Ayokunle Olanrewaju

Alert: The Trump administration is quietly slashing new NIH grant awards, and it's not via the budget NIH’s sudden move to multiyear grant funding is forcing shocking cuts in the number of grants funded. This is an effective budget cut. It's bad, folks.

New, from an anonymous NIH insider: Trump is being pushed to spend more NIH money. The White House is ordering NIH to do multi-year budgets for awards. This budget trick means fewer awards, fewer labs funded, and lower paylines for researchers. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/alert-the-...

This album - and others from Do Make Say Think - got me through countless work sessions in grad school. Feels like a fast track to a flow state whenever I listen to it 

SMBE 2025 Faculty Award Winners SMBE is delighted to announce our 2025 Faculty Award Winners! Early-Career Excellence Award winner: Alison Feder Alison Feder is an Assistant Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washingt...

Congratulations to Alison Feder on receiving the SMBE 2025 Early-Career Excellence Award!
members.smbe.org/news/Details...

High-performance genetically-encoded green and red fluorescent biosensors for pyruvate Pyruvate is the end-product of glycolysis and a central metabolite involved in many biochemical pathways. However, a lack of high-performance (i.e., Δ F / F > 10) single fluorescent protein (FP)-base...

New tools! GreenPy and ApplePy are fluorescent biosensors for pyruvate with huge responses (20–40x in vitro) and a range of affinities (10s of μM to mM). These should be game changers for imaging of metabolism! Great work by Shosei Imai @sikmys.bsky.social and team 👏. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to share that our study, on how T cells selectively sense foreign antigens with single-molecule sensitivity, is out! This work was led by the brilliant Will White, and done in collaboration with Jay Groves and David Baker @uwproteindesign.bsky.social

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

'Neglected tropical diseases' now face even more neglect U.S. aid cuts could jeopardize the supply of donated drugs that are hailed for their effectiveness in combating neglected diseases like river blindness, schistosomiasis and trachoma.

A particularly cruel effect of cutting funding for tropical diseases is that a billion dollars worth of donated drugs are about to go to waste. #NotEfficient
www.npr.org/sections/goa...

Massive NIH study challenges use of race as a proxy for genetic ancestry in research A large government study shows that Americans’ self-reported race is a poor proxy for their genetic ancestry.

Fascinating and important work. Too bad that “all communication related to the paper is under review by HHS, and we do not have approval to participate in press interviews” according to one of the authors.

What happened to #FreeSpeech?

www.statnews.com/2025/06/05/n... via @statnews.com

I'm a current Harvard graduate student and I found out today that I had my NSF GRFP terminated without notification. I was awarded this individual research fellowship before even choosing Harvard as my graduate school

So sorry Michael 😞

I wrote this in a week where it felt like professoring while parenting (and equally, parenting while professoring) was impossible. This feeling ebbs and flows. Seems like Mothers Day is as good a time as any to share, maybe it will help someone else feel less alone.

The More Paradox
1/8

Congratulations!

NSF slashes prestigious PhD fellowship awards by half US National Science Foundation announces lowest number of Graduate Research Fellowship Programme recipients in 15 years.

NSF will award ~1,000 instead of their usual ~2,000 Graduate Research Fellowships this year.

NSF slashes prestigious PhD fellowship awards by half www.nature.com/articles/d41...

You're welcome. @jeremymberg.bsky.social also keeps a list here: jeremymberg.github.io/jeremyberg.g...

Suffice to say - if you are a local philanthropist and would like to see infectious disease surveillance continue here in San Diego County, please reach out.

Without continued support, we'll lose our eyes on infectious diseases in our county, just as they're likely to surge.

Email on website 👇.

Airtable | Everyone's app platform Airtable is a low-code platform for building collaborative apps. Customize your workflow, collaborate, and achieve ambitious outcomes. Get started for free.

airtable.com/appjhyo9NTvJ...

Here’s one via @scott-delaney.bsky.social

CDC’s top laboratory on sexually transmitted diseases is shut by Trump administration The Trump administration fired everyone in a CDC lab that is crucial to tracking drug-resistant gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases. "We are blind," an expert says.

"At a time when the world is down to a single drug that can reliably cure gonorrhea, the U.S. government has shuttered the country’s premier sexually transmitted diseases laboratory…& “no one should expect the private sector to step in to fill the gap… There is little money to be made in this arena”

Hot off the presses: big update to our work looking at how adaptive decoders influence neural representations.

We added heroic analyses to show in both experiments & models that the structure of what the brain learns is altered by adaptive decoders. Check it out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

So sorry Chrystal :(

The Quiet Way the NIH Is Stalling Some Research Before It Starts A number of grant proposals have disappeared from scientists’ review pipelines, with little explanation. Applicants are bewildered and frustrated.

SCOOP: You've heard about the NIH terminating grants. I've learned of another, less visible way it's disrupting science: It’s removing some applications from peer review. Not rejecting them, but putting them on hold without saying why or if they'll ever be reviewed. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

😔

🤞🏾🤞🏾

Photo of four UW BioE faculty with the Capitol in the background

Visiting 9 WA legislative offices today with some awesome BioE colleagues to stand up for science! #AIMBE2025 @uwbioe.bsky.social @neuroamyo.bsky.social @lizwaynephd.bsky.social

Had an eye opening day on Capitol Hill with my @uwbioe.bsky.social colleagues. We advocated for science by explaining how federal investment in research advances healthcare & trains our workforce! 💪

Bonuses:
rode the Senate train TWICE 🚂
👀 many offices carefully decorated with UW & WSU gear 🏈

There is still time to apply for this funded postdoc position! 👇🏾Applicants must apply using the link in the original post below to be considered. Please apply if interested!

Mother and daughter smiling while holding a book titled "Sam is my Sister"

🚨 ALL my remaining NIH grants were just terminated

Without philanthropic gifts, this is the end of
1️⃣ my career (as I know it)
2️⃣ @lgbtqhealthexce.bsky.social
3️⃣ our LGBTQ health equity work

Yet, reading about LGBTQ families in my kid's class reminded me: love knows no bounds 🌈

You with us?

Incredible opportunity to study some fundamental science that leads to direct translation with a great mentor!

There are days in life that shake you.

I’m shattered 💔 to share that I just found out that the US Government terminated my 2024 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (~$2 million), threatening my long-promised assistant professor job at Columbia University
& academic career... 1/🧵

It’s been a devastating 24 hours with 3 NIH grants terminated…all focused on the health and wellbeing of trans or intersex youth. If folks have any ideas of foundations that may be interested in supporting the completion of these projects so years of work aren’t wasted, please let me know. 🙏

💔

Today I lost an NIH grant training clinicians to do research about intimate partner violence with perinatal women.

More women are murdered in the perinatal period than die of obstetric complications.

I didn't just lose a grant. We lost an entire cohort of people building careers to prevent that.