@keribackus.bsky.social
Associate Professor at UCLA, all things chemical biology, chemoproteomic-, covalent-, cysteine- and redox-related
Daily Bruin article about the ~800 frozen grants at UCLA including some from my lab dailybruin.com/2025/08/02/a...
04.08.2025 02:26 — 👍 9 🔁 9 💬 0 📌 0
Suspension of all grants to UCLA www.latimes.com/california/s...
01.08.2025 04:27 — 👍 158 🔁 112 💬 22 📌 46Consider signing the letter to support NIH and the "Bethesda Declaration" (www.standupforscience.net/bethesda-dec...) #ASMS2025 @asms.org
09.06.2025 16:01 — 👍 9 🔁 5 💬 3 📌 1ASSIGNMENT: COMMENT ON SCHEDULE F
1 week left to comment about Schedule F, potentially making NIH institute and center director essentially political appointees.
www.regulations.gov/commenton/OP...
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Join @lindsaykpino.com, me, and our amazing panelists for the #ASMS2025 #Chemoproteomics workshop on Monday!
31.05.2025 21:47 — 👍 30 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 1And after a brief interlude of recommending CSY1 and all the MIRA study sections, now ART recommendations are back to normal
30.05.2025 18:51 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Anyone else notice that ART is now giving different study section assignments compared to earlier in the week? Same title and abstract last night and today, different strong and possible matches...?
30.05.2025 03:01 — 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0We will be hosting the 2025 ONO Pharma Foundation Annual Symposium on June 23 at the Royal Sonesta Boston. This event offers an opportunity to explore the latest breakthroughs presented by ONO INITIATIVE awardees and to discuss groundbreaking science in chemical biology. (1/2)
27.05.2025 21:45 — 👍 5 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 2New paper from our lab joint with Val Arboleda @val-arboleda.bsky.social
24.05.2025 04:56 — 👍 8 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
The 13th General Meeting of the International Proteolysis Society will be held in Búsios, Brazil Oct 26-30, 2025. Training workshops will be held at the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz Oct 23-23. Register now! Links below.
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The fantastically successful NIGMS MIRA R35 "expired" on May 17, after the most recent deadline--these removals are the most aggressive attack on American science in the current series of devastating actions 🧪
20.05.2025 23:18 — 👍 78 🔁 44 💬 17 📌 6Excited to see this out in @science.org today!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
01.05.2025 18:17 — 👍 135 🔁 53 💬 6 📌 5Great news: NIH postbac program is recruiting again! If your grad school plans were affected by program cutbacks or admissions freezes this year I highly encourage you to apply, this could be a perfect opportunity. Please repost.
www.training.nih.gov/research-tra...
Congrats to all the award winners and especially to Backus Lab PhD student Flowreen Shikwana and undergrad Joelle Darrouj!
10.04.2025 16:43 — 👍 10 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0U of Michigan @umich.edu set aside funds from central to support researchers with unexpected disruption in federal funding for up to 6 months.
Are any other institutions doing this? Seems like a good move.
#Medsky #NIH #federalfunding #researchfunding 🧪
record.umich.edu/articles/uni...
Bluetorial: Women, courage, and leadership
What follows will include some generalizations based on population averages of what I have experienced over the course of my career. There are, of course, exceptions in every group who are substantially more to one extreme or the other.
One of the most significant and challenging projects of my career so far. PepCentric: a scalable computational platform utilizing novel 2-D fragment indexing for rapid peptide-centric searches, enabling proteogenomics searches against billions of spectra in seconds. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
04.03.2025 09:09 — 👍 72 🔁 23 💬 3 📌 2
Extending my grant update this morning. Here are data limited to new and competitive renewal applications.
The Pause is dead, Long live the Pause...
📢 Postdoc Opening – Metabolism & Cancer! 📢
Looking for a motivated postdoc to explore how metabolism regulates tumor initiation at Roswell Park in Buffalo, NY! Join us to tackle big questions with cool science in a collaborative environment.
Interested? DM me! #PostdocJobs #CancerMetabolism
@standupforscience.bsky.social Los Angeles 3/7 noon at the Federal building docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
28.02.2025 16:44 — 👍 34 🔁 8 💬 0 📌 1🚨 Chemical Biology & Probes study section (formerly SBCB, one of two NIH panels that reviews chemistry #chemsky 🧪) was abruptly POSTPONED w/no specific plans for rescheduling, less than 24h before start.
If this affects you call your reps & senators, talk to local news, make your voice heard 📢 👩🔬
Today in @nature.com we share our back-to-back stories with Ning Zheng’s lab revealing chemical-genetic convergence between a molecular glue degrader & E3 ligase cancer mutations. 1/5
12.02.2025 16:20 — 👍 82 🔁 37 💬 5 📌 5
Biopharma companies and CEOs are keeping their heads down at their own peril. They should speak up about what’s happening to the NIH and other science agencies before it’s too late.
Silence gives consent. And no one should consent to this.
8 years ago @asbmb.bsky.social gave me +18 more trainees a crash course in advocacy for their DC Hill Day. With NIH slashing indirect costs effective immediately, university Govt Affairs teams will be swamped. Here's 10 tips for scientists contacting lawmakers +pics from Denver's 2017 Science March.
08.02.2025 19:23 — 👍 80 🔁 61 💬 3 📌 2
A long post about what’s happening to the science funding agencies in the US and why. As mentioned, this one just kept getting longer even as I kept stripping curse words from it.
www.science.org/content/blog...
Would love to hear if anyone has personally taken part to a study section meeting yet since this started. I know that we are told that all is moving on as usual, but is it?
04.02.2025 21:08 — 👍 26 🔁 13 💬 5 📌 1Congratulations! Hope you get a nice big retroactive salary boost!
01.02.2025 03:28 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Iteration on a popular cartoon meme showing a weary man saying "What a year, huh" and a colleague replying, "Captain, it's January."
Actual picture from a @riley-research.bsky.social group meeting this week
31.01.2025 22:23 — 👍 10 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0Really want this to be a real account--any way we can check if/when canceled study sections will be rescheduled?
30.01.2025 23:41 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 1
