Liz Chrastil

NEW: In March the White House released an FY27 budget request that zeroed out the National Science Foundation's directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). For months it was unclear what would happen. Now, with FY26 over, the damage to SBE is coming to light. My reporting:

I am recruiting graduate students for UCI's PhD in Cognitive Sciences - www.cogsci.uci.edu/graduate/pro... The lab's focus is on how relational structure and combinatorial reasoning is implemented in human brains and large language models--and if they are similar.

📣 Assistant Professor of Teaching in Neuroscience at UCLA! ☀️ 🧠 Apply before Nov 9th recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF11315

“The arrangement would give Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, a direct role in determining how NIH distributes its $48 billion in congressionally-appropriated money.” Bypassing the many checks and balances at NIH on grant funding decisions.

UC Irvine Cognitive Sciences is hiring! Focus on social cognition, broadly construed. Come be my colleague :) I am not on the search committee but happy to talk about the campus, environment, careers, etc any time. recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF10411

Constructive action: It is our job as scientists now not merely to talk about what’s happening but more. The public is looking for us to signal that things are very bad—to act like it!—and also to tell them WHY it is happening. If we don’t tell the public why science is being torn down, who will?

Finally, this has gone a bit under the radar, so I want to highlight it: The social, behavioral and economic sciences directorate (SBE) has simply ceased to deliver grants to many of its subareas. Any topic not specifically OK'd by the Trump administration is receiving zero new awards.

Scoop: For nearly a year, NSF has struggled to make new grants. Now we know that it will not catch up. In fact, NSF will award just 6,100 new grants—a 30% y/o/y decline, itself down from a previous avg. of 11,000+. In fact, the last time NSF awarded so few grants was in the early '80s.

My lab is hiring! We are recruiting a full time research coordinator to support our projects on memory brain states. More info and application: jobs.virginia.edu/us/en/job/R0...

Another handful of sand in the gears: Researchers cannot serve on a panel *at all* if anyone from their institution has submitted to that panel. Recusing themselves for the proposal itself is no longer sufficient. This is needless, but will certainly slow things up even further.

Remember the current NIH director going on about protecting researchers from government censorship? Today his people called the police in to forcibly remove my colleagues from their own society meeting for sharing an editorial published in their flagship journal that was critical of him. Gift link

"The plan is to kill off publicly funded academic science in this country." Correct. And that means killing off the whole US science and innovation industry. Because it's all built on a foundation of basic research—which. can. only. be. funded. by. public. dollars.

If these changes go through, it will be impossible to do effective science in the United States. Logistically, labs will not be able to function under these constraints. Team science—vital to almost every discipline—will be impossible under the rules around international collaboration.

Every summer I repost this article on how to spot drowning. Please read it and pass on. In the last few years I’ve had SIX messages from people who saved a kid’s life after clicking on the link from my feed. slate.com/technology/2...

This is very very big. Like a big deal and massive cuts. These can’t even be seen as budgetary since you don’t get much savings in the context of trillions budget. They want the US out of R&D out of science research.

The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...

BREAKING: In response to huge cuts in Trump's budget request, NSF is shuttering its SBE directorate. Staff will be transferred to other parts of the agency and "grants that align with Administration priorities" will be maintained. That & more w/ @maxkozlov.bsky.social & @edwrdchen.bsky.social

Happy to share some of the work done in our lab in this mega-thread of nine (!) papers/preprints (+1 sneak peek) from the last six months. Here goes (in no particular order)! **Please repost** and let me know if you need access to any of the PDFs! #sleeppeeps #sleep #neuroscience 1/12

The is the federal government telling news stations to provide favorable coverage of the war or their licenses will be pulled. A truly extraordinary moment. We aren't on the verge of a totalitarian takeover. WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF IT. Act like it.

Donald Trump letting you know how the authoritarian capture of the media is going, in case you missed it. Unlike other authoritarians in places like Hungary and Poland he has no worries about advertising his authoritarian take over of the media.

