Amy E. Baxter, PhD

Wow.

Not something you see in textbooks very often: tripolar mitosis.

In 2025, departures of govt scientists outnumbered new hires by a ratio of 11 to 1. This reduction in STEM PhDs translates to 106k yrs of federal work experience across 10,000 employees. These talents will take their expertise elsewhere. Experience is indispensable.
🧪 www.science.org/content/arti...

“Hey, can we just talk about life right now without bringing up politics?”

“I want to know talk about human biology but can we just ignore blood and bones? And also organs. Tissue as well.”

“I just want to focus on matter itself and not carbon. Can you just leave carbon out of everything?”

U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office A Science analysis reveals how many were fired, retired, or quit across 14 agencies

Incredible self own for the US. The damage being done to the US scientific enterprise is generational. We will look back on this as a tipping point where the US chose all on its own to stop leading the world in science.

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

Do you know how hard it is to get cops to seemingly side with people shot by a bunch of officers

I just spoke with the White House after another horrific shooting by federal agents this morning. Minnesota has had it. This is sickening.

The President must end this operation. Pull the thousands of violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota. Now.

Four-time Grammy Award nominee Jesse Welles performs his song "Join Ice."

Bob Dylan once said a single folk singer could defeat an entire army. Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have our man.

Dr Kareem Carr man: i wish to publish @kareem_carr Jan 21 reviewer 2: your paper is no good man: i'll do anything to improve reviewer 2: it's simple. you must read the work of the great scientist Pagliarini man: *bursts into tears* but i am Pagliarini Andre Pagliarini @apagliar Jan 21 a first: in rejecting an article I submitted to a journal, reviewer 2 noted I failed to engage the work of one Andre Pagliarini Jan 21, 2026 • 3:47 PM UTC

I just thought everyone should see this

Black-and-white close-up portrait of young Sophia Jex-Blake, a woman with dark center-parted hair pulled back smoothly, gazing thoughtfully to the side. Painted by Samuel Laurence around 1865, she wears a high-collared dark dress with a light collar, set against a softly shaded background.

Dr. Sophia Jex-Blake was born #OTD in 1840

+ Led the campaign to secure women access to a university education in the UK
+ First practicing woman doctor in Scotland
+ Founder, Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, 1886
+ Helped establish the London School of Medicine for Women, 1874

#WomenInSTEM

FDA deletes warning on bogus autism therapies touted by RFK Jr.‘s allies The agency used to warn of chelation, used by RFK Jr.'s anti-vaccine ally David Geier.

There’s a big story everyone is missing—but this article hits on it.

We aren’t just seeing public health dismantled bc we’ve been taken over by conspiracy theorists and lunatics.

What we’re really seeing is the giant, predatory, underegulated wellness industry come to Washington.

The media needs to stop writing headlines like “The CDC changes course on vaccines and autism” and “The CDC defends measles response”.

NONE of this is coming from legitimate scientists at the CDC.

ALL of it is coming from RFK Jr.

Every such headline is causing further harm to public health.

Really excited to share this work from the @laura-a-vella.bsky.social and @derek-oldridge.bsky.social labs, led by an amazing MD/PhD student! Sam asked if Tfh spatially localised within germinal centers have distinct gene expression programs & identified GNG4 as a key feature of GC-positioned Tfh.

If women are underrepresented in STEM, it's at least partly because men like this offer mentoring, then embarrass themselves by assuming their mentees must be into them, then decide the best solution is to cut ties, which sends the signal to other faculty that the mentee must not be good enough.

Paul Nurse describing the main job of a PI

(From ‘The Thinking Game’, 2024)

What makes PhD students happy? Good supervision Supervisors who invest in positive mentoring relationships with their PhD candidates also reap the benefits for their own research.

"...researchers who invest time in their students tend to lead more-productive, more-collaborative groups and attract stronger future students than those who do not." "Time spent with the next generation of scientists is an investment."
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪

Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students.

I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:

The Bay Area Reporter front page, 13 August 1998. The headline ‘No obits’ is written in red above the lead story.

