Cole Brookson

Come work with us!! Great group and super cool work 😎

Pathways to an Intergovernmental Panel on Pandemics: lessons from the IPCC and IPBES Colin J Carlson, Christopher H Trisos, Ben Oppenheim, Shweta Bansal, Sara E Davies, Aïda Diongue-Niang, Victoria Y Fan, John D Kraemer, Rachel Golden Kroner, Lawrence O Gostin, David T S Hayman, Marion Koopmans, Torre E Lavelle, Carlos G das Neves, Zoe O’Donoghue, Laura M Pereira, Benjamin Roche, Matiangai Sirleaf, Kayla Zamanian, Carlos Zambrana-Torrelio, Alexandra L Phelan Pandemics pose a global threat to human wellbeing, justice, economies, and ecosystems and are comparable with other planetary crises such as climate change and biodiversity loss in terms of urgency and impact. The global community would benefit from a dedicated scientific synthesis body to assess pandemic risks and solutions. In this Personal View, we explore proposals for an Intergovernmental Panel on Pandemics and assess potential pathways to its creation. Learning lessons from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) might help national governments and international organisations to chart a course through important decisions about format, governance, operations, scientific scope and process, and ability to recommend policies that make the world safer.

🚨 Very, very big news. Today, a global coalition - including members of the IPCC, IPBES, and WHO expert advisors, as well as independent virologists, epidemiologists, and lawyers - started the process of creating an "IPCC for Pandemics."

🔓 www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
🧵 Five things to know 👉

It's hard to overstate how devastating these cuts will be for our incredible group of people working on these important questions.

Some difficult news from the team: In NSF's FY25-26 Budget Request to Congress, we learned that our program will take a whopping 50% cut - meaning that in September, we'll be $1.25m short of an operating budget that currently supports a cohort of seven PhD students, four postdocs, and three full-time staff. Verena is one of the largest and last pandemic prevention-focused programs in the United States: since 2020, we've supported the training of over 60 postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates. Our researchers have established unique laboratory resources for studying animal immune systems, and discovered new antiviral immune adaptations in bats; developed risk assessment algorithms for wildlife and livestock viruses, and diagnostic algorithms for viruses like dengue, Ebola, and Zika; and quantified the effects of climate change, deforestation, and factory farming on spillover risk. Everything we develop is 100% open source, and our data has supported the research of nearly 150 external researchers in 21 countries to date. We have three months to make up our budget shortfall. Every dollar spent on Verena supports not just our team, but the community of researchers who use our data, code, and resources. You can help us by sharing this post, and reaching out if you're able to support a unique and vulnerable program. Or just head over to viralemergence.org, and take a look at what we do. 🦟 🦇 🦠

An update from the team on the uncertain future of our program and the impact of NSF budget cuts. Please share and reach out 🦠

Do you write code? Do you wonder why we don't review code like we review writing? Well, we should :) Led by @jpeters7.bsky.social, we wrote some guidelines and resources for reviewing code, check it out! ecoforecast.org/resources-fo...

Little known, recently discovered fact:

Measles wipes out immune protections OTHER diseases: many who recover actually face big future risk.

Earlier measles may be implicated in HALF OF ALL LATER CHILDHOOD DEATHS from ALL infectious diseases before vaccines.

Gift🔗👉
www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/o...

FWIW, the reason "academia had it coming" is usually some thinly veiled version of (1) my colleagues keep making fun of my shitty race science, (2) people called me an asshole for saying false things about COVID, or (3) mommy says I'm a very clever boy but my professors didn't appreciate my genius.

This a summary of last part o my Ph.D. We investigated how temperature can affect the outcome of dengue infection.

The study covers a 10y period in all five regions of Brasil and all sub-climates of the country

We conclude that higher temperature makes risk of hospitalizations due dengue bigger!

Ten quick tips to build a Model Life Cycle

The Data Life Cycle is a useful narrative device to understand how data flow within a project. But understanding how it fits with complex model pipelines has been awkward. So we wrote a thing! It's called the Model Life Cycle, and it's now out in PLOS Comp Biol: 🧪
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

NEW: Census Bureau working papers on poverty measurement--research the public paid for and has a right to access--have been removed.

Example analysis of "Alternative School Lunch Valuation in the 2022 Supplemental Poverty Measure" is missing
www.census.gov/content/dam/...

