As a chemistry lecturer, I was never quite sure how much course material my students were truly absorbing, so I decided to embark on an experiment. At the end of one lecture, I gave each student an index card to write on. Then, I listed on the board the key topics I had covered and asked the class to copy them onto the cards and write green, yellow, or red next to each topic. Green meant “I understand this well,” yellow told me “I am somewhat unsure,” and red indicated a more dire problem: “I am confused or lost.” I wasn’t sure how the approach would work. I waited eagerly to collect and examine the cards, hoping for a comprehensive, real-time picture of how much my students actually understood.
Years earlier, when I first started to teach as a graduate teaching assistant, I simply gave my lectures and did not question whether my methods were effective. If no one raised a hand, I took it as a sign that the material was clear. But over time, I began to realize I shouldn’t make that assumption. After exams, I would discover concepts students had misunderstood, and I would wonder how I could have intervened earlier. Because students had to master some concepts before moving onto other topics, not catching problems early meant misconceptions compounded over time.
As a scientist, I was trained to seek evidence, test hypotheses, and adjust based on data. However, in the classroom, I was teaching without any feedback. It felt like speaking into the void, without an opportunity to make adjustments.
I needed a way to gauge students’ understanding before it was too late. I could have given regular quizzes to assess where they were in their learning. But what I really wanted to test was my own teaching methods, and I was looking for a low-pressure way to invite feedback. So, soon after I became a chemistry instructor, I started to experiment with the index cards. After each lecture, I would collect them and identify the topics with the most yellow and red comments.
The distribution of colors—what I refer to as “traffic signals”—was eye opening. Concepts I thought were straightforward showed an unexpected mix of yellow and red. For the first time, I had a snapshot of comprehension across the class, and it quickly transformed how I taught. I began to see lectures not as performance, but as an experiment that allowed me to test, adjust, and learn alongside my students.
Importantly, the yellow and red signals told me I needed to slow down. After one lecture that included a concept called freezing point depression, it became clear that many students were struggling to understand the idea. Some had green responses, but most were in the yellow and red. So I began the next class with a targeted review and a real-world example: why salt lowers the freezing point of water on roads. I also made a point of telling students then and during other lectures that if they still had questions about the yellow and red topics we reviewed, they were welcome to stop by during my office hours for additional help.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and teaching moved online, I could not use physical cards, so I developed a digital version. At the end of each lecture, I displayed the key topics on my shared screen and asked the students to send me a chat message with their level of understanding for each topic. For example, a student might send a chat message that read “green, green, red, yellow, green.”
As I continued to use the cards, I found they didn’t just help me. They also helped the students reflect on what they had been taught, becoming more aware of gaps in their understanding. “I didn’t realize how much I understood until I had to choose a color,” one told me. Others admitted they felt relieved when I shared the distribution of responses and they saw they weren’t alone in not fully understanding a concept.
Each batch of students has been unique. So, I am continuing to use the cards, tinkering with my material and teaching approach as I go. Although I developed this strategy for chemistry lectures, it could be used anywhere feedback matters: lab meetings, professional workshops, even research seminars. The broader lesson is that science communication, like science, thrives on evidence and awareness.
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http://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.png00Vincent Barbierhttp://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.pngVincent Barbier2026-02-19 14:04:502026-02-19 14:04:50I wasn’t sure students were grasping my lessons—so I devised an experiment
One year ago this week, in what came to be called the Valentine’s Day massacre, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration began to fire tens of thousands of federal employees who had fewer job protections because they were “probationary,” a category that included some who had been in their “new” jobs as long as 3 years. Billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) drove the terminations, which affected hundreds of government scientists working on everything from climate modeling to cancer research. A bombshell for the U.S. science community, they marked the beginning of a year of wider chaos, from grant cuts to more firings.
Most of the probationary worker cuts were eventually reversed by courts or agencies themselves. But many of the affected scientists chose to leave the government anyway, part of a massive exodus of more than 10,000 Ph.D.s last year.
