Dr. Stepfanie Aguillón 😷

Evolution 2026 meeting logo. Clilp art of a globe and laptop showing a virtual presentation. Text: Society for the Study of Evolution Global Meeting Participation.

SSE is pleased to offer free virtual #Evol2026 registration to all SSE members residing in 152 countries and territories around the world including India, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Request your free registration code today! www.evolutionsociety.org/index.php?mo...

Recently, I was interviewed by the French magazine Epsiloon about recent developments in hybridization research. The resulting piece brings together a wide range of researchers working on hybridization across different systems. Wonderful! 🥳

#ornithology #scicomm

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025 for the Directorate of Biological Sciences.

2/10

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025.

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26)

Directorates to follow

1/10

On one hand you just gotta keep applying?

On the other hand, it feels like everything is just stupid right now and it sucks the energy out of you

Going to level with y’all

Been (somewhat successful) at writing NSF grants for 15 or so years and have served on many NSF panels

I have no clue how to get an NSF grant funded right now. Absolutely no clue

Unexpected migration patterns in a high-latitude breeding songbird: evidence from multi-sensor geolocators and isotopes - Movement Ecology Background Migratory birds often exhibit within-species variation in migration routes and non-breeding areas, yet the mechanisms shaping these patterns remain poorly understood, particularly in high-l...

#ornithology
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

NSF officials break silence on how AI and quantum now drive agency grantmaking Leaders acknowledge White House role in controversial moves

NSF leaders have just acknowledged what many scientists have long suspected: Presidential directives to boost AI and quantum have upended its traditional way of doing business. www.science.org/content/arti...

I understand why chatbot cheating happens but every time I read about it I want to gently remind everyone that the point of schoolwork is not for the submission to exist. Teachers are not just greedy for more essays or solved equations. The point is to do the work WITH YOUR OWN BRAIN, FOR LEARNING.

When the higher education sector is organized, we have the power to stop the Trump administration's campaigns against American universities

We are proud of our members and allies at UCLA who successfully blocked Trump from extracting $1.2 billion from UCLA over alleged civil rights violations.

the professors keep doing all this winning in spite of their administrations.

bravo @aaup.org UCLA Faculty Association and all the other stakeholders showing us what it feels like to win.

www.legalish.me/trump-drops-...

BREAKING: The Department of Education has ended its directive that attempted to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools nationwide.

This is a victory for academic freedom and education equity.

My department at CSU Northridge is hiring a vertebrate functional morphologist! We've got a great EEB group, and we're looking for someone to carry forward a tradition of enriching organismal courses and community-engaged research. App review starts March 15

csucareers.calstate.edu/mob/cw/en-us...

This thread shows a deliberate defunding of U.S. science, engineering, social science, innovation, and education excellence. It’s a U.S. national security, competitiveness, and economic disaster.

Davis FA visited our dept meeting last year. My honest impression at the time was that they were laughable -- fools wielding BB guns against Godzilla in a quixotic hope of feeling better about our imminent destruction.

Boy was I wrong.

If you’re a UC faculty member, PLEASE PLEASE join your Faculty Association! Even if you’re not regularly involved, your dues will support important actions!!

Ok I see you UCLA Faculty Association and the Council of University of California Faculty Associations, pushing your university to be better and creating the space for this to happen!

People with kids and jobs and childcare responsibilities, who get tired and wonder if they’re doing the right thing. If these people hadn’t kept going, this wouldn’t have happened, and history would be different. That’s why I say we need you; it’s just us, and we need to pick up for each other.

I stress the “regular people” thing because I think if I were hearing about this from outside, I might assume that big, professional organizations made this whole thing happen. Unions and AAUP were key, but it was regular people who pushed this through—

Please consider joining, if you haven’t already. It’s just regular people trying to figure out how to fight for the university we all deserve. We need you! cucfa.org

A line curve showing number of awards for fiscal year 2026 compared to fiscal years 2021-2025 across NSF. The fiscal year 2026 curve lies well below curves for other fiscal years.

NSF Update

Funding curve overall. A little bit of progress in the past week, but only a little bit.

Now by Directorate...

1/11

A line curve showing number of awards for fiscal year 2026 compared to fiscal years 2021-2025 for the Biological Sciences Directorate. The fiscal year 2026 curve lies well below curves for other fiscal years.

Biological Sciences

2/11

Happy birthday to Charles Darwin,
patron saint of tired scientists, grumpy fieldworkers, and hating your own manuscript.

Re-upping an older piece to illustrate that Covid precautions - especially for athletes - are not “extreme”. It’s not just about performance on the day of competition; long Covid can literally cost athletes their careers

Davis Summer Population Genomics Program Want to learn population genetics? Please fill out this form to indicate your potential interest in a 2-week intensive online summer population genetics course taught by Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra and Graham...

Fun news! @gcbias.bsky.social and I are teaching a 2-week online population genetics workshop this summer to raise money for the Center for Population Biology at UC Davis. We're trying to gauge interest -- please fill this out if you might be interested! And please share broadly!

Here are the words putting science in the crosshairs of Trump’s orders National Science Foundation staff have been combing through thousands of active science research projects, alongside a list of keywords, to determine if they include activities that violate Trump’s ex...

More context here: www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...

list of banned keywords

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

NSF gleefully stamping REJECT! on grants with the word 'women' in the title.

A line grant showing the number of active grants in each NSF Directorate for the years 2021-2025.

More on NSF

Here are the number grants that were active in each year (at least part) including the effects of grant terminations (data from grant-witness.us) by directorate from 2021-2025.

The only directorates showing losses are STEM Education and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.

My grad student, who got RWR and appealed, got an email from GRFP program today that said "Your application was screened by NSF program officers with expertise in your proposed field of study and was determined to be ineligible according to the solicitation requirements."

No details were given. 😡