David Tobin

Texas researcher faces deportation after being held for week at San Francisco airport A legal permanent resident with a green card who flew back to the U.S. after visiting family in South Korea was detained by immigration authorities and held for more than a week at the San Francisco I...

apnews.com/article/texa... researcher faces deportation after being held for week at San Francisco airport

HOME Visit the post for more.

This week we said farewell to the amazing @caitlinkowa.bsky.social as she moves to start her new lab at Dartmouth. So grateful for all her leadership and mentoring the last few years.

If you’re interested in all things skin microbes (especially fungi) check out her lab! I can’t recommend enough.

$8M RESTORE Grants Program Launched for Researchers Hit by Federal Funding Terminations - AAI News AAI has launched an $8 million emergency funding initiative called the RESTORE Grants Program to support scientists whose immunology-focused federal research grants were abruptly terminated or frozen ...

📣The @aai.org allocated $8M RESTORE Grants Program, an initiative that will focus on providing financial support to researchers whose grants were abruptly terminated or frozen in 2025 for reasons unrelated to their scientific merit! 👏

Check the details 👇
#SupportResearch
#Immunology

Thanks for your leadership on this @asm.org. asm.org/articles/pol...

Alert: The Trump administration is quietly slashing new NIH grant awards, and it's not via the budget NIH’s sudden move to multiyear grant funding is forcing shocking cuts in the number of grants funded. This is an effective budget cut. It's bad, folks.

New, from an anonymous NIH insider: Trump is being pushed to spend more NIH money. The White House is ordering NIH to do multi-year budgets for awards. This budget trick means fewer awards, fewer labs funded, and lower paylines for researchers. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/alert-the-...

Transitions in development – an interview with Jeffrey Farrell

@jeffreyafarrell.bsky.social talks about becoming a group leader, his insights on advocacy for developmental biology and his belief in unifying single-cell biology with classical approaches.

journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

The Anne West lab at Duke is hiring a postdoc to work on nuclear cell biology in neurogenesis. Please help me spread the word! Applications to west@neuro.duke.edu.

Director Vought: We write to ask you to fully implement the Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, including funds appropriated for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The continuing resolution supp011s NIH initiatives across a range of critical research areas­cancer, cardiovascular disease, rare pediatric disorders, and more. These vital efforts are not only necessary to Make America Healthy Again, but also have a direct impact on American families, biomedical innovation, our economy, and competing with Communist China. We are concerned by the slow disbursement rate of FY25 NIH funds, as it risks undermining critical research and the thousands of American jobs it supports. Suspension of these appropriated funds - whether formally withheld or functionally delayed - could threaten Americans' ability to access better treatments and limit our nation's leadership in biomedical science. It also risks inadve11ently severing ongoing NIH-funded research prior to actionable results. We share your commitment to ensuring NIH funds are used responsibly and not diverted to ideological or unaccountable programs. We are confident Secretary Kennedy and Director Bhattacharya are well positioned to uphold gold standard research by ensuring that NIH awards are grounded in transparency, scientific merit, and a clear alignment with national interests. Our shared goal is to restore public trust in the NIH precisely because its work is focused on results, accountability, and real-world impact. Withholding or suspending these funds would jeopardize that trust and hinder progress on critical health challenges facing our nation. Ultimately, this is about finding cures and seeing them through to fruition. We respectfully request that you ensure the timely release of all FY25 NIH appropriations in accordance with congressional intent. Doing so will ensure continued momentum in curing disease, supp011ing American innovation, and delivering result…

Sincerely, Katie Boyd Britt John Boozman Shelly Moore Capito Bill Cassidy Susan Collins Lindsey O. Graham David H. McCormick Mitch McConnel Jerry Moran Lisa Murkowski Thom Tillis Todd Young Dan Sullivan Tim Scott

From @aaas.org check-in with Sudip Parikh: a letter by 14 Republican senators urge the Office of Management and Budget to release NIH funding. If this includes your state (AL, ME, WV, SC, KY, KS, AR, PA, NC, IN, AK), Sudip recommends contacting & thanking them for being American science leaders.

The Wadsworth Center is expanding it's research focus on #virology /vector-borne diseases!
www.asmcareerconnections.org/job/research-scientist-5-g-31/78488664/
This is a unicorn assistant prof equivalent position with 12-month hard money salary and no teaching commitments (!)
Reposts appreciated 🙏

Kenyon is hiring a TT microbiologist! Please share widely. I’m the search chair & am happy to answer any questions. careers.pageuppeople.com/695/cw/en-us...

IMPORTANT IMPORTANT IMPORTANT IMPORTANT

Please watch the workshop video and COMMENT by 5:00 Monday 7/14

This is the source of the "no more model organism only grants in NIH-funded research" decree.

Congratulations Kristen and thanks for everything you contribute beyond the amazing science as well!!

Structural and functional analysis of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis MmpS5L5 efflux pump presages a pathway to increased bedaquiline resistance

Exciting paper by Adam Fountain and Lalita Ramakrishnan. Cryo-ET by @janboehning.bsky.social

Congrats!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The Mycobacterium tuberculosis Transposon Sequencing Database (MtbTnDB): A Large‐Scale Guide to Genetic Conditional Essentiality Mtb transposon sequencing database is a unified resource for exploring conditional gene essentiality in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. By standardizing over 150 transposon sequencing screens, it enables...

Jinich et al. present an important new resource for the Mtb community!
The Mycobacterium tuberculosis Transposon Sequencing Database (MtbTnDB) is an interactive web resource summarizing 150+ published screens.
#MicroSky #Mycobacterium #tuberculosis
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The National Science Foundation is critical to our future, but Trump wants to cut it by $5 billion. Here are 5 things we wouldn't have today if it wasn't for the NSF.

#Zebrafish genome reference update: it is now "live" on the UCSC genome browser at: genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/hgTr...

I am working on getting it included in the zebrafish genome pull down menu with the previous assemblies but that isn't working yet.

Now open - LOIs for the Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease (PATH) program. Deadline is July 17 @ 3pm ET.
More information here:
buff.ly/iSu3v60
#bwfpath #GrantOpportunity

My Canadian university, Queen's, is offering TWENTY 4-year funded PhDs (40k CAD/yr) for a student of ANY citizenship who has been accepted at a top 100 US university but have had offer rescinded OR are reconsidering offer due to US policy.
Details found here👇

www.queensu.ca/grad-postdoc...

URGENT: FlyBase has lost practically all its funding overnight; even user fees are tied up in denied grant funding. 🤬🤯

Any lab using @flybase.bsky.social please donate using the link in post below.

This incredible community, on whose backs our #Drosophila labs depend, can't be left out to dry.

We are looking for post-docs interested in studying T cell responses to M. tuberculosis infection…especially basic T cell immunologists who are interested in learning to work with BSL3 pathogens. The NIH intramural program is an amazing place to train!

All of NIH funding to Northwestern University is frozen. This pause includes noncompeting approved funding, new and competing grants with fundable scores. No reimbursements for money already spent have been received since March. This situation is rarely reported so please Please get the word out!

This would dramatically politicize NIH and increase the turnover of key positions, limiting longer-term planning and execution.

Any regulation must go through a notice and comment period in which the public can weigh in on the regulation and its wisdom

The comment period is open to May 23rd

7/n

Really impressive and moving interview by @baym.lol about the Harvard cuts.

Some exciting news! NCBI has finished the annotation pipeline for our new #zebrafish reference sequence GRCz12tu:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/refseq/annot...

This is a big step up in data depth and quality and should be super helpful going forward.

Amazing super cool and IMPOSSIBLE without a) NIH funding and b) ANIMAL RESEARCH

A human-specific enhancer fine-tunes radial glia potency and corticogenesis - Nature HARE5, a human accelerated region enhancer, modulates cortical development by influencing neural progenitor cell behaviour, leading to an enlarged neocortex with increased functional independence betw...

Thrilled to share our latest study out in @natureportfolio.nature.com led by the fantastically talented Jing Liu. Our study provides insight into a long standing question in biology: What molecular features make us uniquely human and how do these function? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I cannot stress how extremely detrimental this would be to the progress of biomedical science.

The NIH has dropped its research funding by $2.7 billion so far this year.

Cancer research funding has declined 31%.

And new NIH research grants fell to the lowest level in more than a decade.

Eye-opening findings in today's HELP committee minority report:
www.sanders.senate.gov/wp-content/u...

NSF slashes number of ‘rotators’ and well-paid managers as part of restructuring Smaller future budgets will require fewer people, NSF official tells staff

🧪⚛️ If this is to be believed, it sounds like there is a serious chance that the NSF may no longer be funding basic work in materials, chemistry, physics, math, astronomy, etc. Is Congress really just going to sit by and let this happen? (Edited) www.science.org/content/arti...

Patient advocacy in tuberculosis research and treatment: an interview with Zolelwa Sifumba Zolelwa SifumbaMulti-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) is a severe form of TB caused by mycobacteria that are resistant to standard first-line treatment, typically isoniazid and rifampicin (Seung e...

This is a great interview with Dr Zolelwa Sifumba from a relatively new patients’ voice series at DMM @dmmjournal.bsky.social @biologists.bsky.social

journals.biologists.com/dmm/article/...