Been staying with family in MN for the last two weeks watching every Twins game, and we were so sad to see Bader go! Will miss him and his epic villain-in-an-80s-ski-movie mullet. Glad he’s getting a big welcome.

Mine turned out pretty well too

Spectacular! ✨

Anecdata supporting this: most PhDs I know (myself included) are from lower-middle to middle-middle-class families. Smart kids who couldn’t fathom paying $200K for grad school so we TAed for $20K salary & no debt. The rich kids went to law school or business school, some med school.

But seriously, if you or a loved one have dealt with mental illness or substance abuse and wish there were better treatments, making more researchers scramble for less $$ is not the way.

Time to tell your senators that proposed FY26 is hot garbage and that you expect them to stand with NIH & NSF🧪🧠

Also, this combining of institutes is just nonsensical. Teeth and eyes, now they’re brains! Child health and deafness go together because, uh, kids can be deaf? (But vision isn’t part of sensory disorders? It’s with brains) It’s like they put them on a dartboard and threw randomly.
🧪🧠

Have you needed their customer service at all? In grad school I had some issues with ornate survey flow/randomization and found their staff shockingly, pleasantly helpful.

Also at risk? The postbac program, 2 years of training for the brightest grads who go on to become doctors & researchers.

Foreign scientists whose NIH contracts aren’t renewed lose their visas.

American science used to attract and retain the best people in the world. No hyperbole, that’s ending.

These are folks on renewable contracts doing “blue-sky research with high stakes but potentially high reward.” Lifesaving stuff made possible by NIH’s unrivaled research infrastructure, bigger than any one university. “There are entire branches that would be gutted within 6 months.”

This piece also has great, succinct talking points to use when calling your reps about this! It’s worth creating a big, noisy backlash.

🤝 outdoor summer stock production of West Side Story

Biomedical research can’t just pause and start up again. An extended freeze like this is potentially dire for science in this country. Call me naive but I’m gobsmacked that the orgs doing research to cure cancer and COPD and Alzheimer’s are seen as partisan and expendable.

NIH employees aren’t even sure if they are allowed to publish papers under the “communications freeze”. I used to promote the NIH Postbac program to my students, but with the hiring freeze its future is in question.