Science reached out to a group of the “probies” to see how they’re doing now. For many, it was a tough year. One research program manager who asked not to be identified said she applied to nearly 80 jobs, worked part time in retail, used up her savings, and often felt suicidal before getting a contractor job at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the agency that had fired her last February and did not reinstate her. “What DOGE did was reckless and irresponsible,” she says. “They have ruined so many lives.”
Here are some scientists’ stories.
The entomologist
For Anna Wallingford, getting fired from a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) research lab led to what she calls “the ‘Etch A Sketch–shake’ moment,” when her career became a blank slate. Just 10 months earlier, the entomologist had scored a job studying pest management at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center—and with it, she thought, the promise of long-sought stability after 3 years in a soft-money faculty position at the University of New Hampshire.
A month after her firing, she and her colleagues who had been on probationary status were rehired. But she’d had to kill off her insect strains when she was fired, and the prospect of new uncertainty in the workplace felt unbearable—there were rumors USDA was planning to shutter the entire center. Heartbroken, she took the agency’s deferred resignation deal, which provided pay and benefits through 30 September 2025.
After a lot of lap swimming and deep contemplation, she resolved to move back to New Hampshire, where she grew up, and come up with a new plan. Outrage at the Trump administration’s firing spree among Wallingford’s friends and family meant she got a lot of emotional support, and former colleagues helped her network. “Everybody gets fired or laid off at some point in their life. Not everybody gets national outrage about it on your behalf.”
Wallingford has started a nonprofit consulting group called New Hampshire Community Supported Research. It will continue the kind of work she had done at the university, combining pest research and outreach to farmers. Business feels a bit rocky because of diminishing county and state funding. But she hopes to stay afloat with grants, contracts with companies for testing biocontrol products, and crowdsourced support. “I gave up a normal life to pursue a career in science,” she says. “I’m going to figure out a way to do it.”
The grant review officer
Doug Dluzen recalls getting a reassuring call from his supervisor at NIH as rumors about mass firings flew around his office on a Friday last February. His job as a scientific review officer (SRO) was considered “mission critical” and was safe, his bosses said. The following week, he was told to turn in his badge and computer.
Dluzen, whose Ph.D. is in genetics, was 3 months into training as an SRO to run peer-review panels for the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. He had previously had “an eclectic career” that included studying health disparities at a university with NIH funding, working in communications at NIH, and providing career coaching to graduate students and postdocs. When he wound up on the DOGE list as part of a cost-cutting plan to consolidate NIH peer review at a single center, he says, “My final career pivot ended up being a very temporary stop.”
After spending time on administrative leave and briefly being reinstated by a court order, Dluzen got a final termination notice in May. He quickly realized a job hunt would not be easy in a “market flooded with all of these wonderful scientists” newly out of federal agencies. He set up a one-person consulting business doing communications for clients such as scientific societies. But he needed a job with health insurance—his wife’s federal science job is also vulnerable, and they have a child with a rare disease.
This month, Dluzen starts a position with a contractor that provides logistical support to an NIH institute. He’s glad to be reconnected to NIH, an organization he still finds “amazing,” he says. “It’s been a roller coaster ride.”
The marine scientist
Alexandra Avila’s job termination notice from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) came after the initial wave of federal agency firings. On 27 February, an email arrived shortly after lunch “saying my skills were no longer required,” she recalls. “Basically, I had 2 hours to leave.” NOAA, which had funded Avila’s Ph.D. through its Dr. Nancy Foster Scholarship Program, had hired her into a marine scientist position 6 months earlier at Washington state’s Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary.
It took her some time to grieve the loss of her opportunity to do work studying and protecting ocean ecosystems. “I love doing that, and that was taken away from me,” she says. She found it helpful to connect with other NOAA “probies” online. “We’d all been through that shared trauma.”
The job loss created financial challenges for her and her husband, who had a daughter in day care. Avila quickly got a part-time role at a local nonprofit conservation organization, but the family struggled to cover its bills. They made use of the local food bank, secured federal food benefits and Medicaid, and received state support to subsidize their daughter’s day care.