27 years ago, two years after the introduction of effective HIV treatment, the Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco’s lesbian and gay community newspaper, ran ‘No Obits’ as its headline.
It was the first edition not to report an AIDS death in almost 15 years.

As always, Ted Chiang is great in this interview.
cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

Opinion | Jay Bhattacharya: Why the NIH is pivoting away from mRNA vaccines As a vaccine for broad public use, mRNA technology has failed to earn the public’s trust.

I cannot emphasize enough that the playbook being used against mRNA vaccines (and vaccines in general) is IDENTICAL to the playbook used to restrict voting rights after the 2020 election: actively sow public distrust, then cite the distrust you sowed as an independent reason for your desired policy

kennedy is going to kill a lot of people

This is moving.

Kamala Harris feels the pain we feel. Not just from her loss, but from the trauma and abuse our country is living through.

What could have been…

‘Something remarkable has happened’: Cancer treatments bolster evidence of a natural HIV cure In exclusive chat with Science, Loreen Willenberg describes remaining HIV-free even after immune-suppressing therapies for brain and lung tumors

In an exclusive chat with Science, Loreen Willenberg describes remaining HIV-free even after immune-suppressing therapies for brain and lung tumors. scim.ag/4lYu3pl

NASA is more than rockets and moonwalks. NASA is behind much of our everyday technology. From space discovery, to Air Jordans, to CAT scans, NASA has played a role. We get it all on less than a penny of every federal dollar. Now their science may be gutted by 50%.
#NASADidThat

1/2 You could write a book about one atrocious headline in print NYT today

(I sort of wrote this book 30 years ago, Breaking the News, but others can take a turn.)

What's wrong this headline? Mamdani "faces scrutiny" **ONLY AND EXCLUSIVELY** because NYT decided to make this a "thing."

Really bad.

Share Your “Why” In Support of a Strong National Institutes of Health United for Medical Research (UMR) is launching a campaign called "My Why" to highlight the critical role of NIH funding and its impact on the education and careers of researchers and scientists as wel...

Behind every cure, every breakthrough, every treatment — is someone who needed it.

If NIH funding helped you, your research, or someone you love, your story can help protect it.

Share your “why” and help defend the future of NIH & science.

Fill out the form here:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

say it again:

4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities

ROI for NIH and NSF for local economies is conservatively 4x, often close to 10x

demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, recently used my second-place finish in the 1,600-meter run, and that of my teammate in the 800-meter run, to malign Soren Stark-Chessa, the trans-identified athlete who finished first. One of the reasons I chose to run cross-country and track is the community: Teammates cheering each other on, athletes from different schools coming together, and the fact that personal improvement is valued as much as, if not more than, the place we finish. Last Friday, I ran the fastest 1,600-meter race I have ever run in middle school or high school track and earned varsity status by my school’s standards. I am extremely proud of the effort I put into the race and the time that I achieved. The fact that someone else finished in front of me didn’t diminish the happiness I felt after finishing that race. I don’t feel like first place was taken from me. Instead, I feel like a happy day was turned ugly by a bully who is using children to make political points. We are all just kids trying to make our way through high school. Participating in sports is the highlight of high school for some kids. No one was harmed by Soren’s participation in the girls’ track meet, but we are all harmed by the hateful rhetoric of bullies, like Rep. Libby, who want to take sports away from some kids just because of who they are. Anelise Feldman Freshman, Yarmouth High School Yarmouth

this is a letter to the editor from a high school track runner who came in second to a trans girl in a race. her state house rep in maine started talking about it. so she wrote this: www.pressherald.com/2025/05/14/r...

HBO max logo evolution

PI: "this draft is so great, why didn't we write it this way in the first place??"

PhD student: "I did, and then you told me to change it"

The worst happened. We were DOGE’d. Our NSF funding is gone.

So now there’s nothing stopping me from sharing Expert Voices Together, a crisis response system for US-based researchers and journalists facing harassment.

It's a true passion project. 🧵 1/

expertvoicestogether.org