Michelle McCully

I'm working on a starter pack (who isn't?) of faculty at Santa Clara University. Reply if you want on (or off!) go.bsky.app/FwJDjZC #SantaClaraUniversity #SCU #GoBroncos

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:

One thing I find endlessly funny about the rise of AI is that it has revealed that there is a large number of people who believe that the reason they wrote essays at school or university is their teachers were desperately waiting for them to provide a definite answer to “Lear: what’s up with him?”

How does the extreme thermostability of de novo designed proteins arise? We aimed to answer this question by combined chemical and thermal denaturation of de novo designed minibinders in a paper out now in Protein Science (@proteinsociety.bsky.social): dx.doi.org/10.1002/pro....

🎃 October’s Under the Microscope is here! Explore an imagined Halloween interview with Jacques Monod, TPS award nominations, upcoming events & Protein Science highlights. 📬 Read: mailchi.mp/proteinsocie...

I will say, it's soooo satisfying to see that entire day of meetings dissappear. Though as you progress in your career the meetings start coming faster and faster. Eventually they're gonna overflow to Saturday and it's game over.

Grad school: to be successful in a future career you're going to need to focus on THIS ONE THING for the next 5 years. The actual career in question: you can't focus on one thing for more than 30 minutes at a time and you have to keep switching between 1000 things endlessly

Thanks to @campbell-lab.bsky.social for putting together this excellent overview of the protein engineering field at PEDS, and for inviting us to contribute the computational enzyme design section. Check it out below! Protein engineering: status report academic.oup.com/peds/article...

Also as far as science goes - this is a repeatedly asked and answered question (no for the trolls) and yet somehow it remains a talking point for the "intellectually curious" crowd. Go test the validity of gravity - it's just as stupid a question.

SCU is hiring assistant professors in 1) Biochemistry and 2) Animal Behavior or Behavioral Ecology this fall! Please share! We are a Jesuit primarily undergraduate institution in the Bay Area. Biochemistry - wd1.myworkdaysite.com/en-US/recrui... Biology - wd1.myworkdaysite.com/en-US/recrui...

When we don't adequately fund public universities, and instead force students to take out loans, what we as a society are really doing is borrowing money from the younger generation—their hard-earned future income—to fund a necessary project that benefits us all: building an educated society.

"Watching a man who is typically so talkative plead the Fifth, I realized that some of the hate aimed at me had subsided, in part, because one person had continued to absorb the heat, fire, vitriol, and anger over all of our mistakes. Not just his."

I just submitted a comment addressing the devastating changes proposed by the #OMB for US federal grant funding. Thanks to @apsphysics.aps.org for making it so easy! 🧪 You should too. The deadline is Mon, July 13th www.aps.org/initiatives/...

Glad to see this story and coverage of an important paper. www.statnews.com/2026/06/17/n... 1/16

OK--is this satire??? The fact that we can't tell anymore is..... inpreparation.substack.com/p/opinion-i-...

Submission open for the 11th YBM Meeting soon- 20th May! Abstract submission link: t.co/8pCwjpO2Ml

Let’s talk about Bruno! Bruno’s lab is focused on the development and use of computational tools for the design and engineering of proteins, with the aim to develop new protein-based therapeutics, vaccines, biosensors and more. Learn more about Bruno in our April 2026 newsletter. zurl.co/X2o4z

imagine trying to explain this to someone from 1776

Every time I see someone talk about Claude I think about how they switched from female to male names as soon as they wanted the robots to seem like experts vs personal assistants.

The NIH Vigils has become a place for community and support as we endure censorship and antiscience policies inside NIH. Every week for a year, we have gathered to mourn the losses to science and the harms to public health. And we will continue to gather every Saturday until NIH is rebuilt.

More details on the firing of the National Science Board. The NSF now has no director, deputy director, or board. They have issued almost no new awards in 2026. The plan appears to be to completely destroyed the agency. The details are horrifying and have Russ Vought written all over them.

Why are de novo designed proteins so extremely thermostable? We try to answer this question by dissecting the thermodynamics of unfolding of mini-binders emerging from our protein design pipeline – and establish a convenient GUI for data analysis in the process. doi.org/10.64898/202...