Avila spent much of past year applying “nonstop” for jobs in science, policy, teaching, and fisheries management. “I would get like third place, or fifth place, out of hundreds of applicants,” she says. Finally, in January, she started a 1-year fellowship through the West Coast Ocean Alliance, working with the Quileute Tribe in the same area as in her NOAA job on fisheries science and management. The pay is far less than she was making as a federal employee. But she’s happy to be back doing full-time work she loves. “I might be able to work with some of my old NOAA co-workers.”
Avila worries for the future of federal science agencies. “The brain drain that’s happening right now is going to cause a lot of damage. At NOAA itself we lost all the young, new generation of scientists coming in.” Meanwhile, retirements claimed “the oldest ones, the ones that are supposed to pass down the knowledge,” she says. “It’s just heartbreaking.”
The chemist
Analytical chemist Ron Hunter was nearly 1 year into heading a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tobacco analysis lab when he learned that he and three other lab members had been terminated.
Hunter had taken the position at the Atlanta field lab analyzing tobacco products for nicotine and toxic chemicals in April 2024 after spending much of his career in industry. Joining the federal workforce—with a lab just three blocks from his home—felt like “a good move,” he says. He hired new staff, beefed up the lab’s analytical work, and earned the trust of longtime staffers. “We were in this rhythm, we were preparing to move to a new lab, and we had all these fun projects,” he says.
Because his 1-year probationary period ended while a court challenge to the firings was ongoing, Hunter had his job back by May. But he left FDA anyway, figuring he was probably going to be cut eventually. After months of networking, consulting as a career coach to help pay his bills, and losing “a lot of weight” from stress, he found a position with the CDC Foundation, a nonprofit that supports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He’s now serving as an adviser to an initiative that helps low- and middle-income countries with high rates of lead poisoning build lab capacity to test blood samples for the neurotoxin and reduce exposures.
Hunter says he’s glad to still be working in public health—but outside the federal government. “I’m really thankful to be in a public health environment at a time when public health is under attack,” Hunter says.
The computational biologist
Heather Deel was “incredibly excited” when she landed a computational biology job at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2024.Heather Deel
Heather Deel was offered a dream position working as a computational biologist at USDA on the same day Trump was elected to a second term in 2024. “It was a big, careermaking position,” says Deel, who had been working as a postdoc since finishing her Ph.D. 2 years earlier. “It felt like a turning point.”
On the day of her firing, 13 February 2025, Deel and her husband had gone to an ultrasound appointment and heard their baby’s heartbeat for the first time. “I had had two prior miscarriages where we had gone to these scans and not seen a heartbeat,” she says, so “there was a lot of bittersweet emotions in the air.” Then around 9 p.m., she received an email saying she was losing her job, effective immediately, along with more than a dozen other employees who had been working in her Colorado office on probationary status.
The anticipation of her son’s arrival guided Deel’s decisions in the tumultuous months that followed. In March, she was reinstated after a court case overturned the probationary firings. But when USDA announced the second round of its deferred resignation program in April, Deel took the offer. “I wanted to stay in that unit for the rest of my career,” she says. But she worried she would get fired anyhow, especially given that her job involved measuring greenhouse gas emissions related to farming practices. “I felt very, very targeted,” she says. Resignation “seemed like the safer option and it guaranteed me insurance through the birth of my son.”
She leveraged personal connections from her graduate school days to land a job at Pisces Molecular, a small company in Boulder, Colorado, that applies molecular biology to solving challenges in fisheries, wildlife, and conservation biology. She’s still using her computation biology skills and enjoys her job. She also counts herself lucky to have managed to stay in science without uprooting her young family. “Most people I know who have found positions have had to move across the country for them, or even internationally.” But Deel looks back at the USDA position and laments the missed chance to work on a national project that could have had a big impact.