Just got a story approved to run on Monday on the crisis happening at the NSF.

If you are an NSF-funded scientist and have been personally impacted by the funding pause this week, I'd love to hear from you.

Reach me securely on Signal: 3162958947

Agree! The NIH and academic institutions are rushing to implement changes and freezes in response to executive orders that could be illegal or rescinded in days. Maybe we should push back a little, yeah?🧪

Newton International Fellowships | Royal Society This fellowship is for non-UK scientists who are at an early stage of their research career and wish to conduct research in the UK.

If you're a non-UK scientist who wants to come to the UK for a postdoc, this year's Newton Fellowships are now open. You'll need a lab to host you (which could be me, but truly, could be any PI, so get in touch with someone you'd like to work with!)

royalsociety.org/grants/newto...

Chat, is science political now?

Another priority, according to Vought, was to “defund” certain independent federal agencies and demonize career civil servants, which include scientists and subject matter experts. Project 2025’s plan to revive Schedule F, an attempt to make it easier to fire a large swath of government workers who currently have civil service protections, aligns with Vought’s vision. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. “We want to put them in trauma.”

Who is Russell Vought?

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains....We want to put them in trauma.”

www.propublica.org/article/vide...

NSF PRFB POSTDOCS:

Pull the remainder of this funding cycle’s stipend, all remaining research funds, and all remaining travel funds (if you have them). Do it before 5PM today. Per instructions from multiple NSF POs.

If you’re not already on the PRFB slack, DM me and I’ll send you an invite

If you are an environmental researcher and have been negatively affected by the pause / suspension of federal funds (for research or programs) — please LET ME KNOW.

I am writing a story about this ASAP for The New Lede / The Guardian.

Welcome to the United States of Suppression Our new series documents the recent crackdown on dissent and protests in the U.S.

"where are all the protests?"

read our series showing the legacy of both the Trump and Biden admins—from BLM in the 2010s, to Standing Rock, to George Floyd, to the Palestine encampments—as protest suppression and criminalization. politicians want to call blocking traffic and masking "terrorism."

Kansas tuberculosis outbreak now largest in US Sixty-seven active TB cases and 79 latent TB cases have been reported in 2 Kansas counties since the beginning of 2024.

While all this insane grant freezing is going on, Kansas currently has the largest TB outbreak in US *history* going on right now. www.cidrap.umn.edu/tuberculosis...

This is truly insane to see happening. Not all that surprising, but definitely insane — cannot imagine how folks are supposed to deal with this

a illustration of our standard kitchen onion, Allium cepa, from 1586. Handcolored engraving

a black and white photograph of a white man in a suit, holding stalks of some plant, possibly corn or some sort of grain. Photo depicts Nikolai Vavilov (1887 - 1943)

The world has been through anti-science cycles before, to disastrous results

On a detour on my lit review, a mosey through the history of our familiar friend, the standard onion (Allium cepa) brought me right to one of botany's greatest cautionary tales of what happens when ideology overrides data

Ecologists (or similar)!!! Apply for the @asn-amnat.bsky.social Student Research Awards by March 14!! Ten awards of $2K each will be given to research that advances the the conceptual unification of ecology, evolution, or behavior. More here: bit.ly/asn_grant_25

Back 2017 I wrote about a just-leaked style guide for a popular neo-Nazi publication. I call it “Strunk and White Power” and “The ‘half-joking’ advice and much else in the guide is: ‘Don the Magic Cloak of Plausible Deniability and come with us!’”

Today the Trump admin abruptly and indefinitely terminated many of the activities of the National Institutes of Health, the $50B/year collection of agencies that power the US biotech and health ecosystems. Even if these orders were lifted tomorrow, the disruption would be enormous.

Why care? 🧵

Photo of MLK with quote, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

As we honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. today, we reflect on his legacy of advancing equity, dismantling systemic injustice, and serving those in need.

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This Climate Visualization Belongs in a Damn Museum

In 2018, @blkahn.bsky.social said that the warming stripes graphic 'belongs in a damn museum', even suggesting that it was 'fit for the Museum of Modern Art' (see gizmodo.com/this-climate...).

Well...

Later this month, they will appear in the Museum of Modern Art: press.moma.org/exhibition/p...