Steve Ekker

The NIMH Director job announcement and search is back on: hr.nih.gov/jobs/search/...

The NIMH Director provides executive direction and scientific leadership for NIMH, overseeing a $2.3 billion budget and ~1600 employees, trainees, and contractors.

Up for the challenge 😉? Apply!

No, we are spending all of our leadership on even MORE gerrymandering.

That's a lot of

Great to hear! I was lucky to have Dr Chris Wylie as a senior faculty member at UMN for years showcasing COB and Development. Really like the mission of COB

I used Grok to assess this, and Grok just 'spewed forth' - citations to primary sources. Terrible.

Indeed. Such BS when reviewers are making such demands. Let the authors decide on the story they want to tell!!!!

I’d think an ‘AI editorial tag’ could go a long way too

Maybe make it a tagged-annotated process. So even if issues are missed the first time, cannot correct later? Time to make our papers more like software where bugs just get fixed

When can AI tools dramatically reduce these costs while still keeping humans in the loop?

#nature

We #fishfolk call them 'water habitats'!

FishFolk - post if you are here in Madison!

@izfs.bsky.social Zebrafish Disease Models Society should be this handle too, but I do not think it's active. @zdms.bsky.social

Thanks!

A quiet conversation on the side, a closed-door phone call, a printout showing an email out of context... this 'whispernet' is a true poison in academia. Our 'culture of silence' feeds these voices, and the threat of being a recipient keeps most of the reasonable folk on the sidelines.

Rapid Response Bridge Funding Program In the face of recent abrupt shifts in federal funding for education research, including large-scale terminations of National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant awards, we have developed a rap...

Very smart, high ROI initiative from the Spencer Foundation.

Providing bridge funding for canceled NSF grants:

1) directs funds to projects already screened by a top-noch review process.
2) avoids imposing proposal prep costs on researchers.
3) ameliorates the disruption from GOP sabotage.

URGENT: FlyBase has lost practically all its funding overnight; even user fees are tied up in denied grant funding. 🤬🤯

Any lab using @flybase.bsky.social please donate using the link in post below.

This incredible community, on whose backs our #Drosophila labs depend, can't be left out to dry.

Should have called it 'Just Keep Swimming'!

From a wonderful group of colleagues! We hope it helps with thoughts and suggestions on using #zebrafish. Ping me with any questions. #werallfish

Sebastian is awesome. Catch him while he has extra availability.

Rapid Response Bridge Funding Program In the face of recent abrupt shifts in federal funding for education research, including large-scale terminations of National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant awards, we have developed a rap...

The Spencer Foundation is offering rapid response bridge funding for those who lost NSF research grants.

www.spencer.org/grant_types/...

Non-Destructive Larval Genotyping of Danio rerio for Mitochondrial DNA Genetics The rapid advancement of nuclear and mitochondrial genomic editing tools has created an urgent need for efficient, non-lethal larval genotyping methods in zebrafish Danio rerio research. This study op...

Genotyping zebrafish can be a challenge. We have been refining a non-destructive approach that is scalable, accessible and can be used in 48 well and 96 well formats. We use this for measuring mitochondrial DNA editing and heteroplasmy, but works on nuclear DNA, too.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Great thread. It’s getting even more complicated when genetic compensation is coming to light. Meaning there are additional layers of both genetics and environmental inputs that will change the system and our phenotypes. The ‘winners’ of simple views are those selling articles by clickbait headlines

Postdoctoral research position in Institut Pasteur

🚨 JOB OFFER in our lab at Institut Pasteur 🚨
We are looking for a postdoc! Please repost 🙏

The most cited it the developmental staging series by Chuck Kimmel, as I recall.

The silk region of China is pretty amazing! Been growing silk worms for 4000 years…

Lastly, the #zebrafish field is in great shape! So many 'first-as-PI' talks from new faculty. Their energy, creativity and enthusiasm were contagious.

Finally - just as shown by the recent Olympic Games, Paris is an amazing host city for science! Thanks to all of the organizers for a great meeting,

While I appreciate the complex toolkits, some of the best talks are those just asking simple questions. How do fish sense bacteria in their environment? Super interesting that we still have new chemosensor cells to find.

The most impactful talks, to me, were those where old-met-new technologies and problems. scRNASeq combined with old-fashioned WISH and genetic lineages, plus germline genetics plus transient KD (CRISPANTs, morpholinos) - all in transgenic fish with tissue-specific reporters. Yes! 4D context!