Spencer J Fox

Attending the @gs-idd.bsky.social launch seminar. Couldn't be more excited to see this effort take shape and can't wait to see how it helps push the infectious disease dynamics community forward! Thank you to all of the founding members and organizers 🙏

Arizona voters could decide future of government vaccine mandates The Arizona Legislature is considering whether to refer a proposed constitutional amendment to the 2026 statewide general election ballot.

Republicans in Arizona want voters to get rid of childhood vaccine requirements for school entry.

They are planning to add a ballot proposition for November’s election in the hopes of ending the requirements, which they are framing as an issue of “medical freedom”.

This would be catastrophic.

Screenshot of the COI Pond webpage: Upload your academic CV and generate a draft NSF Collaborators and Other Affiliations (COA) Form to submit with your NSF grant proposals. COI Pond parses your CV to extract: Coauthors of articles published, in the last 48 months Collaborators on funded projects, in last 48 months Past PhD advisees & your own PhD advisor(s) Editorial roles, in last 24 months After extraction, you can edit the draft COA form before downloading a final version (in xslx format) that you can submit to NSF. COI Pond is a free tool* from Cevian Labs.

Today we’re excited to announce a new product: COI Pond is a tool for faculty and grant staff that converts an academic CV into a draft NSF Collaborators and Other Affiliations (COA) Form. COA forms are tedious work, and COI Pond makes it a snap. Try it for free, here cevianlabs.io/coipond/start/ /1

You know that annoying NSF form "List every coauthor/co-PI from the last 4y" ?

At @cevianlabs.io we built a free tool that drafts the COI form from your PDF CV in minutes. Check it out 👇

If every student uses it then your class discussion boards will just be AI talking to AI endlessly, slowly adding CO2 to the atmosphere...

My prediction is it will be really obvious to tell if a student uses something like this (at least for a while).

Einstein - AI Homework Agent Einstein logs into Canvas and does your homework automatically. He has his own computer — he can watch lectures, read essays, write papers, and participate in discussions.

Who is this for? If you don't know the material from the class, how can you review the outputs? If you have it auto-submit why are you even paying for the class?
companion.ai/einstein

Interested in learning outbreak analytics and modelling, with a focus on real-life case studies and tools actively used in responses?

Apply for the popular @lshtm.bsky.social R shortcourse, led by @jwlambert.bsky.social & @andreevallecam.bsky.social

More: www.lshtm.ac.uk/study/course...

Supporting exciting biological sciences ideas and impacts on AI and biotechnology

If anyone is interested in writing an NSF PRFB applications on the intersection of AI, disease forecasting, and understanding drivers of transmission (or related topics), please reach out! I think it would be a great fit with the work happening in our lab: www.nsf.gov/bio/updates/...

A Utah monument comes under attack—again - Writers On The Range Utah Republican Congresswoman Celeste Maloy is irritated. Her most recent attack on Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument spurred wide and deep...

We have to protect our public lands at all costs! This is a great summary of the current plans to infringe on Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, a truly ecologically important, beautiful, and culturally significant region of Southern Utah. writersontherange.org/a-utah-monum...

Really cool that @kaitejohnson9.bsky.social is giving a keynote at the next Stan conference!

We are hiring at UGA! We’re looking for a full professor & director of the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography (based right on the coast in Savannah, GA). Please pass on the job ad to anyone in your networks who may be interested: www.ugajobsearch.com/postings/468...

A few hundred more and you can flip through them quick enough to throw some subliminal messaging in there 😂

Excited for the sixth instalment of our meeting on infectious disease dynamics!

If you are a student whose NSF GRFP application was returned without review for vague 'eligibility' reasons:
1) Let your department chair & Graduate School know. Encourage them to contact NSF & congress
2) Write to your congressional reps.
3) Write to grfp@nsf.gov to request re-consideration;

Howdy y'all! I'm planning to graduate in May. If you are in need of a postdoc with knowledge of phylogenetics, graph databases, and Nextflow pipelines (or know of someone who is), please send them my way!

