Today, I'm grateful for the courage of Wired editors: www.wired.com/politics-iss...

Today, I’m grateful it was a competitive showing for Everton www.bbc.com/sport/footba...

Today, I'm grateful for two things: 1. Cake for breakfast (this needs no further explanation). 2. My Chemical and Biological Engineering colleagues. Committed to world-class research, heavily invested in teaching and mentoring, and genuinely collegial people. engineering.tufts.edu/chbe/people/...

Today, I'm grateful for first year undergraduate students. Oh my goodness, so much enthusiasm and curiosity, so willing to try different things...it's fun teaching them. I hope coffee engineering can help them increase these attributes while also preparing them for the rigors of engineering!

Today, I'm grateful for a new episode of "The Chain" podcast (Episode 77). Great conversation between Derek Lowe @dereklowe.bsky.social and chris bahl @cdbahl.com with a wide range of thoughts, provocations, and opinions (1/2). www.healthtech.com/thechain

Today, I'm grateful for Kpop Demon Hunters. I mean, how could I not be (at least mostly)? It's the only music that plays in my family's house + cars, the kids are obsessed with it, and I've had the music stuck in my head for the past month without going insane... www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzCA...

Today, I'm grateful for football (No, not American football, proper football. You know, the football that's played globally?). Especially our city league and our kids' games. It was fun to be out at the Daniel Joyce Middle School in Woburn, MA, cheering them on.

Today, I'm grateful for the Targeted Protein Degradation meeting that took place yesterday in Boston. Excellent talks by @nathanaelgray.bsky.social, Georg Petzold @monterosatx.com, @brianliau.bsky.social, @xingulab.bsky.social, and more (1/2). www.danafarbertargetedproteindegradation.org

Hey #ChemSky, are politics not your thing? Read Briana's work on engineering release factors to enhance genetic code expansion instead! bsky.app/profile/vand...

Today, I’m grateful that I can finally share Briana Lino’s @blino237.bsky.social work on engineering eukaryotic release factor 1 (eRF1) for enhanced noncanonical amino acid incorporation. I highlight some key findings in this thread (1/n). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Today, I'm grateful for a quick trip I made to Basel in May while I was in France. I was able to visit Michael Nash's lab at Uni Basel and give a joint seminar for Uni Basel and ETH. It was a crazy trip involving a bus-to-bus-to-train-to-train set of connections. Beautiful city (1/2).

Today, I'm grateful to Tufts University--the university is trying to do good in the world, at a time when it's very easy for institutions of higher learning to stray wildly from their core missions. (Disclosure: Tufts is my employer) now.tufts.edu/2025/09/09/t...

Today, I'm grateful for one last camping trip this season with a group of friends. An excellent escape (but could have done without the raging afternoon thunderstorm). Picture from @allisonvandev.bsky.social

Today, I'm grateful for Wired and its excellent continuing coverage of the US government during Trump II. Keep it up, Wired! The world needs this info. Excellently researched (but very concerning) article by @telliotter.bsky.social below. www.wired.com/story/state-...

Today, I'm grateful for my Chemical and Biological Engineering faculty colleague Matt Panzer. Matt has refined the labs for the Tufts Coffee Engineering course beautifully, making it possible for me to hit the ground running as I teach the course for the first time (1/2).

Today, I'm grateful for the podcast The Tortured Proteins Department. Excellent back-and-forth between @fraserlab.com and @stephanieaw.bsky.social. Disclaimer: I've only listened to episode 6; I hope it's not an outlier! 🤪 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Hello, fall semester. I'm grateful for a couple of things as classes start: 1. I'm teaching a course on Coffee Engineering--so fun! 2. I'm grateful that many of my academic colleagues are wrestling thoughtfully with GenAI in classes (Tufts resource here): provost.tufts.edu/celt/online-...

Trump knew RFK Jr. would be a disastrous pick to lead health care in America, and he nominated him anyway. Trump made this mistake, and now he must fire RFK Jr. immediately.

@dereklowe.bsky.social is on fire today, and so is the US government: www.science.org/content/blog...

Caution: cryptic post below Grimsby, that was incredibly inspiring. Thank you.

On my sabbatical last fall, I had the pleasure of diving into molecular glues and targeted protein degradation. This recently published work by Monte Rosa Therapeutics is a stunning advance for the field (1/n). www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Another look back at Van Deventer adventures in France: the Tufts in Talloires program went to Chamonix, France, in late May and lucked out with TREMENDOUS weather. On this trip, I hiked and walked in the area and enjoyed great views from pretty much every location I visited!

