Tim Rhoads

I'd watch a muppet show movie where the muppets infiltrate an academic conference.

A pretty stunning attempt at rewriting the last year. While there are exceptions, legal challenges were largely led by faculty, AAUP, and state AGs, while university leadership and scientific societies almost uniformly attempted appeasement and acquiesced in advance.

We are watching in real time who some scientists are willing to sacrifice in favor of access to funding: early career researchers, trainees, scientists from historically excluded groups and immigrants.

A word cloud from the titles of ~1100 NSF grants that were terminated. The most frequent words are STEM, ADVANCE, Student, career, and engines.

This a word cloud from the titles of ~1100 terminated NSF grants.

It is hard not to see these grant terminations as an attack on the training of the future United States scientific workforce.

or just a much larger pool of applications, most of which were higher scoring?

Re: Science Mag editorial celebrating mainly the inside/quiet advocacy done this year, I offer this in lighthearted response. 🧪

This is a Myanmar woman doing her usual, longstanding dance routine while black cars speed by to carry out a coup. 1/4

Mamdani: "I speak of Renee Good, whose final words to the man who murdered her were, 'I'm not mad at you.' I speak of Alex Pretti who died as he lived, caring for the stranger. ICE shot him bc he did something they could never fathom ... let us offer a new path: one of defiance through compassion."

Inclusion of the Forgotten: Structuring a More Accessible Undergraduate Summer Research Experience Summer undergraduate research experiences typically target the student who already demonstrates social capital by being able to submit a competitive application, travel across the country for the e...

Inclusion of the Forgotten: Structuring a More Accessible Undergraduate Summer Research Experience www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

This whole thread is **chef’s kiss** for #millennials 🤣

Students aren’t putting themselves into massive debt so they can learn to use AI or be taught by it. Universities wake the fuck up.

NIH looks to turn primate research center into a sanctuary The health research agency is offering the Oregon National Primate Research Center federal money to stop testing on primates.

@jeremymberg.bsky.social @standupforscience.bsky.social @peterhotezmdphd.bsky.social @drugmonkey.bsky.social

www.politico.com/news/2026/02...

Join us on February 9 for Biochemistry Colloquium with Sara Nowinski @vai.org. The Nowinski Lab is working to understand mitochondria in detail, focusing on the mitochondrial fatty acid synthesis pathway. More info: today.wisc.edu/events/view/...

also, he would rather knock it down than admit that anything cultured wants absolutely nothing to do with him.

Lewis Black Unaccompanied Minors GIF ALT: Lewis Black Unaccompanied Minors GIF

Last rant (for the day) about the "Reclaiming Science" MAHA event.

Deputy Director Memoli (who was described as running NIH inside whereas Director Bhattacharya handles external issues [Narrator: Normally, the NIH Director does not delegate NIH management] participated in a panel discussion.

1/16

❤️

This is neat... intronic RNA structure involved in a gene regulation feadback loop in plant DEAD box protein genes

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Ugh, frustrating. Also a remarkable statement given how much popular press examples like Mike Snyder’s 2024 paper got

As a someone with a 33 year NIH-funded lab whose grant is supposed to be reviewed this week, shut NIH down if that is what's needed to end ICE terrorism. Innocent lives are more important 🧪

PSA on Competitive, Not Discussed NIH proposal outcomes As you know, Dear Reader, the current and following rounds of NIH study section meetings have adopted temporary* new triage/streamlining rules. Previously, approximately half of proposals are Not D…

PSA on Competitive, Not Discussed NIH proposal outcomes drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/01/23/p...

Last term I tried an experiment: I walked into my Tech and Design Ethics class, admitted that I had *no idea* what to do about ChatGPT - so I would let them figure it out.

As in: their first project was to decide and write the ChatGPT policy for the class.

Here's what happened:

Here’s the deal with the FY26 NIH funding bill:

One line in the 1000+ pg bill = significantly less science.

The increase to ~40% of grants moving to MYF is estimated to result in a 35% decrease in the NUMBER of NIH grants funded annually—moving the paylines from 10% to around 4%.

THIS IS BAD.

Reframing Belonging in Higher Education: an Intersectional Ecological Model for Research, Policy, and Practice - Educational Psychology Review Educational Psychology Review - This essay critically synthesizes recent theoretical and empirical developments on belonging in higher education. Although the concept has gained wide traction,...

"Despite its widespread embrace, one thing is clear—though universally desired, belonging remains an inequitably distributed experience, particularly among marginalized student populations in higher education." link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Photo of a woman standing in front of a classroom full of students

Photo of zoom screen featuring Dr. Gretchen Goldman on the left and the 45 or so students in the classroom on the right

Led a workshop on science and democracy for ~45 Hotchkiss students today as part of the day-long celebration of Dr. King's life and legacy. Thanks to @gretchentg.bsky.social for joining us via Zoom and sharing her expertise ❤️

United States Senate Committee on APPROPRIATIONS = MENU Search 01.20.26 Committee Releases Conferenced Defense, Homeland Security, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Daldad Aaaaains and

NIH budget bill out today.

It’s the result of heavy negotiations in Congress over past month+. 🧪

Big pic: NIH budget now is abt more than funding. It’s abt restraining the technical ways NIH is being broken by Proj 2025. And the restraints in the bill are tepid 🤷‍♂️

Also: watch ICE/DHS budget.
🧵1/

FY26 was the hardest LHHS bill I’ve ever worked on. After a year spent witnessing this administration tear apart and eliminate entire federal programs that millions of Americans rely on, our bill re-establishes and increases funding for many of them. It provides a $415 million increase for The National Institutes of Health, among many important others, and ensures that investment results in more research grants being awarded. This bill is the culmination of an incredibly long, frustrating, exhausting negotiating process of late and sleepless nights. It always is. But this year was different for all of the obvious reasons. There were moments we didn’t think we could possibly get it done. I’m proud we kept up the fight until the bitter end because what we achieved is pretty damn impressive. Did we get everything we wanted? No, it’s never enough. That’s why it’s a compromise. But there are a number of bright spots sprinkled throughout the final product that matter. The most important is that Congress is finally reasserting its power of the purse. 💰 Hope is on the horizon. So let’s go, we’re ready for year 2.

From Meghan Mott on LinkedIn

1/2

Committee Releases Conferenced Defense, Homeland Security, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, and Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Bi... United States Senate Committee on Appropriations

The conference (agreement between House and Senate) appropriations bill that includes HHS and NIH was released this morning.

www.appropriations.senate.gov/news/majorit...

1/5

The language on multiyear funding (MYF) is ineffective.

Final bill anchors MYF to 2025 instead of 2024. This means MYF will likely continue at the same rate we saw last year, where NCI's payline from ~10% to 4%.

This is incredibly harmful to the US research workforce - especially early career.

When Experts Leave: What NIH Lost in 2025 I remember moments like this from my 22 years at NIH.

What's been lost, so far.
"Program officers steward research portfolios. They don’t just process applications. They understand scientific contexts, see connections across studies, mentor investigators, and help translate broad priorities into fundable research programs."
substack.com/inbox/post/1...

Interestingly, my experience was the opposite. The orcid integration worked flawlessly, but i had nothing but problems trying to pull stuff in from my ncbi bibliography. It would never load more than about 1/3rd of my publications. Same conclusion though - lots of time on manual data entry.

Don’t let Russell Vought trick Congress into destroying science by removing multiyear funding limits from the NIH funding bill.