With all the grim news, it's nice to be able to celebrate some positive events!
I've been taking a break from social media lately to focus on taking care of my newborn daughter, who just turned two months yesterday! She's doing great so far, and I'm enjoying being a new dad.
But, I decided to hop onto Bluesky briefly to quickly share a few work-related updates.
It's worth noting that this proposal is likely unserious, and we should treat it as such. The real question should be how much do elected representatives want to increase R&D spending by.
My paper on bacterial type ii topoisomerase cleavage patterns just came out today in @narjournal.bsky.social! In it, my coauthors and I show that these essential enzymes have species-specific cleavage preferences, which could be important for their role as antibacterial drug targets 🧪
And another update, I was recently awarded the NHLBI K22 fellowship (similar to the K99/R00), which means that I will have funding for up to two more years as an NIH postdoc and funds to start my own independent lab once I get a tenure-track position.
The recent presidential budget request has a 40% increase in military spending and 10% cut to non-military spending, including a 25% cut to the NIH.
It seems worth pointing out that NIH (and other R&D) boosts the economy by 250%, whereas military spending (except R&D) shrinks the economy by 10%.
New: 150 unionized ProPublica workers are on strike TODAY over AI, layoff protections, wages, and more.
They're asking readers to not visit ProPublica or engage with content on other platforms. It's the first work stoppage of its kind at the newsroom.
www.theverge.com/news/908401/...
Powerful speeches this morning from @michaeldgreen.phd and many others at today's #nokings edition of #nihvigils.
Shoutout to @27unihted.bsky.social, @nihvigils.bsky.social, and all the great organizers who made the event possible.
A 25% increase to the NIH budget is actually not that ridiculous. Adjusted for inflation, NIH funding has consistently been below its peak in 2003, so we have a lot of lost investment time to make up for it.
Source: www.congress.gov/crs-product/...
A new paper suggests that grant terminations from the NIH over the past year may have further punctured the so-called "leaky pipeline" because women were more impacted by grant terminations than men
www.statnews.com/2026/03/23/n...