Julia Willett

Some journals are claiming that you need to pay big $$ for gold open access to comply with NIH's new public access policy. FYI that is total bs. You can comply by depositing the Accepted Manuscript into PubMed Central on the Date of Publication without embargo. Pass it on.

Not just Big Bird: Things to know about the Center for Public Broadcasting and its funding cuts The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has long helped pay for PBS, NPR and 1,500 local radio and television stations and programs like “Sesame Street.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has long helped pay for PBS, NPR and 1,500 local radio and television stations and programs like “Sesame Street.

The suspensions landed perhaps most heavily in math. NSF suspended a $25 million grant for the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), an international center at UCLA that hosts about 2000 visiting researchers every year for workshops and other programs. One of its stars, Terence Tao, a Fields Medal winner frequently named as one of the greatest living mathematicians, also had his only NSF grant suspended. The $750,000 award was in its first year and supported Tao’s own research and a handful of graduate students in developing tools to tell whether a set of numbers is structured or random. Tao says he now cannot offer research assistant opportunities during the academic year, and he calls the cuts to IPAM “quite disastrous.”

NSF and NIH cut off almost 300 grants to UCLA. Story by @dangaristo.bsky.social www.science.org/content/arti...

Trump Administration Puts New Chokehold on Billions in Health-Research Funding The National Institutes of Health can’t award grants to outside researchers under a new White House restriction.

NEW
The White House is blocking the NIH from awarding new research grants for the rest of the fiscal year

Chokes off billions in research funding

Gift link www.wsj.com/politics/pol... with @nidhisubs.bsky.social

Given the lack of significant outrage, people are either unaware or believe they can weather this storm. The latter set reminds me of folks confident they would get on the lifeboats when the Titanic was sinking. At 5% success & a six-grant application limit, there aren't enough lifeboats. /2

MOSAIC scholars who had grants unjustly terminated that are now being reinstated, are likely to have them terminated again. The whiplash is unnerving and the career implications are starting to look bleak.

Where is the support of these and other early career scholars whose funding has been cut?

Project 2025 is gutting medical funding that helped Russell Vought's own kid Its architect's daughter has cystic fibrosis—and benefits from a "miracle drug" backed by an agency he's attacking.

Given his performance on @cnn.com, it’s time to tell this story again. Vought’s daughter is alive because of NIH. He’s destroying an institution that saved his daughter’s life. @mrjoncryer.bsky.social @jamellebouie.net @atrupar.com www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Kathryn Sullivan, PhD, is the only person to have both orbited the Earth and descended to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench.

In 1978 Sullivan was selected as one of six women in NASA Astronaut Group 8, the first to include women.

She was a crew member on three Space Shuttle missions, logging over 532 hours in space, and was the first American woman to walk in space.

On June 7, 2020, Sullivan became the first woman to dive into the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of Earth’s oceans.

Kathryn Sullivan, PhD, is the only person to have both orbited the Earth and descended to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench.
buff.ly/sOpPGba #WomenInSTEM

Excited to share this collaborative study with @ritatamayo.bsky.social showing that E. faecalis influences C. diff morphology through the phase variable CmrRST system! This work was co-led by the amazing team of @ashleyweiss.bsky.social and Jilarie Santos-Santiago!

Happy Birthday, Rosalind Franklin. She captured an X-ray diffraction image of DNA and stated that a helical structure was probable. Watson and Crick then created a detailed model based on her results. They initially received credit for the discovery and were awarded the Nobel Prize after her death.🧪

National Cancer Institute projection of a 4% pay line in FY2026.

Good grief, the US National Cancer Institute projects it will fund only one in 25 RO1 grant applications in 2026. This is massively defunding cancer research. Despicable vandalism. www.cancer.gov/grants-train...

Microbiology professor, want to join a slack for microbiology professors, any career stage, diverse career types (pure teaching, med school, R1, community college, pure research fed PIs, ...)

Message me for an invite link if you are interested.

No imposter syndrome, if you are 1% micro, join!

Brochado Lab Tübingen PLOS Biology

E. coli transport regulation

94 compounds tested

1 in 3 → transporter gene changes

Rob regulator plays a leading role

CAFFEINE upregulated efflux pumps and made bacteria more resistant to antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Fold first, ask later: structure-informed function annotation of Pseudomonas phage proteins Phages, the viruses of bacteria, harbor an incredibly diverse repertoire of proteins capable of manipulating their bacterial hosts, inspiring many medical and biotechnological applications. However, t...

