Christopher Monk

Mood, Emotion & Development Laboratory The Mood, Emotion & Development Lab at Vanderbilt University is directed by Dr. Autumn Kujawa. Our research examines social and emotional development and the ways in which alterations in emotion contr...

We are looking for a clinical psych postdoc to join our team in 2025 or 2026 to help with studies of mood disorders and suicidal behavior in youth and families (using EEG 🧠 and EMA 📱 methods).

See www.moodemotionlab.com for more info on the lab and projects.

This is good news! 15% indirects blocked at NSF now too

Despite everything going on, I may have funds to hire a postdoc this year 😬🤞🧑‍🔬 Open to a wide variety of possible projects in social and cognitive neuroscience. Get in touch if you are interested! Reposts appreciated.

We’re hiring postdocs to join my lab at UNC. If you’re interested in adolescence, brain, and social development, DM me. Our work incorporates fMRI, social media, and longitudinal methods. We study risks and opportunities in adolescence. If you’re at #SRCD2025 and want to meet, please reach out!

All NIDA F31 diversity scholars officially losing their funding...

I barely have words.

Expected at this point but so so disappointing and unfair. We are effectively punishing some of America's best science students for telling the government they are from an underrepresented community.

Moreover, these funds serve the public interest. Universities do things private companies with research capacities cannot: train research talent, conduct basic research with uncertain payoffs, and distribute knowledge as a public good. And the rewards have been enormous. Everything from the internet to pharmaceutical and health care innovations evolved from such investments. We are richer and healthier for the investment.

The trope that universities are "dependent" on the federal government fundamentally misunderstands how vital this partnership has been for the US. The private sector can't replace it. If we kill it, we're all worse off. From @donmoyn.bsky.social and me: donmoynihan.substack.com/p/are-univer...

NIH terminates $13 million grant on dementia A $12.9 million grant for a study on dementia risks among at-risk U.S. populations was terminated by the National Institutes of Health.

“Older Black Americans are twice as likely as white patients to develop [dementia]. Just as it is not illegal to research breast cancer in women, Mezuk said, it should not be illegal to research dementia in Black and lower-income white Americans.”

www.michigandaily.com/news/researc...

We're hiring! The Shackman Lab is hiring a full-time postbac RA for the 2025-26 academic year. This is fabulous opportunity to learn, work, and play with us in the DMV before heading off to graduate school. shackmanlab.org/studycoordin...

Friendly reminder that NSF funded graduate students and postdocs depend on their awards for their income and health insurance. Not knowing whether our grants will be cut means we’ll be worrying and wondering about our careers *and* our day to day lives. #NSF #postdoc

This was me. Terminated from #NIMHBSC with no explanation. Complete gov interference in the #NIH intramural research program oversight and review - telling NIH researchers what science they can do and who can do it. Not a positive outlook for scientific discovery, innovation, or health. 👇👇

Kudos to Harvard for standing up to the federal government.

More of this, please.

A graphic showing that 50.6% of research projects with "LGBT" search terms have been cancelled. 45.8% of grants with "transgender" in the search terms have been cancelled. 45.5% of research grants with "vaccine hesitancy" have been cancelled. 3.4% grants with "HIV" or "AIDS" have been cancelled.

The US National Institutes of Health has terminated nearly 800 research projects at a breakneck pace, wiping out significant chunks of funding to entire scientific fields

Read the full story: https://go.nature.com/42wYrix

SCIMaP - Impacts of Federal Cuts to Science and Medical Research Developed by an interdisciplinary research team, this website shows how funding cuts reduce economic activity and employment nationwide

16B USD/~68K Jobs and counting
scienceimpacts.org

The University of Denver is hiring full time research assistant interested to work on a study of pregnancy heath, sleep, and infant development. Bilingual Spanish is a plus, but not required. Please reach out to Jena Doom Jena.Doom@du.edu or Elysia Davis Elysia.Davis@du.edu if you are interested.

