Graham Coop

Graph of award probability of R35 and R01 from NIH factbook as a function of review rank percentile. As is apparent, 2025 is a significant departure, with lower award probabilities at all scores <40 and significant departures from norm, where even being in the top 10% is no longer a nearly certain indicator of success. Data source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted.

What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards.

Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

Here is the "effective payline" for each institute, estimated (by Claude) as the percentile where one can expect 80% probability of funding from a logistic regression fit. The effective payline has gone from a historic ~12% to 6% in 2025.

Discovery of a Genetic Toxin-Antidote System in Vertebrates https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.04.709565v1

Call_Long Island 2027[16].docx The American Society of Naturalists Proposals for Symposia at the ASN stand-alone meeting in Long Island 2027 Due April 30, 2026 The American Society of Naturalists will be holding an East Coast m...

The American Society of Naturalists @asn-amnat.bsky.social
will be holding our next meeting in Glen Cove, New York on 8-12 January 2027!

Have an idea for a special symposium? We want to hear it!
#ecology #evolution #behavior 🧪 #popgen 🧬
Applications due Apr 30: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

I think the rink-neck colour varies a bunch geographically even within California academic.oup.com/jhered/artic...

Alligator lizard

Ring necked snake

Western skink

sharp tailed snake

Northern Californian central valley foothills reptiles

A California condor with orange tags with the number 34 on each wing is perched on a metal structure overlooking landscape of green hills with light fog rolling between. The image includes the logos for ALERTCalifornia, UC San Diego, and PG&E.

Spotted male California condor Hasso on Henrietta Peak 2. This camera is set to "patrol mode," which means it is programmed to spin 360 degrees to take six images every two minutes. We stitched adjacent images together to show his full impressive 9-10 foot wingspan.

Harper to the judge: "Your driver's license doesn't list your height and weight at birth. It doesn't list where you used to live. It identifies who you are now."

David Marques was an amazing speciation genomics researcher, a passionate birder, and a wonderful friend, husband, and father. May he rest in peace. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Bouquet of brown seaweeds #PhycologyFriday #SciArt

7/ In reality, my colleagues still inside NIH tell me that their assessments are largely ignored.

Once a grant or application is picked up by the tool, they are almost never able to move the grant forward as is - regardless of the scientific justification.

Current NIH leadership want you to think they are using rigorous, consistent & scientific processes to screen studies to align them with agency priorities.

But the process that they have put down on paper is a sham.

It’s important to know NIH is not following its own guidance. Here’s why:

🧵1/

Germline fate determination by a single ARGONAUTE protein in Ectocarpus | PNAS ARGONAUTE (AGO) proteins are a highly conserved family of RNA-binding proteins that play central roles in gene regulation and developmental process...

One protein. One pathway. A whole germline fate.

New paper from my postdoc @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social out in PNAS:
Germline fate determination by a single ARGONAUTE protein in Ectocarpus www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

California Saxifrage (Micranthes californica)

Hillside Woodland Star

Checker Lily (Fritillaria affinis)

Western redbud

Spring #BloomScrolling in Northern Californian central valley foothills

you're just jealous that all these horses are off living their best lives and totally didnt go to the glue factory.

FY26 is in a worse place Evan than FY25. NIH barely got funding out last year. This is very worrying.

Join me at the next No Kings Day

March 28 will be the largest nonviolent protest in American history. Find your local No Kings event to stand up for our communities and reject Trump's fear and violence. app.sosha.ai/s/Ja4OZjQB

Recently we're working with SNPs from whole genome assemblies to estimate ARGs. It's a pain to go from alignment files to vcf, keeping track of masked and invariant sites. So we wrote a snakemake/SLURM pipeline. Hope it's useful to others, and don't hesitate to post issues if there are problems!

@pratikkatte.bsky.social and I just released Lorax 🌲, a tool for interactive exploration of biobank-scale ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs).

If you’ve ever wanted to scroll across the ancestries of thousands of genomes… this is for you.

