John M. Drake

Nonprofit Refuses $1.5M Science Grant Due To New Federal DEI Rules A coding nonprofit turned down a $1.5M NSF grant after new DEI restrictions, highlighting the clash between federal policy and scientific community values.

I spoke with Kari Jordan and Erin Becker of The Carpentries about why they declined a $1.5M NSF grant intended to expand data science training. Their decision highlights the growing intersection of #science, #DEI, and federal policy.

Read the full story on Forbes: www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

Scaling of Extinction Time With Habitat Size in Experimental Populations Theory predicts that extinction time scales with carrying capacity as either an exponential or power law. Extinction time in 35 laboratory populations was more consistent with a power law than expone....

New in #EcologyLetters: How does extinction time scale with habitat size? An experiment with #Daphnia found strong support for power law—not exponential—scaling. A rare test of a big theoretical question.

Link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
#Ecology #Extinction #Scaling #Microcosms

John Drake shaking hands

Congrats to @jdrakephd.bsky.social on the important achievement of winning our* infectious disease pub quiz. Honorable mentions to Corin Yeats, Luca Ferretti, @christophraser.bsky.social and @aliciagill.bsky.social
* the Pandemic Sciences Institute; Data, Epidemiology and Analytics section

Tracking Bird Flu Through Poop In Places No One’s Looking New research uses bird droppings to track avian flu in remote regions, revealing hidden hotspots and potential for early outbreak detection.

Global #influenza surveillance has long focused on farms, markets, and clinical settings. But new evidence suggests that sampling wild bird droppings could play a critical role in detecting emerging flu threats earlier and in places that are otherwise hard to monitor.

www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

Scientists-In-Training Speak Out To Protect Public Research The McClintock Letters Project is a student-led nationwide campaign advocating for public investment in scientific research.

Hundreds of early-career scientists are writing letters to their hometown papers to connect Americans with science. The McClintock Letters Project is about trust, story, and the future of science in America.
🧬📬 Read more: www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...
#ScienceCommunication #McClintockLetters

Please to be presenting today at the 74th Annual International Conference on Diseases in Nature Communicable to Humans on our latest work using #MachineLearning to understand the ecology of emerging #Arboviruses

Judge Rules NIH Grant Cuts Illegal A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration’s termination of NIH research grants constituted racial discrimination and anti-LGBTQ+ bias.

A federal judge ruled Trump-era NIH grant cuts “void and illegal,” citing discrimination. I wrote for Forbes about the implications for science funding and institutional trust.
🔗 www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...
#NIH #SciencePolicy #Forbes

Volunteer Track The $10 Billion Blow To American Science Grassroots efforts support court case against the NIH

Nearly 4,000 federal science grants terminated.

A group of volunteers built Grant Watch to track it—now their data is showing up in court.

I talked to Noam Ross about how it started and what it means.

www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

#ScienceIsEssential #GrantWatch #NIH #NSF #ACLU #DataJournalism

Former NSF Director Warns Of Fragile Future For American Science Former NSF Director France Córdova reflects on the promise of science, the limits of philanthropy, and why disinvestment puts America’s scientific future at risk.

“All of science is underfunded—and now we really mean it.”

Former NSF Director France Córdova on the future of American science.

My piece for Forbes: www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

An interesting question is *why* we have this pattern. I suspect there are multiple contributing factors, perhaps not all bad. #ScienceOfScience

I was thinking about that, too. Of my research projects, some of the most subjectively important, and most interdisciplinary, have been least cited.

The pivot penalty in research - Nature An analysis of millions of scientific papers and patents reveals a ‘pivot penalty’ when researchers shift direction, with the impact of studies decreasing rapidly the further they move from their prev...

Fascinating new paper shows that when researchers “pivot” to new areas of work the outcome is less impactful.

#ScienceOfScience

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

$90M from the Leinweber Foundation to support theoretical physics at 5 top U.S. institutions. The largest gift ever to the field—and a rare example of long-view support for basic research. I spoke with Larry Leinweber and France Córdova to get the scoop for #forbes

www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

Are Scientific Discoveries Slowing Down? A controversy among research policy scholars asks whether scientific progress is slowing down or just evolving

Is science slowing down? A recent article in Nature suggests that it is. But, maybe scientific innovation is just harder to measure now that the frontier of knowledge is broader and more complex. From where I sit, discovery feels more fertile than ever.
www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

Trump’s NIH And NSF Cuts Estimated To Cost The U.S. Economy $10 Billion Annually Economists find public R&D drives a quarter of U.S. productivity growth — and pays for itself

So I took a deep dive.

