Nancy Parmalee

Two ripe blackberries on the vine.

It’s August so the blackberries are starting to be ripe.

Oops I forgot!

I am so sorry to hear this. I’m sending good thoughts in your direction. It’s so hard.

My partner is in a lake near Bellevue. It’s 70°, I’m not going in. He moved with me here from Dallas where it’s 105° from May to October so Seattle summers are pretty glorious.

And this is why the people saying there will be a brain drain from the US to Europe are not getting the full picture.

While I was job hunting I kept hearing from recruiters for jobs I was over qualified for. Bachelor’s with 2 years experience. They were paying slightly more than my current NIH funded salary with a PhD and 13 years work experience.

They could easily tie salaries to GSA COL, where salaries are in alignment with GSA payscales for comparable work. Salaries for non-tenured people would be higher. It would be easy to take salary data from people at the National labs and even extramural people at NIH. 2/n

Truth! The salaries and benefits of non-tenured scientists in academia is embarrassing, from lab techs to research professors. The workforce is underpaid, by large margins. I completely understand the position PIs are in and this needs to be fixed. 1/n

Masked ICE agents hauled workers out of a pizza place in my Massachusetts town today.

Do I feel safer? No, the opposite. Do I feel wealthier? Not a bit. Do I feel that justice is being served? No, not that, either.

I’m mostly infuriated by armed, masked men roaming around and grabbing people.

Writing lecture notes in Quarto during missile attack in Kyiv underground

#AcademicLife in Ukraine: preparing for lectures at night during a massive missile attack on Kyiv in an overcrowded underground station
#EconSky #UkrainianView #RStats

For almost four months, we've been holding NIH vigils every Saturday at 10 am to come together as a community, support each other, and talk about what's been happening at the NIH. We will keep going as long as the NIH is under attack. Come join us to support NIH workers! @nihvigils.bsky.social

Oh shit, that's what that was?

One thing we never talk about when we talk about NIH funded jobs is how underpaid most people are. My work has been a labor of love. I’m getting a significant pay bump as my research career ends. The world gets great research at bargain rates and we never talk about that.

Badass.

The job market is atrocious.

The drosophila screen (Nobel Prize winning) that discovered the hedgehog gene named the genes that were discovered after their mutant phenotypes. The mutant hedgehog fly embryo looked like a hedgehog. Sonic Hedgehog is in the same pathway and the human geneticists were trying to be as clever.

AP The Associated Press @AP BREAKING: The Trump administration is pushing an initiative for millions of Americans to upload personal health data to new apps run by private tech companies. Gabrielle A. Perry, MPH @GeauxGabrielle Hi! Epidemiologist here! Don't do this. In the 80s and 90s this was done by Depts. of Health during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. "Somehow" the lists they created found their way into the hands of cops, landlords, & job sites to deny people human rights. It's partly WHY the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act exists

No AP News alerts, no Union-Tribune alerts or articles, no emails from UC either. I work at a UC and I would not know that UCLA lost all grant funding last night if I wasn't on Bluesky or in union group chats.

Self-preserving silence and general complacency are becoming more common.

Sometimes I think of how only two generations of us were even allowed to attend these settler colonial ass universities in tiny, awkward handfuls, and how even that was too much

Advancements in treatments for leukemia, stroke victims, paralysis, prostate cancer, PTSD, brain aneurysms -- as well as water filtration, nanotechnology, sustainable fuel and batteries. The list goes on and on. Cutting funding to universities like UCLA affects us all. tdg.ucla.edu/industry-inv...

The suspensions landed perhaps most heavily in math. NSF suspended a $25 million grant for the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), an international center at UCLA that hosts about 2000 visiting researchers every year for workshops and other programs. One of its stars, Terence Tao, a Fields Medal winner frequently named as one of the greatest living mathematicians, also had his only NSF grant suspended. The $750,000 award was in its first year and supported Tao’s own research and a handful of graduate students in developing tools to tell whether a set of numbers is structured or random. Tao says he now cannot offer research assistant opportunities during the academic year, and he calls the cuts to IPAM “quite disastrous.”

NSF and NIH cut off almost 300 grants to UCLA. Story by @dangaristo.bsky.social www.science.org/content/arti...

Five years ago, nearly to the day, the Trump Admin throttled Covid testing because this dumb mf’er thought the testing made him look bad.

The massive list of suspended UCLA grants came out today: 300 NSF and 500 NIH grants. I am miraculously not on the list, but this is devastating. Science will be lost, progress will be frozen, people will lose jobs, and careers in science and medicine are being destroyed. This is not ok.

I wish people cared about research more - this is devastating, and it should be a bigger story.

2nd Ave bike lane with a sunflower in the barrier

Summer in Seattle means sunflowers in our protected bike lane barriers. 🌻

“Brought to you by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Viewers like you” is practically written in my DNA.

Hell ain't hot enough.

"Since the first messenger who told Tigranes that Lucullus was coming had his head cut off for his pains, no one else would tell him anything, and so he sat in ignorance while the fires of war were blazing around him, giving ear only to those who flattered him."

-- Plutarch, ≈ 100 A.D.

Amazing! I saw him at Madison Square Garden. I regret I’m going to have to miss this one.

He’s playing at McCaw Hall in a few days.