Stephanie Caty, PhD

EPA Employees Still in the Dark as Agency Dismantles Scientific Research Office On Monday, some employees at ORD, the largest office in the agency, began receiving emails detailing that they had been assigned new positions within the EPA. "There is no action you need to take the ...

On Monday, some employees at the EPA’s Office of Research and Development began receiving emails detailing that they had been assigned new positions within the EPA. "There is no action you need to take the reassignment, and there is no option to decline.”

Three cardboard boxes sitting on a laboratory bench.

Amidst all the drama at the EPA, we’re still trying to do science.

Buying reagents has been prohibitively difficult, but on the bright side, we finally got some new supplies today! That we ordered on April 30….

Most of this is focusing fluid for our flow cytometer, nothing costly or unusual

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Just a few more days until the deadline!

If you're planning to apply to Bio-based PhD programs this year, considering joining us at the Biology Preview Program where we'll walk you through the PhD application process and help you polish you application materials!

Apply here: bit.ly/4n4Nxtu

Not pictured: the small shout and large flinch when this spider—inevitably—jumped on me.

#jumpingspider #macrophotography 🧪

The CDC Has Been Gutted Thousands of CDC employees who worked on things like preventing HIV and lead poisoning have been told they were subject to a reduction in force. Experts say people will die.

Not an April Fool's joke: The CDC has been gutted. Thousands of CDC employees who worked on things like preventing HIV and lead poisoning have been told they were subject to a RIF. www.wired.com/story/cdc-gu... from @makenakelly.bsky.social @leahfeiger.bsky.social @knibbs.bsky.social

Whenever I move somewhere new, for some reason, people love to tell me about how bad their allergy season is.

I do think North Carolina takes the cake though. Footprints and tire tracks in pollen is a whole new level.

A close up of a flower with white petals. The stamens are covered in bright yellow grains of pollen.

A close-up image of several bright green aphids clustered on a plant stem. The aphids have translucent bodies and delicate legs, with visible antennae extending from their heads. The plant stem is covered in tiny reddish-brown spots. The background is slightly blurred, with hints of white flower petals visible.

An image of a small cluster of white flowers, next to a quarter for scale.

This weekend I went out in search of some fun things to look at on my microscope and found some flowers that I thought would be cute.

And they are cute, but even better, they were COVERED in aphids. Probably not great for the plants, but a very fun surprise for me.

#microscopemondays #microscopy 🧪

YouTube video by SciShow The Ancient Crops We've Forgotten How to Grow

Think corn was the first crop to be domesticated in the US? Think again. 🌽

In my latest video for @scishow.bsky.social, I dive into the story of America’s lost crops—ancient plants that were farmed in what is now the US long before corn took over.

youtube.com/watch?v=VjFT...

#SciComm 🧪

graph of NIH basisfor new drugs

A pie graph worth keeping in mind as the NIH budget plummets jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... for 356 new FDA drugs approved

Microscopic image of a dandelion seed head, with thin, hair-like filaments extending outward in a starburst pattern.

The wildflowers around my apartment are quickly becoming my favorite microscope muses

🧪 #microscopemondays #microscopy

From 2010 to 2016 (latest data I have ), NIH research contributed to EVERY drug approved by the FDA

One of my favorite tools for designing pretty graphics for my science is coolors.co which can help you build a color palette for your poster or figures.

If you have some colors embedded in your work already (like these microscopy images I had) you can build a color scheme around them

#scicomm 🧪

I'm currently on the hunt to find a reference chemical that reduces neutrophil and/or macrophage counts that I can use as a positive control in this assay moving forward. Any suggestions are very welcome!

I've been developing methods to image these fish on a high-content imaging platform called the Opera Phenix, which allows me capture 10x confocal images of an entire 96 well plate of fish and then analyze those images to pull out cell counts, all within the span of about 2 hours.

The idea behind the assay is that if a chemical of interest is developmentally immunotoxic, we could measure a change in the number of neutrophils or macrophages as a read out of that toxicity.

We have two transgenic lines of zebrafish in the lab that express fluorescent markers specifically in either macrophages or neutrophils (two key cell types of the innate immune system).

Throughout the past few months at the EPA, I've been working on a project to develop new methods to test for developmental immunotoxicity using zebrafish.

This week I had been planning to attend the @sotoxicology.bsky.social annual meeting for the first time. However, DOGE had other plans.

But the science-sharing must go on! So here is my poster plus a thread with some details of what I’ve been doing.

#2025SOT

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Illegal dumping grounds off the New Jersey turnpike across from Manhattan in the 1970s

Smog rolling on over Manhattan in the 1970s

This is what many cities in the U.S. looked like before the EPA.

Why the heck would anyone celebrate deregulating it?

Trump Administration Aims to Eliminate E.P.A.’s Scientific Research Arm (Gift Article) More than 1,000 chemists, biologists and other scientists could be laid off under a plan to dismantle the Office of Research and Development.

Love finding out that I’m probably going to lose my job by seeing someone post this story on Instagram 🫠🫠

This is very bad. Not just for me and others who do research at the EPA, but for the health and safety of everyone who lives in the US.

🧪

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/c...

The flowers have started blooming in North Carolina, including this teeny one I’ve seen popping up all over the place.

🧪 #microscopemondays #microscopy

E.P.A. Declares ‘Greatest Day of Deregulation Our Nation Has Seen’ Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, said he would revise or repeal dozens of air, water and climate protections to help industries.

This is a sad day for the EPA.

However, I know that many of us at the EPA are dedicated to the true mission: to protect human health and the environment. And we’ll do our best to keep fighting for that.

🧪

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/12/c...

A highly magnified image of overlapping pine needles, with fine lines and rows of tiny white dots running along them.

Pine needles are much prettier than I realized

#MicroscopyMonday #microscopemondays #sciart #microscopy 🧪

March 7 @standupforscience.bsky.social happened. I now have a question. Reply to this thread w ur answers!

What do we do with this momentum? Think innovative, creative, mundane, give us all your ideas.

We have ideas, but this is for EVERYONE. I want everyone’s ideas.

Rally Poster with the Stature of Liberty

NC friends of science. Join me tomorrow in Raleigh on Halifax Mall by the State Capitol for the Stand Up For Science Rally--talks begin at 12:30. Let's remind our neighbors and our politicians that science solves societal problems, develops disease treatments and creates jobs! 🧪 Please share

Found out yesterday that no one from the EPA’s Office of Research and Development can attend the upcoming Society of Toxicology meeting—presumably to cut costs.

Not as dire as mass layoffs, but still a real loss for science and transparency

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Omg yes!

purple background with white text that says standing up for science is standing up for economic mobility.

Science fuels economic opportunity—creating jobs, driving education, and supporting mobility. We're standing up for science to protect the critical infrastructure that makes this possible.

Stand Up for Science with us on March 7th!
#scienceforall #standupforscience2025

A close-up microscopic view of a dandelion, showing the individual yellow florets in fine detail. Each floret has a tubular base with delicate, hair-like structures extending outward, creating a dense, feathery texture.

Dandelions: basically tiny, fancy bouquets if you zoom in enough.

#MicroscopyMonday
#MicroscopeMondays

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Amazing! I looked at pictures from the March for Science for inspiration