📣 New preprint alert!

Happy to share the first results from our effort to reannotate Pseudomonas #phage proteins of unknown function, using structural bioinformatics.

📄 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Duke School of Medicine plans salary cuts for tenured faculty who do not meet grant expectations Set to go in effect in 2026, the proposed policy would apply to the School’s basic sciences units. These units rely heavily on grants from the National Institutes of Health, which have been increasing...

👀

What a time to propose this policy:

"Duke University School of Medicine (SOM) plans to implement new faculty productivity guidelines that would tie tenured professors’ salaries to external research funding, according to documents reviewed by The Chronicle"
www.dukechronicle.com/article/2025...

Photo of the outside of a convention center with a green banner that says FEMS micro -- welcome

That's a wrap on #FEMS2025 in beautiful Milan! The biggest thanks to @kimingeneva.bsky.social for the invitation to co-chair & present in the very cool Microbial Dark Matter session with 3 other wonderful speakers! I loved all the great talks/posters & hope to return to @femsmicro.org in 2027 🤗🦠🧫

New in JB: Sven-Ulrik Gorr (single author paper!) shows that a antimicrobial peptide drives small colony variant (SCV) formation in Staph with a surprising resistant profile. SCV are found in many infections, including CF.
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...
@asm.org #JBacteriology

Thrilled to share the first preprint from my group! Prevotella are predominant but understudied members of the respiratory microbiome. They have a reputation for being hard to work with, but understanding them is likely important for understanding how they contribute to respiratory health. 🧫🔬

At my 1st @femsmicro.org congress (in Milan!) - it's a fantastic meeting. I co-chaired a superb session on Microbial Dark Matter with @jlewillett.bsky.social, who also kicked off the session with a talk on her lab's work. 🤩 We also heard from my FEMS Microbes co-EIC Kathleen Scott! 💪🏽 #FEMS2025

@ioannachatzig.bsky.social presented her work dealing with New insights on the phylogeny and function of the agricultural soil microbiome during the Session of “Microbial dark matter - knowing the unknown”.
#FEMS2025 @femsmicro.org

The 3-decade-old competition that enabled the emergence and evaluate of AlphaFold has run out of NIH funding.

The program will be terminated in weeks.

This is terminating success.

www.science.org/content/arti...

“The New York Times collaborated with a white nationalist eugenicist hacker and agreed to keep his identity a secret to publish a Zohran Mamdani hit piece” is a way bigger story than “18 year old Zohran Mamdani ticked ‘African American’ on his Columbia application because he was a citizen of Uganda”

Wedding photo of Jeff Bezos and his new wife

My hot take on Jeff Bezos' wedding: That $50 million price tag is double what the US government was spending annually on food and medicine for 5 million AIDS orphans before the Trump administration canceled it.

We are literally letting orphans die rather than make this guy pay taxes.

Here’s Your Cheat Sheet for Vaccine Recommendations Backed by Science These graphics will guide you through science-based vaccine guidelines for children and adults

Vaccination schedules on the CDC website have already started changing under RFK Jr. So we published a guide to the evidence-based vaccine recommendations in place *before* all 17 members of the advisory panel were abruptly dismissed by the new admin. www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-... 🧪

Banner on the website of the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, website: "Restricted-Access Federal Facility, Effective July 7, 2025. Effective July 7, 2025, the National Archives at College Park, MD, will become a restricted-access federal facility with access only for visitors with a legitimate business need. It will no longer be open to the general public. Security officers will enforce these restrictions, and your cooperation is appreciated."

So this is an ominous banner: "Effective July 7, 2025, the National Archives at College Park, MD, will become a restricted-access federal facility with access only for visitors with a legitimate business need. It will no longer be open to the general public." www.archives.gov/college-park

Jeff Bezos donate your yacht to NSF challenge

Jeff Bezos is worth $230 billion and is reportedly spending $20 million on a three-day wedding in Venice while sailing around on his $500 million yacht. If he can afford to do that, he can afford a wealth tax and to pay Amazon workers a living wage. Hello?

🚨if this is correct, NSF will be “disappeared” as a physical presence

Here Is All the Science at Risk in Trump’s Clash With Harvard (Gift Article) More than 900 research grants worth $2.6 billion are in jeopardy. So is the 80-year-old model of American science.

"The money the government sends to Harvard is, in effect, not a subsidy to advance the university’s mission. It’s a payment for the role Harvard plays in advancing the research mission of the United States." www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH