Ayokunle Olanrewaju

LONG RAMBLING EMOTIONAL THREAD:

It's World AIDS Day. Since the Administration has decided to keep it quiet, I'd like to share my introduction to AIDS.

I grew up in Seattle. My mom remarried a man who had a brother who was a King County Sheriff's Deputy. His name was Terry and he was gay. 1/x

White background, red ribbon. Text says “World AIDS Day”.

My wife has been HIV+ for 34 years. She’s alive today b/c work of activists who destigmatized the virus, pushed medical science to adapt & find ways to treat it, & advocated for gov health programs that helped fund her care. The current U.S. regime may want to go back in time, but we won’t let them.

Someone get me (genetic epidemiologist) & my husband (school psychologist) on a podcast bc our rants on these people are...fiery. We spent 5y in the bay around these folks and oh boy.

I'm also so sick of these puff pieces that avoid saying plainly what this actually is. Shoddy science for eugenics.

AIDS Activism, A Playbook For Global Health Advocacy AIDS activism was exceptionally successful. Other areas of global health can and must use the AIDS activism playbook.

On #WorldAIDSDay we remember the incredible activism that turned the tide on this deadly epidemic in the past

I’m sad that funding cuts by G7 nations are making such activism necessary yet again

www.forbes.com/sites/madhuk...

Sorry for the super late reply. Added

Happy Pre-Thanksgiving weekend everyone! In the spirit of overindulgence I invite you all to feast on a cornucopia of Arey lab preprints (okay only two)! And fittingly their themes happen to be in the realm food and drink! Settle down next to the metaphorical fire as I share the stories...

😞😱

Thank you.

Congratulations 🎉

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
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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-...

😔

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