Mallory Molina

Vanderbilt University Medical Center to Cease Gender-Affirming Surgeries Patients received surprise messages Friday saying health care system will no longer offer gender-affirming surgeries

www.nashvillescene.com/news/pithint...

Vanderbilt University Medical Center is telling patients that it's shutting down its gender-affirming surgery practice for adult patients. Journalists covering #LGBTQ+ health, take notice. @assignedmedia.org @erininthemorning.com Feel free to DM and I'm @jgilligan.82 on Signal.

We had the snowpocalypse in Nashville and my daycare was without power most of the week. My kid was really sick, several of my students also didn't have power, my class was cancelled all week. That whole week just felt like one really long day

Apparently the AAP defines 3-5 as "preschoolers" not toddlers. It feels like my 3yo just instantly leveled up in my head and I'm kind of sad about it. Bye bye toddlerhood 🥺

As the parent of a very young child in the South, I can never let go of the anxiety related to her catching diseases that she currently can't be vaccinated from yet due to the loss of herd immunity. Between that and the ads for bullet-proof backpacks I'm bombarded with, I'm so tired. All the time.

5 college courses (fave non-astro edition)

1. Indie music and poetry English lit class (I got to talk to the lead singer of the antlers!)

2. Music theory (two quarters since I loved it so much)

3. Film class about romantic comedies

4. Intro to physical anthropology

5. Jane Austen lit class

Vanderbilt cancelled classes all week tonight, but jokes on them I had already cancelled my class all week on Tuesday.

I've been feeling bad about my class this semester, it's my first time teaching it so it's kind of a mess. After my group meeting today I found a handwritten note in my office from a student in my class last semester thanking me for being such a wonderful teacher 😊 I really needed that today

@bot.astronomy.blue signup

I did it. I wrote 4 proposals in 2 months, 6 this year. Will any get funded? Probably not. Do I still feel like a champion? Yes.

I can't wait to celebrate by watching paw patrol or umi zoomi with my toddler tonight 🎉

I grew up in TX and I am very surprised at the backbone on display, but it's nice to see

Azeem will be studying X-ray emission from dwarf galaxies to understand the energetics of their black holes

So excited to announce my other grad student Azeem Bari (not on bluesky yet) won a FINESST fellowship! I'm 2/2 for grad fellowships this year, great way to end my first year as a prof 😊 #astronomy

Tagging @breinz.bsky.social !

So proud of my student Brayan Hernandez for being awarded an NSF graduate research fellowship! ☺️

MUTUAL AID ALERT:
Stand with our community in Astro+ adjacent fields impacted by the attack on DEIA, support our community by giving aid through our GoFundMe. See links in thread!
- choir collab, @blackinastro.bsky.social, Astro Poverty Survey Team, MVMT Consulting @dranicole.bsky.social)

Everyone told me my first year as a faculty member would be hard. But I honestly feel like I've been thrown in the deep end without the ability to swim well and no life vest and everyone keeps throwing stuff at me and laughing.

YouTube video by Universal Pictures Les Misérables | Do You Hear the People Sing?

youtu.be/1q82twrdr0U?...

A plaque from the institute on teaching and mentoring commemorating my attainment of my PhD. It also denotes that I was a graduate of the Sloan Minority PhD program in 2019

So proud to show off my plaque from the Institute on Teaching and Mentoring in my office as new faculty at Vanderbilt. My experiences as a Sloan Minority PhD scholar had a tremendous impact on my career. I hope that in some small way I can pay it forward to future generations.

Quick update: there were some issues with the Swift data reduction for the SwiM VAC. We fixed these errors, detailed in this erratum: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

Updated catalog (v4.2) is here: www.sdss4.org/dr17/data_ac...

Many thanks to Ruonan Guo and Cheng Li for finding these errors!

As someone who lived in TX during Bush, Perry and Abbott governorships...I have the same question

It's now working!

Is anyone else able to connect to heasarc? Was there a scheduled outage today?

I can't seem to access the website and therefore can't download data 😔

Postdoc & grad student parents in the US are in a tough situation. They either quit academia or struggle to support their family. The push to be over-productive can make them fall even further behind. I'm very stressed, exhausted and sad about this situation and I have no idea how to solve it. 5/5

How can I focus on work when I'm worried about affording diapers/food or figuring out which medical services that I need can be neglected to ensure the health and well-being of my child? How do on-campus daycares cost $20k/yr for tuition alone? How is this acceptable? 4/5

That's ~25% of a typical grad student's *annual* salary, and 15% of my postdoc fellowship salary. Rent has skyrocketed averaging about $1.5k/mo, or $18k/yr. That means that daycare and rent is 43% of my salary (before taxes) and ~70% of a grad's salary. Even with a 2nd income, that's wild. 3/5

That daycare happened to be significantly less expensive than other places, but still high quality and licensed. Despite being half the price of most other daycare centers (including those on campus) we paid almost $10k in tuition alone. That does not include clothes, diapers, formula, food, etc 2/5

Astro grad students & postdocs can't afford children: My child went to daycare full time last year so I could work. We searched far from our apt/the university to find a daycare. We found *ONE* daycare 30min away from our apt (40min from Uni) that had an opening before fall 2023. 1/5

Thank goodness for Ms Rachel otherwise I don't think I could have handled watching my very fussy feverish toddler alone all day today on one hour of sleep.

On an extremely related note, she learned a new word today, "row" (from row row row your boat).

Wow...also what how? There's no way I could have done that as an undergrad. Or even now. That must be 3 papers in what like 1-2 years? While taking classes full time? That sounds exhausting