Deel is still open to returning to the federal government someday—after what she sees as a temporary state of turmoil. “When the next administration comes through, there’s going to be many years of repair. And I want to be part of that repair.”
http://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.png00Vincent Barbierhttp://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.pngVincent Barbier2026-02-13 14:49:472026-02-13 14:49:47These scientists saw a future in public service—until Trump’s ‘massacre’ hit
When I finished my presentation and opened the floor for questions, I was flummoxed by the opening response. Instead of addressing me—a staff scientist—a senior faculty member turned to my mentor and congratulated him on the project. I felt it in my gut first, then in my cheeks. I had provided project support for scientists for more than 10 years and was used to being overlooked in discussions. But it was not what I was expecting on this day, during a presentation about my own work. My mentor made a point of looking my way when responding, saying I had been at the “tip of the spear” for the project. I was thankful for his vocal support. But my path as a staff scientist hasn’t always been easy.
I began my career in academia providing administrative support for two associate deans. I had just graduated with an undergraduate degree in English, I was in my late 20s, and I was looking to pay off my student loans. I had explored many different career paths—hospitality, nonprofit management, wedding photography—but none felt right.
I was eager to find ways to contribute and succeed. So, when an entry-level research position opened up in a research center one of the deans oversaw, I decided to apply. It still involved many administrative tasks. But after starting, I found that I enjoyed dipping my toes into data collection and analysis and that I was drawn to research methods. After several years in this role, I was encouraged to pursue a master’s in public health.
Two years later, with my master’s degree in hand, I took an entry-level position as a statistical data analyst. I thoroughly enjoyed the work. But I was rarely included in high-level planning meetings. I was simply handed a to-do list without a chance to learn the goals of a project or contribute to the strategy. I felt valued but not included, and over time I grew dissatisfied.
Other research staff who shared my dissatisfaction advised me to stay focused: “You have to be committed to the work, you can’t care about the credit.” But I didn’t see it that way. Years earlier, I had come across an article about the Toyota Production System, which achieves high efficiency in part by respecting and listening to all employees and involving them in problem-solving. Ever since then, I have been hyperaware of how people on the lower rungs of the academic hierarchy—research support staff, for example—are not routinely included or fully tapped.
I felt I had my own contributions to make. So, after 5 years of supporting faculty, I worked to create the staff scientist role I currently hold. I was given projects to lead, and I wrote my own proposals in collaboration with faculty members. But when it came time to communicate the work, I was often bypassed. At the conclusion of one project I was asked to write talking points for the faculty member who would present them to an external advisory committee. In another instance, I was told my name would not appear on a slide describing a project I was leading. I wanted credit for my own work, and I refused to prepare a summary for the presentation.
I have been fortunate to find some faculty colleagues and mentors who give me the opportunity to fully participate in the scientific process. These relationships have made all the difference for me. But most faculty seem to view the academic hierarchy as some kind of natural law, where they are knowledge producers and staff are knowledge supporters.
Those of us who lack a Ph.D. may be more likely to be excluded, but I have seen staff colleagues with Ph.D.s experience the same treatment. All of us need to seek out faculty leaders who are receptive to feedback on the staff experience and want to cultivate inclusivity. I also urge those in positions of power to think about how their current structures might render nonfaculty contributions invisible. We’re all valuable cogs in the system.
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At least 50 students hoping to win a prestigious graduate fellowship this year from the National Science Foundation (NSF) have already been turned down without even having their research proposals reviewed. It’s an unusually high number of such rejections for a program that has long served as a steppingstone for many prominent scientists, including 50 Nobel laureates.
In recent weeks, students seeking NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF) have received brief and identical emails from NSF saying “your application did not meet the Eligibility/Compliance requirements and is being returned without review (RWR).” An NSF spokesperson said applicants may be ineligible because they don’t meet “requirements related to degree status, field of study, degree program, or proposed research.” The spokesperson said the RWR decisions, first reported by Eos, are final and cannot be appealed.
The agency’s cryptic messaging—the spokesperson declined to answer specific questions from Science about the process—has led to speculation about what has prompted the large number of cursory rejections. A watchdog group called Grant Witness has analyzed RWR emails sent to 50 applicants and found most had proposed research in the life sciences, although the team says it has no way of knowing whether its sample is representative or how many RWR notices NSF has sent out.