IDDconf 2026 A Conference on Infectious Disease Dynamics. IDDconf is the second instalment of a new meeting series focussing on innovative research in infectious disease dynamics.

IDDconf 2026 - July 7-9 in Ambleside, UK.

A new summer date & a new ticketing system!
Plus, 2 exciting workshops this year!
See IDDconf.org for more info

Tickets will go on sale on 2nd Feb. To be notified when, sign up at: tinyurl.com/IDDconf2026

Final week to apply for SFI’s 2026 immersive, summer programs in complexity science:

Apply by Feb 4, 2026

CSSS and GWCSS : www.santafe.edu/engage/learn...

Journalism Fellowship: santafe.edu/journalism-f...

Interpreting Breakthrough Infections Given Assortative Mixing of Partially Vaccinated Populations Declining vaccine coverage across the United States has increased the risk of outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. Even when vaccines have low primary failure rates, conventional epidemic theory...

In a new preprint, we combine modeling with school-level vaccine data to contextualize the risk of 'breakthrough infections' and impacts on the ongoing US measles outbreak. #idsky #episky

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

William H. Foege, Key Figure in the Eradication of Smallpox, Dies at 89

🧪 💉 Bill Foege is an absolute #PublicHealth legend

And furious to the end about the destruction of US public health
“Kennedy’s words can be as lethal as the smallpox virus,” he wrote… “I had no idea I would be this angry at the age of 89.”

Ht @boghuma.bsky.social
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/u...

Trends in County-Level Childhood Vaccination Exemptions in the US This study examines US county-level trends in nonmedical and medical exemptions to childhood vaccination requirements.

Our latest study in @jama.com on trends in county-level vaccine exemptions, demonstrating geographic pockets of high vaccine exemptions and high susceptibility to vaccine-preventable diseases. Great collab with @nbcnews.com colleagues and our Stanford team. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Role of behaviour change in controlling the 2022 Paris mpox outbreak Nature Health - Behaviour changes, rather than vaccination or postinfection immunity, best explained the sudden decline of mpox cases among men who have sex with men during an outbreak in the Paris...

*New paper in Nature Health*

Why did the 2022 mpox outbreak in Paris decline so abruptly?

rdcu.be/eZ24H

Dont miss the ESPIDAM summer program in June 2026 in Stockholm, covering many key concepts for ID modelling:
stochastic models, AI for ID control, nowcasting and forecasting, phylodynamics, data analysis, network models, within-host models, health economics www.statistics.su.se/english/divi...

Oh thanks for the heads up!

HHS Gave a $1.6 Million Grant to a Controversial Vaccine Study. These Emails Show How That Happened Two Danish researchers faced accusations of “questionable research practices” as RFK Jr.’s top appointees made their study a “funding priority.”

Here's something I hadn't heard about the planned then cancelled then re-planned unethical Hep B trials: Bill Ackman is funding half the cost, who knew! www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

The new vision from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) - Nature Medicine Preparing for tomorrow’s threats by enhancing our ability to help patients today.

Nice to see the new NIAID vision laid out in a paywalled journal article. Since NIH funds contributed to it I am looking forward to reading the open access version soon... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Controversial US study on hepatitis B vaccines in Africa is cancelled $1.6m project drew outrage over ethical questions about withholding vaccines proven to prevent disease

A few updates on the deeply unethical study to probe "non-specific" effects of the birth dose HepB vaccine in Guinea-Bissau by Danish investigators.

1️⃣ The study was canceled as per AfricaCDC - HHS disputes this.
2️⃣ Full protocol was leaked and it's bad.

Quick 🧵

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

This is some great forensics. Good reminder that it is extremely difficult to know how many people are infected at any given moment in the absence of serology data.

Advance your research and expand your network at SFI's 2026 CSSS program with lectures, application-focused seminars, and team projects. Participants gain experience in transdisciplinary collaboration and explore real-world questions through complexity science.

Apply by Feb 4, 2026
santafe.edu/csss

S/O to The Reich Lab and the Hubverse for the idea and making this sandbox forecasting challenge so simple to setup and manage!