“Everyone thinks universities have to do what donors want because they pay the bills. But that gets it backward, and not just at Hopkins.” I highly recommend reading this piece. www.publicbooks.org/the-misuses-...

This case is insane: ICE shot and killed a citizen last March then *hid it for a year.* The young man they killed had no criminal history. All we know about shooting is from internal ICE docs. We don't know officers' names. We don't have footage. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/u...

We’re hiring! The Suthana Lab @ Duke is looking for a Research Assistant to join our team studying human memory & real-world 🧠 dynamics using wearable tech & intracranial recordings. Apply: careers.duke.edu/job/Durham-C... You can also email suthanalab@duke.edu with CV/questions. Please share!

It shouldn't take having a 5yo to be sick imagining the terror felt by a child still little enough to be held and rocked when scary things happen and by his frantic family members, but I do have a 5yo and thinking of this little guy shoved into a van, a cell, a plane, another van, another cell ...

The way to make this matter is for the outrage from the general public to become more of a problem than the Trump Regime's outrage. A thing we know is possible from Jimmy Kimmel. So far, so good. Keep going.

This afternoon, I was in a meeting with Jay Bhattacharya, and I can confirm this is *exactly* what he both wants and will be doing. THIS IS NOT HYPERBOLE.

Huge congratulations to my students Erica and Daniela who defended their PhD thesis this week! Plus a rainbow after one of them, seems very fitting for the whole process!

👀 💕 👏🏽 @laurapritschet.bsky.social @chrastil.bsky.social

Come see our lab's posters at #SfN2025! With great work including @alinatu.bsky.social @mjstarrett.bsky.social @aaronbornstein.bsky.social and more!

In a major win for UC faculty groups and unions that sued, a federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump from imposing a $1.2-billion fine on UCLA along with stipulations for deep campus changes in exchange for being eligible for federal grants: www.latimes.com/california/s...

Want a party that actually fights back? Run for office. We’ll help you. runforwhat.net

I wonder what it feels like to be so alienated from God and humanity that causing the deaths of over half a million people doesn't wrack your entire body and soul, doesn't tear you apart with grief and horror, doesn't haunt your every waking moment and torment your every minute of sleep.

“Of all the words spoken in opposition to, or aghast at what’s happening in the United States, only one set of remarks has rattled in my head day after day, for going on a month now.” Compelling and insightful article today from @brianbeutler.bsky.social 1/

I will be recruiting 🌟PhD students🌟 for my newish lab! If you're interested in learning & memory mechanisms applied to individual, interactive & collective behavior using computational modeling, real-world experiments and fMRI, email me! RTs much appreciated 🙏 rouhanilab.com

I don’t know who needs to hear this but the CDC is being eviscerated right now. America is not going to have any kind of outbreak response capacity after tonight. Americans’ health data is no longer secure. Say goodbye to federal public health in any capacity. It’s a disaster. We won’t recover.

BREAKING: A federal judge has granted a restraining order blocking President Trump's call-up of the National Guard in Portland. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

🚨 Are you an alum from one of the 9 universities Trump is attempting to extort right now? ✍️ Sign this petition to defend your university, free speech, and democracy. I signed. This is a time for courage, not capitulation. #JustSayNo #Compact 🧪🧠🧬 (context in thread)

the president of the united states wants to use the american military to kill american citizens on american soil. that's the whole story!

The NIH has confirmed that it is complying with court orders and re-instating $500 million in frozen research grants to UCLA, Vice Chancellor for Research & Creative Activities Roger Wakimoto wrote today. He says workers “have shown great resilience in this challenging time.”

Huntington’s disease treated successfully for first time in gene therapy trial

While I am genuinely concerned for my colleagues who are doctors currently on H1B visas, I acknowledge that I can't make people care about other humans. But American *should* care about the fact that their ability to get medical care WILL be affected by these visa restrictions.