Mary Munson

The massive list of suspended UCLA grants came out today: 300 NSF and 500 NIH grants. I am miraculously not on the list, but this is devastating. Science will be lost, progress will be frozen, people will lose jobs, and careers in science and medicine are being destroyed. This is not ok.

Jay Bhattacharya once studied health disparities. As NIH director, he’s allowed such research to wither Jay Bhattacharya’s tenure as NIH director has seen health disparities research swept up in the Trump administration’s attack on DEI

Incredibly well reported deep dive on NIH and health disparities research in STAT. 🧵

www.statnews.com/2025/08/01/n...

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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.

Russell Vought's daughter has cystic fibrosis. Without NIH research she would be dead.

Post Sunday morning shows Bhattacharya email...

Call for 20 Assistant Professor positions Karolinska Institutet is a world-leading medical university with a long and proud history of ground-breaking research. We are now recruiting outstanding early-career researchers with particularly exce...

Wow

Karolinska Institutet is recruiting 20 outstanding early-career researchers for assistant professor positions

ki.se/en/about-ki/...

Another Bhattacharya email today

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Fifteen years later, Science retracts ‘arsenic life’ paper despite study authors’ protests Belated decision on widely disputed 2010 study pleases some critics but puzzles and dismays others

Science finally retracts the Arsenic life paper www.science.org/content/arti...

That's a wrap! The results of the first #cryoEM heterogeneity challenge are up on biorxiv!
biorxiv.org/content/10.110

Happy to share the latest work from the lab, led by @mudgal17.bsky.social‬, in collaboration with the Weis lab @ethzurich.bsky.social.
How do nuclear membranes fuse during NPC assembly? We answer this question in our latest work, where we identify a new mechanism for membrane fusion… (1/13)

Hi Jeremy, can you elaborate any further on this? Is it NIH-wide? Is it retroactive for the whole FY, or only for grants going forward from some date after the beginning of the FY?

NIH staff are being required to fully fund ~ 50% of their grants. This means that all 4 years of an award will be paid out of this appropriation. This will help them get the appropriated funds spent, but will mean they can only fund (1/2 + 1/4*1/2) = 5/8 has many grants as they would have otherwise.

Drawing of three scientists - from the NIH, EPA and NASA - standing together

This morning, NASA released the #VoyagerDeclaration. This afternoon, NIH #BethesdaDeclaration signers met w/ Jay Bhattacharya. Earlier, EPA staff were terminated for their act of resistance.

I made this in solidarity. @altnih4science.bsky.social @altnasa.bsky.social @alt-epa-workers.bsky.social

so.... NIH issued a news item clarifying the new use of animals policy.

It seems that the bottom line is that NIH will not issue NoFOs specifically about creation or use of animal models of disease.

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grants.nih.gov/news-events/...

Fay: Cuts to research funding risk the collapse of U.S. science and technology I started as an assistant professor of molecular biology at the University of Wyoming in 2001.

“Simply put, there is never a good time to pull out of an investment that continually pays such strong dividends and directly benefits the citizens of our state.”

Cuts to research funding risk the collapse of U.S. science and technology | Guest Column | wyomingnews.com

“What philanthropy cannot do is restore America’s research enterprise to what it once was if the proposed cuts to federal funding come to pass.” 🧪

I was just about the perfect age to appreciate the moon landing. I was a kid during the 1960's, watching the Apollo missions and building models of space capsules from kits.

It all seemed like an exciting, but perfectly normal, part of growing up.

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My first two Bhattacharya email day...

This one is coming in hot...

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For those interested in the latest in thinking about indirect cost reimbursement...

Here is a one-page summary of the FAIR model.

www.cogr.edu/sites/defaul...

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Genome Sciences is looking for a Director of Departmental Computing. This is a rare opportunity for someone interested in leading our excellent IT team, building and maintaining computational infrastructure, and working closely with our faculty and labs uwhires.admin.washington.edu/ENG/candidat...

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.

NIH director is replacing his top outside advisory board Some worry new members of the long-running Advisory Committee to the Director will mirror agency chief Jay Bhattacharya’s views

In yet another shake-up at the world’s largest biomedical research agency, President Trump’s administration has disbanded the top advisory committee to the NIH Director, Science has learned.

The Advisory Committee to the Director will be reconvened with new membership, NIH says. scim.ag/44An6Ug

Though much remains uncertain (e.g. outcomes of lawsuits re: canceled grants), it is clear that U.S. gov funding for science — especially science that intersects w/ concerns about human flourishing — is going to be significantly diminished in coming years. Here are a few things we can do to help:

Exciting news! I am launching the Lab of Polymicrobial Interaction & Evolution at IPMB at Academia Sinica (ipmb.sinica.edu.tw/en)! 🎉Our brand-new website is live: (www.labofpie.org). Check the lab of PIE out!!🥧🎈

Imagine that! Diversity is actually DIVERSE! We are losing so much because of the willfulness of this regime.

This... 👇

In academia, I get very frustrated when people refer to individuals as being "diverse" as opposed to be from groups that are underrepresented in science. This conflates the concepts of diversity and representation, which are both important but different.

Everyone is acting like US scientists will just go get science jobs elsewhere and sure some will but there are not anywhere close to enough science jobs elsewhere.

The end result of this will be much, much, much less science, not science happening in different places.

Senate spending panel would rescue NSF and NASA science funding Its support for a flat budget is a sign of congressional resistance to drastic cuts Trump has proposed

The Senate appropriations committee has voiced its intent to ignore the request by President Donald Trump to slash the budgets of the National Science Foundation and NASA science programs. scim.ag/4nW7XWi