maybe the problem in NIH grant award is in topic diversity? drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2014/01/29/m...

“It is not acceptable to recruit a variety of students into the laboratory, subject them to a variety of stress tests and abuses, and then keep the students who thrive under abuse and get rid of the students who aren't able to thrive in the lab. That's straight-up exploitation.” 👏👏👏

New preprint with @pyjiang.bsky.social and @kelleyharris.bsky.social! The discovery and patterns of the underlying long-standing mild-effect mutator alleles in S. cerevisiae populations www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We are honored to share that our work, led by @katarina-aranguiz.bsky.social and @linder-surprise.bsky.social, has been featured as a Science Highlight on the DOE's Office of Science website. 200 articles are selected annually to be highlighted. Check it out! 🧫 www.energy.gov/science/ber/...

Some very profound changes. NDs will be split into competitive vs non-competitive, and competitive NDs could conceivably still get funded. And summary statements will be very abbreviated with a sentence on level of SS consensus, and then bullet points on score driving strengths and weaknesses.

Gatekeeping by demanding expensive technology or approaches is the ancient tactic of the rich laboratory.

Every once in a while I go back and rewatch this performance, and every time I'm glad I did youtu.be/6SFNW5F8K9Y

Yup. Totally fine with editors making decisions on say, split reviews, or requests for additional experiments. Reviewers are advisory, not the final word.

absolutely agree but then say THAT. the inability to be careful with our language and arguments is part of what brought us here, as did allying with some bad actors. Being clear about what our primary concerns are make our arguments more compelling and less likely to be manipulated against us

Always so SUPER interesting who defends ONLY using peer review to determine who gets funded. 👀 I am a big believer in the value of peer review but have also seen its weaknesses and biases.

Those who are triggered by the notion one person (the IC Director) has dictatorial power to select #NIHgrants for funding should really be more concerned about the person who really has life or death power over your application’s fate. drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2019/10/31/t...

Study sections are also unaware of what other grants are currently funded either by other researchers or to the applicant. Just blindly funding the science that three people thought was cool (because really it’s the three reviewers who largely drive the score), may not be the best use of our money.

FFS people, look at the curves for the ICs with "no paylines." It's not like percentile is completely uncorrelated with funding. This looks exceptionally healthy to me. That study sections are adding a lot of value, but that ICs do not just rigidly follow their advice.