John A. White, Ph.D.

Mount Holyoke College in lovely western Massachusetts is hiring a tenure-track neuroscientist. Amazing students and fantastic faculty support - please share!
mtholyoke.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...

When you strip away humanity

Columbia Agrees to $200 Million Fine to Settle Fight With Trump

You can never bend the knee enough to appease an authoritarian bully.

This is a devastating blow to academic freedom & freedom of speech at Columbia.

Never in the history of this nation has there been an administration so intent on the utter destruction of higher education as we know it.

It is a cult, and dangerous. My dear mother, god rest her soul, was utterly unmoored from reality when it came to the priorities of the GOP.

This is excellent. In three minutes she explains how democracies become dictatorships. It's happened so many times, yet in each country, most people said, 'it can't happen here'

New England would like a word with you ..

N.I.H. did the citizenry a big favor in funding fellowships for trainees from poorer areas of the country. Either members of the administration don't know that these grants support great talent from their districts, or (more likely) they don't care.

Meet Dr. Daniel Carbonero, who aced his PhD defense today and will start his job tomorrow.

Fantastic day sharing knowledge with the brilliant researchers at NIH who valiantly work to advance the frontiers of science for the cause of improving human health. Thank you again for your service 🙏 🇺🇸

Next month, in lovely Florence, Italy, my student Brandon Williams can tell you all about his fantastic dissertation work, at a CNS*2025 workshop organized by my awesome collaborator Carmen Canavier.

www.medschool.lsuhsc.edu/cell_biology...

We set out to quantify U.S. academic contributions to medicines. The results stunned even us From 2020 to 2024, universities contributed patents underpinning 50% of FDA-approved drugs. 87% of those academic breakthroughs came from American institutions.

The astounding contribution of US academic science to new medicines

www.statnews.com/2025/06/06/u...

“We take vaccines so for granted in the United States” ...“Women in the developing world know the power of [vaccines]. They will walk 10 kilometers in the heat with their child and line up to get a vaccine because they have seen death.”

Melinda Gates

Nice!

Honored to give the 2025 commencement speech for my amazing high school, the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science (TAMS) at the University of North Texas (students skip years of high school, and go straight to college). My topic - how to engineer serendipity: www.youtube.com/live/nVknJwk...

I was able to attend college specifically because of Pell Grants and federal work-study. These proposed budget cuts are designed explicitly to prevent students of limited financial means from improving their positioning in the job market and society.

"WE'VE ARRANGED A society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it?" "Science is more than a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along."

I think a lot about what Carl Sagan said in one of his final interviews.

The great Nicholas Peppas is giving the 2025 Colburn Lecture at BU BME.

Reactivation of memory-associated neurons induces downstream suppression of competing neuronal populations | PNAS Inducing apparent memory recall by tagging and optogenetically reactivating cells in the hippocampus was demonstrated over a decade ago. However, t...

New work from my brilliant former student, Jacob Norman, shows that reactivation of a memory suppresses neural representations of competing neural populations.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Aphasia Robs Millions of Communication. Boston University Is Helping Them Regain Their Voice Treatments, informed by research, make BU and Sargent College a leader in combating the neurological disorder

Aphasia Robs Millions of Communication. Boston University Is Helping Them Regain Their Voice.

Read our recent article with The Brink detailing our impact: www.bu.edu/articles/...

Jennifer West, the 2025 winner of the Pierre Galetti Award from AIMBE.

Adolescent Medicine Trials Network for HIV/AIDS Interventions (ATN) OverviewTopic AreasMore InformationOverviewATN is the only multicenter research network in the United States devoted to the health and well-being of adolescents and young adults living with or at risk...

Horrible news - The Adolescent Medicine Trials Networks for HIV/AIDS Interventions (ATN) funded by the NIH has just been terminated.

Stopping a clinical trial mid-course like this is insane.

www.nichd.nih.gov/research/sup...

Microplastics Could Be Fueling Antibiotic Resistance, BU Study Finds Researchers shocked to see that bacteria’s antimicrobial resistance is strengthened when exposed to plastic particles and point to a potential outsized impact on refugees

Read about BU BME star faculty Muhammad Zaman’s sobering work in microplastics.

www.bu.edu/articles/202...

2025 Study section tracking

Wondering if your study section cancelled? I update this sheet daily. As of today, 56/124 study sections that should have met since Jan 2, 2025 have "not met as scheduled." docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

BREAKING NEWS: CDC orders mass retraction and revision of submitted research across all science and medicine journals. Banned terms must be scrubbed. Any unpublished manuscript mentioning certain topics, including gender and "LGBT," must be pulled or revised.

The commissars have arrived open.substack.com/pub/insideme...

Good lord!

Could Twisting Beams of Light Make the Internet Faster—and Greener? BU engineer Siddharth Ramachandran is developing a technology that could cut the power needed to transmit data—and maybe one day improve brain imaging

Could twisting beams of light somehow make the internet faster and greener? BU engineer Siddharth Ramachandran has found tornado-shaped beams of light could increase optical fibers’ data handling capacity by up to 50 times. This is cool stuff. 😎

Boston’s finest! Much underappreciated.

YouTube video by Netflix Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl | Official Trailer | Netflix

It's a difficult month. Live a little. You're welcome.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0ZG...

I can't think of a more deserving recipient.

🎯

Non-profit, low overhead, open access seems to be the best way forward. We also need to find a way to redirect 💰to beleaguered reviewers. Why do we work for free for highly profitable publishers?