Nick Fears

Did you have to have a prescription to book the appointment?

LSU Continuing Education AI prompting certificate course to supercharge your career in just 5 weeks

LSU too. online-certificates.lsu.edu/ai-prompting

What do you recommend counting toward the total amount of grant getting? PI only grants? PI and Co-I grants? PI and site PI grants? Some other combination?

Red states and blue states alike

Equal opportunity damage to biomedical research and the US economy

Internal budget document reveals extent of Trump’s proposed health cuts HHS would be asked to absorb a $40 billion cut, about one-third of its discretionary budget.

This proposed budget, which zeroes out many key programs that protect the US, would be catastrophic for American health.

www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

😞 any word on what is happening to the staff?

Have any autism advocacy or research organizations put out statements on this yet? Seeing many from cancer orgs.

That’s how I would read that as well.

A weighted balloon doll with a clown painted on it famously used by Bandura for psychology research. Very punchable.

Clearly this is who they were looking for…

For those who don't know a K01 is a training grant for early career researchers. Typically 4-5years to help them launch their research careers. It protects up to 75% time for research. Rescinding awarded K level grants is throwing a grenade into an already tenuous research pipeline.

NIH plans to slash support for indirect research costs, sending shockwaves through science The NIH said Friday night that it would slash support for indirect costs on all existing and future grants to 15%

It's entirely reasonable to both think university indirect rates are too high and a 15% ceiling is too low

We want universities to be transparent and efficient

But if they have to subsidize the research enterprise, it won't happen at most institutions

www.statnews.com/2025/02/07/n...

Academic Skyers: I am compiling a list of policies and statements from various universities about how they are handling the "pause" in terms of stopping expenditures (or not).

Please respond to this post with your institution and materials.

THANK YOU!

With 6 Black QBs between the ages of 23-29 years in the final 8 this year, are we entering the era/decade of the Black QB?

The way back machine has some of the previous CDMRP RFAs archived. I had to use it to look up some information about the autism research program this evening.

I’m not sure when the site went dark, but as of 1pm ET yesterday the CDMRP staff were still processing grant documentation.

What is worst advice you have ever received from an academic?

#Thread
Why Autistic-led autism research matters.
I get Google Scholar alerts about newly published research.
It’s striking how little of this has any tangible benefits for Autistic people.
On the contrary, much of it is potentially harmful.
There’s an alarming sub-text.
We’re subjects, not people.

Does anyone have an assignment they enjoy grading for developmental psych that has students engage with a (or multiple) scientific article(s)? I have tried many iterations of different assignments and want one I look forward to grading. Right now... not enjoying grading AI-written policy letters.

Gender Gap in Teaching Evaluations and its Effect on Course Enrollments The disparity in teaching evaluations between male and female instructors is well documented. This paper demonstrates that, even when controlling for …

"even when controlling for specific components of the same evaluation surveys, students tend to give lower overall ratings to female instructors...RateMyProfessors’s overall quality ratings have a greater influence on course enrollment than official evaluations" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Overworked faculty: there's just too much on my plate, and no time left for the really important stuff
AI techbros: so hear me out--what if we automated your entire teaching process and then you can go to more meetings

One of my barometers for men colleagues is if they know and push back against the course evaluation comments their women colleagues receive. Every woman I know gets horrendous comments and they are all deeply misogynistic and unrelated to the course content.

Absolutely this. I teach a 3rd-4th year course and the number of students that tell me I’m the first instructor that has told them I don’t care about their grade, that the assignments are designed for their learning is astonishing.

This is presuming the "result" is a good grade in the assessment, whereas the result should be the learning and understanding itself. How we re-centre that is the big question.

saying "you only live once"
- cliche
- thanks for the existential dread
- offensive to cats

saying "leroy jenkins"
- has some flare
- here for a good time not a long time
- leeeeeeeeeeeeroy jeeeenkkiinns
- inoffensive to cats

Along with her many awesome skills, her great attention to detail and skill in connecting numbers to reality are two reasons I’m so excited to be her mentor and have the opportunity to support her development as a researcher.

My student just unlocked a researcher core memory: she was trying to replicate an analysis for a class project but the values she were getting didn’t make any realistic sense. Turns out the PUBLISHED paper reported incorrect variable coding. After some troubleshooting, we figured out what they did.

Today is International Day of Persons with Disabilities. Time for a reminder that "disability" can mean a wide variety of visible and invisible disabilities, and it doesn't mean lower productivity. 🧵1/9 #disability

Every time I read about banning books, I think of this:

Reading a book with a gay character will not make you gay any more than reading a book about Einstein will make you a genius.
If you're afraid that books might change someone's thinking, you're not afraid of books — you're afraid of thinking.

Mid-career academics - do you have a formal 'mentor' outside of your line management? Have you sought them out? Are they at a more senior career stage, or at roughly your career stage?