Katie Wilkinson

Heading back from #FASEBOnTheHill and want to share what I learned and why I think all scientists need to be setting up meetings w their reps to talk about the impacts on science of the current chaos. #AcademicSky #NeuroSky @faseborg.bsky.social @apsphysiology.bsky.social 🧪

Besides being racist and false, this suggests science is only carried out by a few geniuses who claim prizes, whereas in reality science relies on smart and diligent people committed to collaboration and discovery without special recognition.

I'm usually 100% for new science funding but a definite NO on Prop 38. There are plenty of currently functioning Immunology labs at CA universities and biotechs that should be able to compete for state money, not just a billionaire's institute with no currently employed scientists.

You know how Adobe offers to summarize long PDFs? Welp, AI summaries have hit our chemistry labs, students do not see ALL the directions (and some summaries are dangerously wrong), disasters are being narrowly averted, and students are upset with their INSTRUCTOR for the experiment not working.

Every academic volunteering for a service role

Happy 100 year birthday to the discovery that neurons talk with a frequency code! Adrian & Zotterman showed this using none other than the frog muscle spindle afferents. This is a great write up of these classic studies in The Transmitter: www.thetransmitter.org/history-of-n...

This is so frustrating-would my grant scored High Priority be funded in a regular year? Infuriating that this administration is trying to hobble science at every opportunity. @liccardo.house.gov @lofgren.house.gov

Insanity

In honor of #NoKings this weekend I turned my ballot in early and canvassed for @michaelmelillo.bsky.social for SJUSD School Board with fellow @momsdemandaction.org volunteers.

Canvassing fun! #MichaelMelillo for #SanJoseUnified School Board! #GSUCandidate

Together with other scientists I’m suing the 🇺🇸 US National Institutes of Health for violating our 1st Amendment rights & censoring our health science. I’m ready to shine a light on the darkest days. Buckle up, read on. This gets pretty wild… THREAD

‘There are more gun deaths in the US on a single day than there are in the UK, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Japan in a year combined. Our weekly total is roughly equal to the annual total of gun deaths of France, Canada, or Germany.’

I swear to god so much of this is literally just people confusing measles and chicken pox

Come work with me at SJSU - we are hiring a physiologist (pretty broad research interests encouraged to apply). jobs.sjsu.edu/en-us/job/56... @apsphysiology.bsky.social @blackinphysiology.bsky.social @blackinneuro.bsky.social

1. CRISPR came from basic research on bacteria. 2. Optogenetics started with a discovery in algae. 3. The GFP protein comes from jellyfish. The biggest breakthroughs all trace to scientists following their curiosity, and this is one huge reason why we must keep funding basic research!

Harvard just dropped a study AI productivity in software engineering and it found the average increase in productivity from using Claude code is.....zero and for exactly the reasons you'd think fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf

$1.4 billion in research funding was redirected from the NSF in the latest move by the Trump administration to reshape how federal research dollars are allocated. Use the link below to share the importance of science funding!

Earlier this year the scientific community successfully fought back on dramatic changes in Federal funding proposed by the Trump Administration.Now another RFI is proposing substantial changes that would damage peer review. This letter from SDB President Helen McNeill lays out the issue clearly 1/n

never the wrong time for this classic

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

As someone with a grant that was rated high priority (top bin) that wasn't funded this year, I'm appalled that NSF withheld 1/5th of their budget. @liccardo.house.gov @lofgren.house.gov

🔍🚨NEW from @nytimes.com: Agency Diverted $1.4 Billion in Science Funds Mandated by Congress It’s a dramatic attack on the science enterprise that has served us very well since World War II. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/02/u...

NIH’s shift to multiyear funding reduced the number of awards across a range of research areas. Grants reviewed by NIH panels that had "cancer" or "oncology" in their title dipped to around 1,590 in 2026, compared with 1,920 in 2024. Fewer grants funded means fewer shots on goal, fewer wins

The changes to peer review reporting proposed by the NIH could limit transparency and weaken scientific judgment in funding decisions. Join fellow #NeuroAdvocates in speaking up for science. Submit a public comment by October 13. 🔗 vist.ly/5kfud #neurosky #neuroskyence

If these stories feel incessant, and overwhelming… it is because they are. These stories are a drumbeat, telling you, telling America, telling the world that our government is being destroyed. This is indistinguishable from a foreign attack on our country. But the attack is coming from within.

Most people have no idea how much international students are the lifeblood of higher education. But they’re about to learn. Sigh.

As you call members of Congress to raise concern about a Vought-led grant review panel, encourage them to sign onto proposed legislation that could help: 1) Follow the Science Act by @degette.house.gov would remove political appointees from the grant-making process: www.congress.gov/bill/119th-c...

@djphysicswebb.bsky.social, Mary Chessey and I have a newly accepted paper on uncollected test item responses on open-ended physics exam questions! Blank responses on exams are missing data, not measurements of physics knowledge or skills. Read on for details... Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2606.05473

Action Alert: Write to Your Lawmakers About the Proposed OMB Grants Rule www.congressweb.com/AIBS/9?frame...

BREAKING NEWS: New cat species just dropped! 🧪 What is a tilcayo, exactly? Well, it's a small wild cat in the genus Leopardus and a member of the tiger cat species complex, but it is NOT a tigrina, oncilla, kodkod, Geoffroy's cat... www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/arti...

Briefly popping my head back in to unveil the cover of my upcoming book, LIFE BEYOND MEASURE: Nature's Hidden Wonders at Every Scale. It’ll be out on April 6 in the U.S. and April 29 in the U.K. and you can pre-order it right now! www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/757705... 1/

Colleges could subsidize books for students rather than paying for premium versions of ChatGPT

This is a little mean but I also think the idea that “AI must be taught in college” is an older generation projecting their own tech incompetency and anxiety onto a younger one. It sounds interchangeable from saying “TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat should be taught in college,“ which is just lame.

Breaking: Federal judge hits pause on Trump admin's plan to limit visa length for grad students & postdocs on the day before the policy was supposed to go into effect this quote, from the temporary ruling, is quite something (from a George W. Bush appointee, I will add)

“Who owns academic materials used to develop AI systems? Can algorithmic analysis influence faculty evaluations? If AI makes academic work faster, who benefits from the time saved? If supervising AI creates new work, where does that labour appear in workload calculations?”

I have been showing this video in Intro Bio for the last 9 or 10 yrs to many gasps. Then follow it up with the Beatrice the Biologist cartoon.

An absolutely incredible development here. This leg would have been unimaginable just a few short years ago. (Original post by @science.org on instagram)

I also find it hilarious how universities are justifying these expenditures using the language of 'equity.'"If we don't buy these tools for everyone, then only the rich kids will be able to afford them, and that's unfair." But you don't buy books assigned by profs for anyone? Why not subsidize that!

I've been arguing that the left should pitch their morally superior policies as economically superior policies. They're almost always both. SNAP generates $1.54 in GDP per $. Head Start is $4. NIH is $2.5. Free Child Care $4.25.

I was in college in Pgh at the time and my roommate’s Arabic class had a police escort for the rest of the semester due to threats and pretty much every non-white friend was harassed on the street. Also greeted by armed police leaving my dorm and told to run down the street bc of an anthrax threat.

Pedagogy is not some new, unsolved problem awaiting its Silicon Valley disruptor. If you want good teaching in any given subject, it’s there to be had. If you just don’t want to pay for it, then all we’re really talking about is how much you want something for nothing. That’s nothing new, either.