Carolyn Phillips

‘Completely shattered.’ Changes to NSF’s graduate student fellowship spur outcry The announcement comes months later than usual, leaving many would-be applicants stranded

Today was a hard day for Ph.D. students who found out that they can no longer apply for NSF's prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program. "Devastating“ was how one student described it to me. #GradSchool #NSFGRFP

www.science.org/content/arti...

A book cover with a strand of RNA on a pink background, with the title, authors name, and publisher.

I did a thing. I wrote a textbook about #RNA. I wrote it so that those without formal science training could understand what RNA is and how it is used in medicine. It releases in the US and Europe on September 8th. www.worldscientific.com/worldscibook...

Sign the IMPEACH RFK Citizens' Petition to Congress — STAND UP FOR SCIENCE Join with us to sign our Citizens' Petition to the US Congress to choose the people over Trump and Impeach RFK Jr Now!

Sign the petition to call for the removal of RFK, Jr.

www.standupforscience.net/rfk-impeachm...

The US could see a 30-40% decline in new international student enrollment, resulting in nearly $7 billion in lost revenue and more than 60,000 fewer American jobs. https://www.nafsa.org/fall-2025-international-student-enrollment-outlook-and-economic-impact

Trump freezes $200 million in UCLA science and medical research funding, citing antisemitism The Trump administration has frozen roughly $200 million in National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and other federal agency-funded research at UCLA, citing allegations the school d...

Suspension of all grants to UCLA www.latimes.com/california/s...

A Quiet Policy Shift That Could Devastate American Science Why NIH’s sudden move to multi-year grant funding should alarm every principal investigator and university

A little known - but hugely consequential - part of the government’s changes to science funding:

open.substack.com/pub/sciencea...

RFK Jr. Says AI Will Approve New Drugs at FDA 'Very, Very Quickly'

This is a catastrophe in the making

gizmodo.com/rfk-jr-says-...

Go worms! #worm25

Huge thanks to Cathy Savage-Dunn @cswormlab.bsky.social and Baris Tursun @baristursun.bsky.social for an amazing #worm25 !!

I want to call out the OUTSTANDING meeting they created! Talks and posters were A+++. Most of all they brought us together in one of the most challenging times we've had.

c. elegans, ba-ba-bah #worm25

Trump preparing large-scale cancellation of federal funding for California, sources say | CNN Politics The Trump administration is preparing to cancel a large swath of federal funding to California, an effort which could begin as soon as Friday, according to multiple sources.

CNN story updated with specifics:

"the administration is specifically considering a full termination of federal grant funding for the University of California and California State University systems.

A White House official said Friday afternoon that no final decision had been made on the cuts."

Dear lord: "On Capitol Hill, at least one committee was told recently by a whistleblower that all research grants to the state were going to be cancelled."

The U of Cali system alone accounts for $4B+ per year in federal R&D. If true, let's hope for another all-or-nothing fight like Harvard's.

Opinion | Trump is killing one of our strongest exports The president wants to balance U.S. trade deficits? He can’t do it without this industry he hates.

Now there's a memorable stat!

"Colleges and universities are among America’s most competitive international exporters. In dollar terms, last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined."

wapo.st/3EvzMCI

in these bleak times for US science and society, it was so wonderful to connect and celebrate with Ruvkun lab members from the decades. i can't believe postdocs and students i met 33 yrs ago in college still remember me. thanks Gary for giving me a chance and showing me everything cool in science!

Great 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...

DOGE Orders HHS to Cut 35% of Contract Spending In one email obtained by NOTUS, NIH employees were told they could not “use mission criticality as a justification to not make cuts.”

Trump and Musk are demanding NIH cut 35% of contracts.

That will devastate NIH science and grant funding — many of the contracts support people doing extramural work, or extramural/grant databases.

Moreover, the number is bullshit. They just made it up. There is no need—and in fact, it's illegal.

STILL no New or Competing Renewal awards from NIGMS. Only NIGMS seems to not be making these awards.

Figure 3 B Representative confocal micrographs of pachytene nuclei expressing GFP::NDC1NPP-22 and PGL-1::tagRFP in germlines of the indicated genotypes.

FG repeats drive co-clustering of nuclear pores and P granules in the C. elegans germline

Read this #OpenAccess Research Article by Laura Thomas, Devavrat Bodas and Geraldine Seydoux:
doi.org/10.1242/dev....

It's going to be a brutal day at the NIH.

Never forget what the Republicans have done to science. I never want to hear that there is "bipartisan support for research" ever again.

Congress could step in at any moment.

Trump administration pausing $210 million in federal funding to Princeton University as it probes antisemitism on campus: report Princeton was one of 60 colleges and universities that the Department of Education’s civil rights arm warned earlier this month could have federal funding taken away over antisemitic discrimination…

It's our turn apparently. #thetop60 #winning
nypost.com/2025/04/01/u...

A scientist in Marc Kirschner's lab

The Chaos of NIH Cuts Has Left Early-Career Scientists Scrambling As graduate programs lose spots and labs face shutdowns following Trump administration cuts to science funding, the path to a science career for students and researchers just got a whole lot harder.

This is what breaks my heart. These young people who are so eager and full of promise and who are the next generation of Nobel Prize winners, scientists inventors, teachers. #Trump and #Musk have destroyed it all. www.wired.com/story/the-ch...

$25 C. elegans genomes!!! Let's do some forward genetic screens!

Tweet from rightwing economist celebrating Bhattacharya taking over NIH for the Trump regimr

This is a shocking lack of courage from Stanford.

Stanford is allowing Bhattacharya to go emeritus instead of calling him out—for all he got wrong on COVID and for all the rank garbage he wrote in rightwing sites from Epoch Times to NYPost Opinion.

Stanford will own the damage to NIH that he does.

Bill to ban all Chinese nationals from receiving US student visas causes alarm Legislation's sponsor claims it will prevent espionage, but there are warnings it will harm US competitiveness

One of my Bsky posts and a bit of my ranting in this article. Yet another bone-headed move aimed at destroying the American scientific enterprise.

www.chemistryworld.com/news/bill-to...

Report: mRNA vaccines are in RFK Jr’s crosshairs; funding in question “Kennedy’s war on vaccines has started,” one researcher said.

mRNA vaccines are legit a near-miracle tech, there's one in testing that might be able to cure pancreatic cancer, and this fucking degenerate might take them from us arstechnica.com/health/2025/...

DOGE ends America’s golden age of biomedical research Biomedical research impacts all of us. I became curious about how drugs work after my mom was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis when I was a small boy. She received “gold shots” as treatment, which ...

I’m a biomedical researcher who lost his wife to cancer. Finding cures is personal to me. What’s happening at the NIH is devastating. Here’s my editorial in my hometown newspaper.

www.vindy.com/opinion/edit...

Scientists have just cured pancreatic cancer in some patients with personalized mRNA vaccines. Pancreatic cancer. And this Trump administration wants to throw it all away.

They’re throwing away a cure for cancer.

Chuck Schumer Helps Pull Democrats Back From Brink Of Courage

Chuck Schumer Helps Pull Democrats Back From Brink Of Courage