Graph from the Washington Post showing declines in spending at NIH. New grants cut from 1 billion to around 400 million. Overall grants down from 4.5 billion to 2.4 billion.

Trump has cut the NIH budget by more than half in defiance of Congressionally mandated appropriations for the agency. No comparison historically, not even the Great Recession. This is clearly not legal and Congress needs to address it.

Opinion | David Leonhardt: ‘By the Time Trump Comes for Your University, It’s Probably Too Late’ And how universities can fight the president’s ‘destroying agenda.’

David Leonhardt & @patrickhealynyt.bsky.social: ‘By the Time Trump Comes for Your University, It’s Probably Too Late’
www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/o...

NIH Grants Fueled $95 Billion In FY 2024 Economic Activity, Finds New Report National Institutes of Health grants generated almost $95 billion in economic activity nationwide in FY 2024 according to a new report by United for Medical Research.

New report shows that NIH grants fueled $95 billion in economic activity and 407,782 jobs in 2024.

That's not to mention the countless lives that biomedical research has saved.

Show me a better investment than that.
www.forbes.com/sites/michae...

Judge issues preliminary injunction blocking Trump cuts to NIH research overhead payments A federal judge issued a nationwide preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration from slashing NIH payments for research overhead

Preliminary injunction in nationwide indirect cost rate case.

This means that the judge found that the plaintiffs (AAMC, et al.) are likely to win on the merits when the ruling is finalized.

www.statnews.com/2025/03/05/n...

The Precision Psychopathology + Dynamic Immunopsychiatry Lab at UPenn will be hiring 1-2 post-bacc RAs and potentially a postdoc this year

Immune/phlebotomy/blood preprocessing exp will be a plus. Formal posting will follow in a few weeks

Excited to recruit the founding members of this team :)

“And the NIH’s acting director, Matthew Memoli, who until January was a relatively low-ranking flu researcher at the agency, has instructed leadership to stick to what HHS says...But if agency personnel responded to this new allowance reasonably, [Memoli] said, they’d be granted more liberty.”

Trump Administration Stalls Scientific Research Despite Court Ruling (Gift Article) Using an arcane law, officials have effectively delayed funding from the National Institutes of Health, leaving medical studies in jeopardy.

New York Times article now up on Federal Register stuff.

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/s...

1/n

For those keeping track, we are now at 2 weeks with no new R01s funded. Still only 18 new ("01") grants are fellowships/Ks, a few admin supplements, one R35, and one R03. Same 2-week period in 2024: 143 new grants were awarded and 41 R01s. Devastating.

Eleanor Maguire, Memory Expert Who Studied London Cabbies, Dies at 54 By watching the brain process information, she discovered that a specific region plays a key role in spatial navigation — and that it can be strengthened like a muscle.

R.I.P. Eleanor Maquire - www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/s...

"... if you suddenly and drastically cut funding for the “indirect” costs of research—the money used for the facilities, equipment, and staff that support biomedical research—you’re going to be cutting biomedical research. This isn’t hard logic to follow."

In Michigan -

NIH FUNDING:
$991M

JOBS SUPPORTED:
11,965

ECONOMIC ACTIVITY SUPPORTED:
$2.42B

It is simply not enough for universities to say, “Our grants & research offices are looking into how research will be affected by the latest directive.”

University leaders must actively and very publicly make the case for the kind of work many of us do. The silence on this front is deafening.

Federal judge temporarily blocks Trump administration's funding freeze A memo from the Office of Management and Budget ordering a freeze on federal assistance sparked confusion across the country earlier this week.

Now that another judge has blocked the freezing of all federal grants, NSF needs to give postdocs their salaries back. www.cbsnews.com/news/federal...

Order to pause federal spending creates deep uncertainty for schools, nonprofits and companies.

Update from NYTimes on the scope and legal fight over blocking federal funds to NIH, NSF, Head Start, school lunch, and many other vital programs. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01...