Amy E. Baxter, PhD

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

🧪 Here is a resource that tracks federal grants that have been terminated.
grant-watch.us

"Women are PIs on 58% of the canceled grants, although they are PIs on only 34% of all active NSF grants.

Similarly, Blacks are PIs on 17% of the terminated grants, although they make only 4% of the total pool. Hispanic PIs and those with disabilities were twice as likely to lose a grant."

“The political environment in Russia made it hard to do science because everything was unpredictable. […] That type of uncertainty is incompatible with science, which requires the ability to plan what type of experiments and research you will do a year into the future.”

U.S. scientists’ lives and careers are being upended. Here are five of their stories As the second Trump administration sends U.S. science into upheaval, countless researchers are fighting for their futures

It was a privilege to help tell the stories of U.S. scientists whose lives have been upended during the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s administration in this recent piece for @science.org

Cover of The Lancet's April 26, 2025 issue. Quote on cover reads: "The pursuit of rigorous medical science is not compatible with capitulation to government demands aimed at weaponising and eroding science."

🆕 'Supporting medical science in the USA'

Read the latest Lancet Editorial: tinyurl.com/2ra3r7e8

📖 Full issue: tinyurl.com/5n74jjn7

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

What DEI threatens isn’t merit. It’s monopoly. Political science professor Hakeem Jefferson argues for DEI's importance to de-monopolizing universities.

A colleague at Stanford’s business school used The Stanford Daily to argue—poorly—against DEI. The piece was riddled with historical errors and left one searching for fact, so I broke my public writing hiatus to respond.

I hope you’ll read and share the piece.

stanforddaily.com/2025/04/22/w...

‘Never mind’ is used as a conjunction to mean "let alone" and, imperatively, to suggest disregard.
-“Never mind him.”

‘Nevermind’ is a noun meaning "concern.”
-"Pay him no nevermind."

‘Never mind’ is currently more common as two words.

Here we are now, entertain us.

New images could change cancer diagnostics, but ICE detained the Harvard scientist who analyzes them Without scientist Kseniia Petrova’s expertise, no one can fully unlock the data’s potential, putting crucial advancements in early cancer detection at risk.

Almost every line of this story would have been simply unbelievable a few months ago:

—Pioneering cancer researcher;
—*Arrested* at airport in Boston;
—Now indefinite ICE detention in Louisiana;
—"Crime": not declaring some frog-embryo samples for research.

Read it.
www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

A screengrab from Twitter. HeatherLhaney @heather_l... asks: “Why do you think we have so many more kids with Autism” David Dennis Jr. @DavidDTSS quotetweets this reply: “Probably for the same reason there are so many more planets in outer space now than there were before the telescope was invented”

Staple this to RFK Jr’s forehead.

🚀🚀

When my students ask me "what was the most significant change in the last 100 years?" they always expect me to say "the Internet" or "space travel." But most Americans fundamentally don't understand either "some of your siblings will die young" or "women are pregnant or nursing for 1/2 their lives."

Tariffs xkcd.com/3073

How Measles Attacks an Unvaccinated Child With falling vaccination rates and outbreaks that have caused more than 580 U.S. cases and at least one death, health experts expect hundreds or even thousands more to be infected in the coming months...

Here is a look at how measles — one of the world’s most infectious viruses — takes over the body.

Another terrible day for young scientists. The NIH just sent termination notices for the MARC, PREP, IMSD, IRACDA and Bridges programs.

“We must dissent because America can do better.” Good to hear Wisconsin Judge Susan Crawford quote Justice Thurgood Marshall in her victory speech tonight.