“In past years, [NSF] might have excluded a handful of applications that were clearly inappropriate,” says Stony Brook University cognitive psychologist Susan Brennan, a former GRF program officer. “But this number is quite unusual. And it runs counter to the program’s goal of preparing the next generation of scientists by giving them a chance to have their ideas be subject to rigorous peer review.”
Some applicants find the rejections particularly puzzling because similar applications they submitted in 2024 did very well. A first-year graduate student who asked to remain anonymous says she was shocked to receive an RWR email late last month for essentially the same proposal she submitted in late 2024 that received an honorable mention. “It was very disappointing,” the student recalls, “since my previous proposal had received a very high score. And this one was probably even stronger, because I had tweaked it to respond to comments from the reviewers. It makes no sense.”
Another first-year graduate student whose previous proposal had also earned an honorable mention before receiving an RWR this month applied “to show my adviser that I could propose a research project based on my own ideas. It was also a way to get my feet wet and learn how the process works.”
The GRF program was one of NSF’s first initiatives after the agency was founded in 1950, supporting aspiring scientists in any field that NSF funded. But it has traveled a bumpy road since President Donald Trump took office a year ago. The 2025 class was roughly two-thirds its original target size of 2300—and it reached that number only after NSF added a second cohort of 500 students, following community outrage after NSF announced in April 2025 it would only be supporting 1000 students. The second batch of recipients skewed toward computing and quantum science, fields the Trump administration has emphasized.
The GRF was designed to support college seniors planning to attend graduate school. But over time second-year graduate students, with a year of research under their belts, became more likely to win the 3-year scholarship. Last fall, NSF announced new rules for this year’s competition that banned those more experienced students.
On social media, GRF applicants and NSF-funded researchers have speculated about the causes of the perfunctory rejections. Some wonder whether NSF judged the proposed work to be related to a particular disease, the domain of the National Institutes of Health, rather than understanding an underlying molecular mechanism. Another popular theory is that applicants used words that are anathema to the Trump administration, such as climate or diversity. Some onlookers also wondered whether NSF might be trying to reduce the number of outside reviewers needed to rate the proposals after agency program managers carry out an initial vetting of what could be up to 14,000 submissions.
The cloud of uncertainty has already had a devastating impact on students whose proposals have been summarily rejected. “Neuroscience/life sciences are still listed in this year’s solicitation [as eligible fields],” one applicant posted on Reddit in searching for an answer to why they had received an RWR email. “I am just so upset … I feel like I tried so hard and [that] none of it means anything.”
In its analysis, Grant Witness classified 12 RWRs as involving ecology, six in cell biology, five in psychology, four in neuroscience, and 14 in other subfields of biology. None of the RWRs related to work in artificial intelligence or quantum science. The rejections are evenly divided between undergraduate and first-year graduate students, says Lauren Kuehne, an independent ecologist and member of the Grant Witness team, and no single university or institution appears to have been targeted.
Whatever the total number of RWRs, there are signs that NSF may be retreating from its initial position that the rejected proposals “will not be considered further.” One student who received an RWR email tells Science that NSF rejected their first appeal but their second resulted in being told that the proposal “is being actively reviewed.”
NSF typically announces the new GRF class in April.
http://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.png00Vincent Barbierhttp://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.pngVincent Barbier2026-02-12 13:08:172026-02-12 13:08:17NSF’s flagship fellowship program is rejecting applicants without peer review
In the aquamarine waters off Kenya’s eastern coast, fishing nets often accidentally ensnare endangered sea turtles. A local conservation group has spent years recording these encounters in a sprawling archive of data. Yet much of it remains unused.
This problem extends beyond turtle conservation. Biologists have access to more data than ever. But a preprint posted last month argues that traditional lectures and lab courses often leave students without the computational skills needed to analyze them, especially in resource-constrained parts of the Global South.
