Jibran Khokhar

NIH Leadership Is Failing Early Career Researchers Halted training programs, funding chaos, and hiring freezes jeopardize advancement options for early career researchers.

Over the past year, we have been enforcing our CBA amidst unprecedented attacks by the new administration. We have sought to work with the NIH amicably, but have been met with animosity. 11/n

I have a workshop on visual thinking and it’s just amazing how much fear some people have about creating even simple flow charts or stick figure drawings.

Some irony that fear of making a bad figure might lead some to use AI to create really bad figures

Excited to host this webinar highlighting the wonderful work of @katenautiyal.bsky.social’s group! make sure to tune in next week!

Why can’t people (especially scientists) see that AI generated figures and diagrams shout out that they were AI generated and look awful? You’ve spend many months designing and performing experiments only to cover the resulting masterpiece in clear plastic like a cheap sofa.

But single digit success rates vs double digit success rates with artificially constrained application numbers is a distinction without a difference in terms of impact on the research environment.

Agreed! Lottery would be the most fair!

With this level of application pressure something has to give or we are staring at single digit success rates. There is simply no deterministic way to pick the top 8-10%. The fairest is a score threshold lottery. But queue the cacophony of protests.

The 3 strikes thing is interesting because grants with average scores of 4.2 are going ND in the recent 60%+ triage rate. The bottom/top category is already rife with biases which this might just amplify!

We made a highly blue-light resistant red-fluorescent genetically encoded calcium sensor GECI) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

BluePrint™ 🗺️ below:

Exclusive: Iranian girls killed by ‘double-tap’ strikes on Minab school Eyewitnesses describe second blast which killed survivors as they sheltered in prayer hall

The girls’ school in Iran, where 165 people were killed by an apparent US-Israeli attack, was hit with two strikes, with the second missile killing sheltering survivors, two first responders and the parent of a slain child have told Middle East Eye.

Text from Canadian government about prohibition on use of AI for grant review. Key sentence highlighted in yellow: “therefore, use of publicly available online tools for evaluating grant applications is strictly prohibited “

Is CIHR not adhering to federal policy re grant review and use of AI ?? i.e. prohibiting use of publicly available tools?

I know some reviewers won’t. But CIHR itself??

science.gc.ca/site/science...

They already get triaged heavily so might as well!

Did the modelling include sending ECRs onto ice floes?

My feedback to the University Delegates meeting where various options were being discussed. Competition frequency. Please, please stick to the current two competitions per year.

🤯😱 FWIW, here’s part of my feedback to the UD meeting where various options were being discussed.

Increases to tricouncil budgets (CIHR, SSHRC and NSERC) announced in Budget 2024. This is back loaded with an extra $207MM to CIHR in FY2028 and $305 million in FY2029 (not counting the 2% reduction in Budget 2025). Actual total TC numbers: FY 2025; 745; 2026; 153: 2027; 286: 2028; 517: 2029; 764. These add up to $1,795MM additional funds for the tricouncils over the time frame, reduced by ~$36MM in last years budget.

The inexorable cycle of increase in application pressure and decrease in funding rate is causing CIHR to consider multiple options. I don’t think this is seriously being considered but something has to change and I am doubtful there is money waiting aside from the budget 2024 allocation.

And/or somehow make the peer review committee system work better?

Hard to imagine anyone who has been involved with peer review at CIHR as a reviewer or as an applicant would
think this could be a bright idea

It is definitely being considered and panel chairs were presented some modeling at their recent meeting!

Is this something that's being considered because they think it will make success rates look higher (it won't), reduce application pressure (it will increase it), or part of general "austerity" in the bureaucracy (false economy)?

The molecular basis of force selectivity by PIEZO2 Nature - PIEZO2 is intrinsically more rigid than PIEZO1, and disparate mechanical stimuli paradoxically evoke opposite conformational and gating responses in each channel.

New paper from the lab led by @ericmulhall.bsky.social addresses how PIEZO1 and PIEZO2 are tuned to different types mechanical forces. From nanometer-scale super-resolution microscopy to in vivo experiments, links single-molecule observations to physiological function.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fraction of CIHR grant holders with 1, 2 or more grants (circa 2015).

True but even in the good old “reform” days (~2015) over 70% of CIHR grantees had one grant.

Yes.
My #NORDP colleagues like
@igrrrl.bsky.social
@azfaust.bsky.social
@raddrrach.bsky.social
could tell many stories ☹️

In 2025 things changed @ NIH. It's possible my colleagues and I over-represent areas of research heavily targeted (e.g., vaccination, gender & women's health, health equity) for elimination by US regime, but overall US rsch $ was way down last year & foreign subgrants halted at least temporarily.

I haven’t seen reports.
UBC ORS data don’t show a major decrease in US # grants or $$ between 2020-2025.

But we (my group) haven’t done an NIH in maybe 3 years.

15% even seems optimistic based on recent competitions (not all proj grant, some team/op/catalyst). Have we seen any documentation yet regarding any changes in appln volume since US largely got out of the funding biz (at least in certain area).

The other thing that’s different is that one is allowed to hold >1 CIHR Operating/project grantS, so it USED to be a working strategy to offset the grant dates.
Now it’s an ongoing and brutal effort to get even 1 CIHR.

Exactly - and even that is tough if you don't get them. But for CIHR to go back to one a year (when did they do that, I can't remember?) with these success rates basically means that 87% of grants are not supported. Which is fine if you don't want there to be thriving research in your country 🤔😡

It’s interesting cos NSERC and SSHRC have one competition/ year.
BUT they also have funding rates of 30-50/60%!!

Oh my god - is this even being discussed again?!?! That would be catastrophic for Canadian science. Forget about all those fancy chairs, they would all bail. And the rest of us will fade into the mist...

Apparently you can double your success rate by making it 1 competition and improve peer review quality and reduce grant fatigue #CIHRMath