This is not lets-propose-this-and-see-what-Congress-says. Their plan is more like USAID: eliminate before Congress can weigh in.

AS PER MY LAST POST: Google's AI Overview scanned a hoax paper (loaded with Star Wars references) that @neuroskeptic.bsky.social wrote. AI Overview said "Kyloren syndrome" is a real disease. See "The garbage'll do", July 2017, in Stinging the Predators: bit.ly/StingPred

More context on this #Artemis II image: * This is the night side, lit by moonlight. You can see city lights in Spain & Portugal, & a sliver of day at lower right * The Sun is entirely behind Earth, which makes it a kind of solar eclipse, but w/ Earth doing the eclipsing instead of the Moon: ☀️🌍🚀🌕

"Experts are Dubious" !?!?

THE TRUMP TRAP. Do not give up your integrity to keep your job, your funding, your lab, your organization, your science…you’ll end up with neither. If you wait for them to forcefully take it, you still have your integrity. Choose wisely, history watches.

After almost 10 years, my name is finally right in SCU's digital systems 🎉🎉 Depending on how implementation rolls out, my students and advisees should finally know how to find me, I shouldn't miss as many communications and payments. Thanks to the HR/IS team who make it happen!! #WomeninSTEM

…Noem was just fired because of public pressure, articles of impeachment getting serious, and tanking polls. And immigration has ALWAYS BEEN Trump’s number one issue. He shoots the hostage every time. Why would he spare an unpopular Kennedy? RFK Jr is not a sacred cow.

What a good idea for an article! Very interesting. It's worth contemplating whether you would have also recognized the warning signs -- or have someone in your life who would. www.science.org/content/arti...

I mean, it's this, or we just send chatbot-written e-mails back and forth to each other forever

Let's hit the streets on Saturday, March 7th! The mission is simple: Save Science, Protect Health, Defend Democracy. Find a rally near you, start your own, or just get some friends together and have a pop-up protest! Links in bio, or visit standupforscience.net/march7 #science #standupforscience

I’m looking to hire a research technician for my lab at Harvard & DFCI, who would primarily work in the wet lab expressing and characterizing designed proteins, starting this summer. A great role for a recent college grad looking for an immersive research experience before grad school.

DOCTOR Rümeysa Öztürk has earned her PhD!!

We should also note that these vaccines were limited to the most vulnerable populations or not approved at all due to these rare side effects (1 in 200,000). And now this detective work will help ensure future vaccines are even safer. Truly important work!

#goals @ncfdd.org

Preaching to the choir, but...

Final stretch to apply for undergraduate summer internships in the Rosetta Commons! Come design proteins, develop AI and physics-based methods to model biomolecules, and impact health, materials, and sustainability! Application deadline is Sunday Feb 1. rosettacommons.org/education/reu/

Do what you can. ❤️‍🩹Take care of yourself. 🫂Take care of each other. ☎️Call 5calls.org 🧑‍💻Write democracy.io#!/thanks 🚫Boycott ICE: www.boycottcitizens.org/ice ✊Support MN: www.standwithminnesota.com

Jane Richardson was born #OTD in 1941 + Developed the Richardson (ribbon) diagram to represent proteins' 3D structure (becoming a standard representation for protein structures) + MacArthur Fellow, 1985 + Elected, Nat'l Academy of Sciences, 1991 + President, Biophysical Society, 2012 #WomenInSTEM

Here’s a preprint from the Keating Lab: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... Foster Birnbaum and Amy E. Keating demonstrate that sequence design models, such as ProteinMPNN, are limited because they were trained only on native sequences.

“We shouldn’t be aiming to nudge a few % points in public opinion. Our goal should be to make freedom of mobility so compelling that people demand it. Help people visualize & demand a future where kids can bike to school, seniors can walk to stores, couples can bike to dinner.” @usa.streetsblog.org

Here for the right reasons

I have started updating my website because I am no longer at San Francisco State. I also wrote on my website landing page that I am writing a book about my favorite topic: evolution of drug resistance. That's my biggest goal for the year! pleunipennings.wordpress.com

here’s hoping 2026 is just one year