Katie Martin, PhD

+++ Hissscord🐍 NEWS +++

Second call for joining our server! 🐸
Hissscord is open to everyone in the scientific herpetological community, from students to established researchers.

💬 DM me for an invite to the Discord channel, or reach out via email: hissscord[at]gmail.com

Please share!📣

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)

NSF GRFP is out 2.5 months late w/key changes

1. 2nd year graduate students not eligible.

2. "alignment with Administration priorities"

3. Unlike prior years, they DO NOT specify the expected number of awards... that is a BIG problem.

a brief 🧵 w/receipts

www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

While I'm sad our cover submission wasn't selected for our recent human duplication paper, check out the super cool illustration created with @lazaroillustration.bsky.social ! Certainly, you will be seeing Dennis lab members running around with "fishman" t-shirts at future meetings, inspired by Ohno

The Poison Pill to End the MMR is Tylenol If you think Tylenol is bad for babies, wait until you hear about rubella virus

Yesterday's Tylenol press conference was at "inject bleach" levels of insanity, but it also revealed the plan for cancelling the MMR. Here's how I think this is going to go down.
open.substack.com/pub/rasmusse...

"Health losses attributed to anthropogenic climate change," a brief communication in the journal Nature Climate Change. There's a map showing regions of the world, and pie charts of relevant studies as they apply to different health impacts like "heat-related deaths" and "maternal and child health"

🚨 NEW: Climate change is already causing 30,000 deaths per year - a global annual economic loss of $100-350B USD - but the true damage is probably 10x higher. Out TODAY in Nature Climate Change: the first systematic look at the science of "health impact attribution" 🔓 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I’m setting up a Discord server for young herpetologists, derived from an idea at #SEH2025. The goal is to create a space for quick help, collaboration, and networking. If you’d like to give input or get involved, let me know!

#herpetology

i'm livid we live in a world where this isn't about people with passionate opinions about herpetology

anxiously waiting 😬

Demand some fucking resignations

Me: this is great, glad to see authors ripped off by AI getting their due.

Me after using the search tool: I am one of these ripped off authors.

Academics, it only takes a minute. Seven of my papers are in this and I had no idea.

saw a blue salmon swimming upstream to spawn today

The Global Burden of Climate Change Study Working Group

We may have a one-year postdoctoral position opening! We're looking for someone with experience in attribution science OR very strong skills in climate epidemiology to come help us launch a Global Burden of Climate Change Study. Remote possible for the right person; aim to raise $ for a second year.

🐍 Florida has 500+ invasive species!
We're studying public views on 13 of these "iconic" wildlife species ranging from herps, fish, birds, and mammals— covering your knowledge, opinions & support for management.

⏳️8–10 min confidential survey (IRB #ET00022350).

Open to all not just FL residents

Real talk: our lab is at the cutting edge of tracking climate change-related deaths, and we have exactly $0 of external funding to do it. We're getting $0 from NIH and NSF for the next few years. If you're able to materially support our work, it keeps projects like HAL alive.

Database — The Health Attribution Library

We maintain the only living database of studies that measure the present-day health impacts of climate change. Please share, and support our work if you can - elbow grease and cash both go a long way for climate-health labs right now. (8/?) www.healthattribution.org/database

CHILDREN OF MEN is going to place “surprisingly” high on the NYT Best Movies of the Century list (like #7) and it’s going to formally occasion the Strange New Respect that we all know is coming so I just want to say I have been riding for that movie since I was a sophomore in high school

I am surrounded by people who are outsourcing their own thinking to ChatGPT and they are quickly and obviously becoming dependent on it for even the most banal tasks. Once again, the "figuring it out" is the important part. Yes, you can use a crane to lift weights but you will not get stronger

I have a PhD and can’t afford to pay for my own healthcare.

Since graduating/no longer working as a TA, I have lost my health insurance. Because I made/make/will make so little, I qualify for Medicaid. I’m hoping to be employed again soon but who knows with the current state of federal funding?

I don’t know if this will happen but if it does, I see it as an extension of this super flawed but pervasive idea that our PRIMARY (only?) identity is being a scientist and that we should do anything, go anywhere, in service of THAT identity, over all others. For many of us, that simply isn’t true

must be incredibly frustrating and disheartening to have federal funding that was promised to you for important work suddenly and arbitrarily ripped away

this is a day for those of us who have spent the last six months terminally online. this is for us and honestly, we deserve it.

Results of a DNA gel electrophoresis

We are so back

Title and author list of a new publication out in Frontiers in Amphibian and Reptile Science, titled "A novel PCR assay and sampling techniques for the detection of Raillietiella orientalis"

Congratulations to
@jenna-n-palmisano.bsky.social and the rest of the team on a really cool pub! This novel PCR assay majorly increases our ability to detect the invasive parasite Raillietiella orientalis in North American snakes from fecal samples and cloacal swabs.
doi.org/10.3389/famr...

Everything sucks, but I had a reviewer give respectful, pertinent feedback that will make my paper better. So. Small wins.

Congratulations Dr. Vagell!

I wish more people understood that grants aren’t handouts. They are payments for services the government can’t provide without contracting with nonprofits & universities. We are out here doing the work of keeping people safe and the country functioning. The government needs us. The country needs us.

Congratulations, Dr. Salazar!! 🎉

I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but the orcas now have two F/A-18 Hornets

The "yeah that sucks" and nothing else from a lot of tenured professors regarding the impact of federal funding cuts is giving "thoughts and prayers"