New research shows public science delivers 140–210% returns and fueled 20% of U.S. productivity growth since WWII.

Cuts now = $billions lost later.

www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

The NSF Is Being Dismantled — With Broad Implications For The American Economy The economic consequences of cuts to the National Science Foundation and restricting scientific inquiry on this scale could be far-reaching.

Lots of great questions on my last post about the dismantling of NSF. Why not let private companies fund science?
What do we get for public R&D?

www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

Original paper here: academic.oup.com/jid/advance-...

Did Horses Trigger The 1918 Flu Pandemic? The idea is biologically plausible and historically grounded — and it reframes how we think about the origin of pandemics.

Did the 1918 flu pandemic start in horses? New paper by Furmanski & Murcia makes the case. I wrote about it here: www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

Forbes Forbes is a global media company, focusing on business, investing, technology, entrepreneurship, leadership, and lifestyle.

Defunding basic research in America may be politically expedient, but its bad for the economy. My thoughts at Forbes.com

www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions Changes seen as a response to presidential directives on what research to fund

#ScienceMagazine reports that NSF is to be drastically restructured www.science.org/content/arti...

New paper (OA in #EcologyLetters) with Jill Anderson, Jeb Byers & @johnwares.bsky.social! We introduce two hypotheses—variability damping & variability adaptation—to explore how past climate variability might shape species’ futures on a more dynamic planet.

🔗 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

We’re Releasing Millions Of Birds. The Ticks Are Thriving. Each year, millions of pheasants are released into woods and fields in the UK for recreational shooting. As a result the bacteria that cause Lyme disease are increasing.

Fascinating new work by Emile Michels and colleagues in #EcologyLetters showing game bird releases increase Borrelia, the bacterium that causes #Lyme disease by more than 2x.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

My thoughts in the #Science section at Forbes.com

www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

This Swine Flu Strain Has All The Hallmarks Of A Pandemic Threat Known as H1N2, the virus belongs to a lineage of flu viruses that originated in birds, adapted to pigs, and has now been detected in humans.

Flu strain 1C H1N2 has spilled over from pigs to humans 29 times. It replicates in human airway cells, transmits via air in animals—even with prior flu immunity—and escapes most people’s antibodies. We don’t know how severe it would be. But it bears watching.

🔗 www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

Flexible Methods for Species Distribution Modeling with Small Samples 1. Species distribution models (SDMs) are used for understanding where species live or could potentially live and are a key resource for ecological research and conservation decision-making. However,...

Flexible Methods for Species Distribution Modeling with Small Samples

See our preprint in work led by @maitner.bsky.social.

We compare 3 alternatives to Maxent for rare species and find that flexible, ensemble-based approaches often perform better.
🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#Ecology #SDM

Resilience in ecological systems: Triggers, drivers, and the role of noise Resilience in ecological systems: Triggers, drivers, and the role of noise John M. Drake April 16, 2025

Thanks to Fabian Dablander and Denny Borsboom for a fantastic symposium on resilience in complex systems at IAS Amsterdam. Great to see such rich interdisciplinary exchange.

Slides here: docs.google.com/presentation...

#Resilience #ComplexSystems #InterdisciplinaryScience

The Way We Eat Is About To Change — Whether We Like It Or Not Oxford’s Paul Behrens says global diets will shift toward plant-based foods as a structural response to rising environmental and economic risks.

In his keynote at the 2025 Oxford LEAP Conference, Oxford Martin School professor Paul Behrens argued that a global shift toward plant-based diets is inevitable, not for moral reasons—but because the resource demands of current food systems are unsustainable.

www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

Sequence-based detection of emerging antigenically novel influenza A viruses | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences The detection of evolutionary transitions in influenza A (H3N2) viruses’ antigenicity is a major obstacle to effective vaccine design and development. In this study, we describe Novel Influenza Virus ...

Excited to announce our latest research in #PRSB on unsupervised learning to detect antigenic transitions in Influenza A (H3N2) viruses.

Read more here: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

#MachineLearning #Influenza #VaccineDevelopment #PublicHealth

How does #Ebola move from the bat species that are its natural reservoir into primate and human populations? Our latest research in #Ecography suggests that fig trees and #monkeys are a key part of the story.

nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Pleased to share our latest research in #LancetPlanetaryHealth on the intersections between climate change, biodiversity loss, and infectious diseases

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

2. Transmission thresholds are nonlinearly dependent on both vertebrate host availability and temperature, adding a new dimension to our understanding of disease spread dynamics.

Check out the full paper for a deep dive into our methods and results! #Epidemiology #PublicHealth #VectorBorneDiseases