Next installment of Van Deventer European adventure: Talloires, France, is incredible. Located on Lac d'Annecy, there are beautiful view in every direction, and it's incredibly easy to take good pictures (even for a terrible photographer like me!).

Friends, we had an incredible experience earlier this summer. I taught a course in Talloires, France, for Tufts. This gave @allisonvandev.bsky.social, our kids, and me the opportunity to have all kinds of adventures in Europe. More pictures and reflections in the coming weeks.

"As civil servants, NSF employees are bound by their oath to uphold the Constitution. That oath now compels us to call attention to actions that jeopardize NSF's mission, its independence, and the foundational laws that protect the federal workforce from politicization and abuse."

I'm letting Rumeysa's words speak for themselves: www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2025...

I updated my funding curves last night. Here are the results for new and competitive renewal grants. The rate of investment has dropped substantially. This is apparently due to a requirement for DOGE review. I am calling this effect the "Downward DOGE" 1/2

All 4 of my NIH research grants are terminated. These were grants on MDR-TB treatment & strategies for supporting adolescents living w/ HIV. This is a massive waste of resources. I am heartbroken for my Harvard team, my partners in Peru, the next generation of scientists & our country. Shame.

**** Judge Sessions GRANTS BAIL/RELEASE to Rümeysa Öztürk: "The court finds that [Rümeysa Öztürk's] continued detention cannot stand."

This is a horrific development for the US National Science Foundation: www.science.org/content/arti...

Jocelyn Kaiser's recent interview with the new NIH Director... www.science.org/content/arti...

Jeremy Berg's recent interactions with the new NIH Director...

BREAKING: NSF has frozen all grant funding, as of yesterday. It's unclear when they will resume funding awards, or why the pause has been put in place. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

💬 “It’s hard to remember all the earthshaking decisions and events that have transpired with unprecedented speed in the first few months of the Trump administration. We’re tracking, day by day, what’s happened in the worlds of science and health.” ✍️ @usha.bsky.social, @statnews.com

Sen. Ossoff: Who out there in the American public is sitting at home demanding that we shut down cancer research and Alzheimer's research?

“And I’m like, what do you mean, you ‘do your own research’? You running a double-blind study in your living room, dawg?” - A guy walking ahead of me with his friends on a NYC sidewalk in 2021, also my favorite overheard dialogue of the entire pandemic

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

A lighter topic than, well, most things at the moment: I found out about the Slack channel my group uses to communicate without me (only took 5 years...). Here's the quote of how I announced this to the group: "Hey everyone, I found out about the Jimless slack channel(s?) yesterday. ..." 1/n

Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions - rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking steps to make sure students can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let’s hope others follow suit.

Question: What's worse than a 10-hour Zoom meeting? Answer: A ten-hour Teams meeting! So many more technical difficulties...

As a Tufts faculty member, I am extremely grateful for President Kumar's declaration supporting Rumeysa Ozturk. I hope that this support also reassures the international students at Tufts of our commitment to these incredible scholars, students, and community members. We are better because of them.

Daily life goes on: Oh my goodness, living in the Boston suburbs is...very Boston-y. We just got an announcement about Friday being a Red Sox clothing day at the kids' school. LOL. @allisonvandev.bsky.social and I have lived in MA for 14 years, and we still have a Red Sox-gear free house. 😬

Former FDA Commissioner:

Try to imagine a situation where you are not allowed to do your job (e.g. working with applicants to formulate successful proposals), you and and your long-time colleagues are fearful of losing their job, ... 1/n

Social psychology lost a giant, and I lost a dear friend and collaborator. Still processing the loss of Sam Sommers, and probably will be for some time. Cherish the time you have with your people, folks. now.tufts.edu/2025/03/20/r...

“The suppression of scientific inquiry into an area of study that has already saved millions of lives and has the potential to be one of our best defenses against future pandemics puts all of us in harm’s way” By @lisamjarvis.bsky.social www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

They are coming for every university, if you think you’re safe because it hasn’t been yours yet I don’t know what to tell you. Join AAUP, refuse to comply, organize your colleagues

The most important thing that my family will do today: Donating extra money to La Colaborativa, a Boston-area nonprofit that advocates for marginalized people in Chelsea and beyond. The residents of Chelsea are worthy of our unwavering support!

The Van Deventer Lab’s first manuscript describing chemically expanded antibody discovery is now published! The genetically encoded “Clickable CDR-H3 Library” can become many, chemically diverse antibody libraries, enabling new drug discovery opportunities (1/n). pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

The Trump administration cut a clause from federal contracting rules that had been on the books since the 1960s: Companies are no longer explicitly prohibited from having segregated facilities.