The authors propose a creative solution: hackathons, a competitive activity that has gained popularity across STEM fields because it challenges participants to quickly develop solutions to real-world problems. To test the approach, they recruited more than 50 early-career researchers—mostly master’s students—from across sub-Saharan Africa. After attending multiday summer schools that taught basic coding and modeling, the participants were challenged to a 30-hour team hackathon. Despite starting from zero programming experience, many successfully developed data-driven projects to regional challenges, including turtle health, algal blooms, and HIV infection modeling.
Science Careers spoke with two of the organizers, University of Embu mathematician Marilyn Ronoh and RWTH Aachen University computational biologist Anna Matuszyńska, about how hackathons can help students build computational skills, communicate across disciplines, and gain confidence in shaping their own research.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What makes hackathons useful in ways traditional classroom education can’t easily achieve?
Marilyn Ronoh: Hackathons are amazing because you can bring together people of different minds and different backgrounds. Many participants reported that this was their first experience working closely with peers from completely different disciplines—and doing so under real analytical pressure. We had, in one room, students of biology, ecology, political science, math, and informatics. Another theme that appeared repeatedly was that the hackathon compressed learning in a way traditional coursework rarely does. As one participant put it: “What we gained is what a normal student will gain in a whole semester.”
Anna Matuszyńska: It’s a space that allows you to remove all distractions. There’s one problem and one problem only. And it also gives you great satisfaction because you have some tangible product at the end of the intensive work, boosting your self-esteem.
Q: What sorts of problems did your hackathons focus on?
A.M.: Many Sub-Saharan countries are sitting on a gold mine of information that they don’t know exactly how to use. For example, for our first hackathon, we worked with a local ocean conservation group that had a hospital for curing turtles caught by fishermen. They had 20 years of data basically stored on Excel sheets. The students then selected a particular feature or trend to extract from the huge amount of data. For example, how long are some turtles staying in the hospital? Is there any correlation with seasons? Are there a lot of sick turtles in a certain area? That’s important to know because if the ecosystem where they feed is too polluted, they develop different diseases, like cancer. That would be an indicator to fishermen, too: The ocean here is not healthy. You’re not going to find fish either.
Q: Given that that challenge was rooted in the local community, did the students do anything with their findings afterward?
A.M.: A great surprise was that the fishermen were interested in listening to our results! They were asked by the organization to provide information about turtles, but not everyone understand what for.
We needed to come up with an idea for how to explain that their help had been extremely useful in finding the health status of the ocean. But we needed to achieve it without PowerPoints, without any fancy graphs. The participants had great idea of summarizing their coding results in a flip chart [a large pad of paper mounted on an easel] with images showing the connections and presented them to the fishermen in the local language, Kiswahili. That helped the fishermen understand their contribution, so they could continue their involvement in the project.
Marilyn Ronoh (left) and Anna Matuszynska (right) help lead a hackathon.Fiona Moejes
Q: Most hackathons are structured as one-time events. Why did you embed the hackathons as part of a larger program?
A.M.: Many participants would not arrive with all the necessary skills to tackle the challenge right away, especially in terms of coding. Coming from very different disciplines, they also wouldn’t share a common language, both conceptually or technically. By offering a diverse portfolio of teaching formats—lectures, seminars, panel discussions, and hands-on computing classes—we could first transfer core skills and build a shared language. That common ground was essential before asking people to meaningfully collaborate in a hackathon setting.
M.R.: In our context, especially in the Global South, a one-off hackathon can be exciting but rarely transformative. Participants often leave inspired, but without the scaffolding needed to actually use the skills in their research or professional lives. We wanted participants to understand how to think with data and models, how to collaborate across disciplines, and how to carry those skills back into their theses, teaching, and institutional work long after the hackathon ended.
Q: Why do you think hackathons are especially relevant for the Global South?
M.R.: One of our greatest problems is departments thinking that they can’t work together. No one wants to imagine that we could have interdisciplinary research or postgraduate programs. It’s something that we are praying that we can work around. Hackathons are quite a good place to bring that out and show us there can be a lot done from students drawing on different disciplines. Nearly all participants indicated that they now plan to actively engage colleagues from other fields to address their research challenges and to integrate computational modeling skills into their own work.
Q: Do you have any recommendations for others on how to organize an effective hackathon?