We are happy to announce that the Internal Conflicts and Organismal Adaptation STN has funding available to support several small travel grants for early-career researchers to enable them to visit another laboratory. What is this for? This funding is intended to enable early-career researchers – PhD students, postdocs, and junior research fellows – to visit another laboratory. In so doing, they can learn a new method or approach and/or initiate novel collaborations in the form of manuscripts, grants, or fellowship proposals. We envision that these visits are short stays (a week up to a month) but longer stays are also permitted. Who can apply? Early-career researchers, i.e. PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and up to junior research fellows (i.e., those in tenure-track positions but not tenured yet). Priority will be given to ESEB members and to trips that reflect novel collaborations (i.e., between people who have not previously collaborated, defined by co-authorship). ESEB membership is cheap (€40 annually, €20 for students) and discounts are available for residents of low to upper-middle economy countries (see ESEB website for details). Membership also comes with additional benefits such as reduced fees for conference attendance. What can be requested? Applicants can request funding to support a short research visit at another institution. The maximum amount of support that can be requested is €1.000, to be used for travel and accommodation. The provided funding cannot be used to cover research costs, wages, and/or stipends. ESEB policy states that we should minimize the environmental impact of e.g. travel; therefore, we will only support travel by airplane if the distance travelled exceeds 500 km and the travel time with alternative forms of transport would be more than 6 hours. How to apply: Download the application form and fill it out. Obtain two short letters of support, one from your supervisor/line manager and one from the host research group explai…

Are you an early career researcher who want to visit another lab to collaborate on a project on internal conflicts?

Apply for our ECR Research Visit Grant!

Deadline is April 30.

Our paper is out in @Science! The Atlantic silverside spans Earth's steepest latitudinal gradient in coastal sea-surface temperature. Despite high gene flow, populations show clinal genetic variation in multiple locally adapted traits. doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Amy Goldberg, PhD - Join The Goldberg lab is moving to UCLA summer 2025, and recruiting postdocs and graduate students. We are a computational lab with occasional wet lab or field collaborators. We will be located in the Depa...

The Goldberg lab at UCLA is hiring one or more postdocs. Flexible start date.

We develop methods to study population genetics of humans, our primate relatives, and our pathogens.

www.goldberglab.org/join

[Exit Murderer.]

A triumph of genetic engineering - three Minions stand together, with one holding a guitar, smiling and posing for the camera.

In light of the latest news from Colossal Biosciences, now is the perfect time to announce my laboratory's groundbreaking Minion de-extinction project, which depends on state-of-the-art gene editing at 20 key sites in the genome of the common banana.

Leipzig U and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) have an open faculty position (W2) in evolutionary population genetics! This position is tenured and comes with generous core funding. We are eager to welcome a new colleague! Deadline March 11.
www.uni-leipzig.de/en/newsdetai...

Stand Up for Science plans second rally on March 7 Public health chaos and research funding cuts are inspiring nationwide pro-science protests against the Trump administration

National Day of Action, this Saturday March 7, with dozens of events taking place in communities nationwide.

New reporting via @meghanbartels.bsky.social with key quotes from @cdelawalla.bsky.social & @mtosterholm.bsky.social on the moment we face.

www.scientificamerican.com/article/stan...

Looking forward to #Dros26 this week. My lab is recruiting and I would be delighted to chat with anyone interested in grad school/postdoc positions in evolutionary cell biology and developmental genetics. Please reach out if interested!

iNaturalist-facilitated rediscovery of Monarda mexicana (Lamiaceae) in high-elevation habitats of Durango, Mexico | Phytotaxa

the "lost" species Monarda mexicana is still out there! Known from just 2 historical collections (most recent from the 1950s). Imagine my joy in stumbling on a picture of it on @inaturalist.bsky.social !!! We've now documented the first known modern populations and revived the species name:

The core-pivotal index: a geometry-first approach to academic impact The defining goal of the academic endeavor is to establish a single perfect value that completely summarizes entire careers’ achievements. Such an index wo

@russcd.bsky.social ushers in a new era of academic metrics with the core-pivotal author index, which assigns all credit to authors that occupy the exact center of the author list, while non-central peripheral authors receive no credit whatsoever.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag026

#evobio #molbio

Ouch. I'm always super paranoid about train tracks and cattle grids. Here I was talking to someone and so didnt spot the drain.