Francisco J. Mercado

Now the @insidehighered.com map is updated to show >800 visas revoked across 150+ colleges in 41 states. Ohio State's known number of revocations increased from 7 to 11.

It’s paper day! Check out our latest paper on galactic shapes in FIREbox. Tip of the hat to Courtney Klein for leading this effort! 🔥 📦 🌌 arxiv.org/abs/2503.05612

It’s paper day! Our paper on galactic sizes has now been accepted for publication (ApJ). Tip of the hat to Francisco Mercado for leading this effort! arxiv.org/abs/2501.04084 @astronomerc.bsky.social

choir - mutual aid In direct response to the federal funding freeze outlined by OMB Memorandum M-25-13 and any ensuing directives imposed by the current administration which may prove harmful to our space sciences commu...

GoFundMe: www.gofundme.com/f/mutual-aid...

RequestAid: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

MoreInfo: www.choircollaboration.com/mutual-aid

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)

*this is illegal*

FYI 🧪 🔭 ⚛️

list of banned keywords

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

National Science Foundation suspends salary payments, leaving researchers unable to pay their bills An NSF online payment system remained down after the federal funding freeze was lifted, leaving early-career scientists scrambling to pay bills

“If the freeze is not stopped, I might lose my house."

Some NSF-funded postdocs are having trouble paying rent and credit card bills because their salaries were paused this week, even though the federal funding freeze memo was rescinded.

www.statnews.com/2025/01/30/t...

Apparently all the PhD researchers holding prestigious NSF-funded research fellowships are having their salaries withheld until some unspecified time when the leadership figures out how to eliminate any grant funding that doesn’t align with the president’s political ideology.

Effects of galactic environment on size and dark matter content in low-mass galaxies
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04084
Francisco J. Mercado, Jorge Moreno, Robert Feldmann, Marckie Zeender, Jose A. Benavides Blanco, Courtney Klein, Coral Wheeler, James Bullock, Lina Necib, Philip F. Hopkins

The @aasoffice.bsky.social will issue full registration refunds for all of our colleagues impacted by the devastating fires in CA. If you are an #AAS245 registrant and in CA standby for an email on how to request your registration. We at the AAS are heartbroken for you and ready to support.

Effects of galactic environment on size and dark matter content in low-mass galaxies We utilize the cosmological volume simulation, FIREbox, to investigate how a galaxy's environment influences its size and dark matter content. Our study focuses on approximately 1,200 galaxies (886 ce...

Unfortunately, I won’t be presenting at AAS this coming week but I’ll be there. Find me and chat with me about this paper!

arxiv.org/abs/2501.04084

We conclude that a galaxy’s relative size is set by the combined effects from it’s environment and halo mass.

Using a Random Forest regression model, we find that while galactic environment is significant in predicting a galaxy’s relative size, it’s halo mass plays a similarly important role.

Specifically, we look into how environment predicts deviations away from 3 key galaxy scaling relationships at fixed stellar mass.

We use the cosmological volume sim, FIREbox to study the effects of environment on galactic size and dark matter content.

Effects of galactic environment on size and dark matter content in low-mass galaxies We utilize the cosmological volume simulation, FIREbox, to investigate how a galaxy's environment influences its size and dark matter content. Our study focuses on approximately 1,200 galaxies (886 ce...

Kicking off the new year with a paper day!

With @jorgitomoreno.bsky.social, Robert Feldman, Marckie Zeender, José Benavides, Courtney Klein, Coral Wheeler, @jbprime.bsky.social, @linoush95.bsky.social, and Phil Hopkins

arxiv.org/abs/2501.04084

In the blink of an eye, Francisco more than doubled the size of our research group. As a postdoc, he has really exceeded all expectations! 🌌 🔥

Two stages of writing:

1) This shouldn't take too long
2) Oh no

Screenshot of a slide from Prof. Arianna Long's presentation at the SACNAS conference. The header says "lessons learned", and the bullet points read "Community takes work!!!!! Invest in one another, connection is key to sustainability. It can't always be about the bad. Joy must also be centered to sustain the work / connections. Community can be formal and informal. The goals can (and should) be flexible. Community can be built within a system, but communities outside the system (and decentralized) can often do more."

The @aasoffice.bsky.social CSMA hosted a great session at SACNAS on building community in astronomy w/ @astrojennifer.bsky.social, @astroarianna.bsky.social, @skyientist.bsky.social, & Sebastian Monzon. Among the great lessons from the panel, @astroarianna.bsky.social shared this amazing wisdom. 🔭

Congratulations to Francisco for his first invited conference talk! 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