A.M.: In contrast to many industrial hackathons, where competition and producing the single “best” solution are the main goals, ours was to empower every single participant and ensure they left with tangible proof of newly acquired skills. We highly recommend embedding the hackathon within some educational framework, such as a semester long course that is finalized with a hackathon, because then the students have this time to build their skills and implement them. As educators, our role is not only to transfer specific technical skills, but also to empower students to believe in themselves. So beyond providing them with specific tools, we also gave them confidence that together, they can actually change the world.
http://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.png00Vincent Barbierhttp://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.pngVincent Barbier2026-02-11 11:36:432026-02-11 11:36:43Can hackathons help foster data skills in the Global South?
At the foot of the French Alps in Grenoble sprawls an 844-meter-long ring: the European Synchrotron Research Facility (ESRF), which accelerates electrons to nearly the speed of light to produce bright x-rays. And here, in a restroom within this magnificent facility, I stood expressing milk from my breasts. I had just started my first shift of a 5-day experiment. While troubleshooting with my colleagues, I noticed my hoodie was soaked with milk. My breasts were hurting, and I could hardly move my arms. As I made my way to the bathroom, I tried to convince myself this was an empowering moment and that I should be proud. But in reality, it was a reminder of my anxiety at being away from my young daughter for the first time—feelings I felt ashamed to be bringing to the lab.
When I got pregnant in my last Ph.D. year, I didn’t think much about how motherhood and my career might come into conflict. After all, I was in Sweden, a country with great family support. Many of my colleagues had children. And I was fortunate to be able to take a full year of parental leave.
After I came back to work, I had 3 months left in my contract to write up and defend my doctoral thesis. It was a highly stressful period—but both early motherhood and writing a thesis are exhausting, and I assumed once I had finished my Ph.D., life would go back to normal.
But the stress continued even after I started my postdoc and my 1-year-old daughter began preschool. Every day at work I felt waves of inexplicable panic. It was hard to focus, even though I knew she was safe and fine. I felt overwhelmed with guilt each time I recalled her upset face at drop-off, her distress exaggerated in my memory. I soon realized I had developed a strong separation anxiety, a condition well-known in toddlers but rarely acknowledged in parents. The hardest part of becoming a postdoc turned out to be learning how to leave my daughter behind.
When the opportunity to travel to the ESRF came up, my daughter was still breastfeeding and was deeply attached to me. I was more worried than ever about leaving her. A student in the lab with two children assured me I would overcome this “energy barrier” simply by going. “The hardest part,” she said, “is not being there; it is thinking about going. You are the most stressed person in this situation, not your daughter. She is, and will be, fine.” She knew it from her own experience.
Her insight was helpful, but the anxious part of my brain continued to generate worst-case scenarios. I booked my return flight for right after my final 12-hour night shift at the synchrotron, without any rest—but I kept worrying about delayed flights or missed buses. My husband and I are immigrants to Sweden, with no family close by for support, and I couldn’t help wondering how he and my daughter would cope if he got sick while I was gone.
But none of those things transpired. After that first night at the synchrotron, I was relieved to learn that my daughter had found comfort in her father. In the following nights, she quickly adapted to sleeping without breastfeeding. Over the course of those 5 days in France, I found myself gradually transforming from an anxious and unfocused mother into a well-performing researcher.
The experience also left me feeling more confident back home. Drop-offs have become easier: If we can survive 5 days apart, we can survive a morning goodbye, too. I still worry about my daughter, but my intense separation anxiety has eased, and I feel less tension and internal conflict.
Now, writing this from a conference, again far away from my daughter, I can see that that moment spent expressing milk at the synchrotron really was empowering, even if I didn’t feel it at the time. It was part of learning to cope with separation. If you’re a parent dreading the first experiment or conference abroad, my best advice is what I was told: The hardest part is often thinking about going. Once you’re there, let the evidence accumulate that your child can be safe and loved without you in the room—and that you can still be a serious scientist with milk stains.
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http://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.png00Vincent Barbierhttp://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.pngVincent Barbier2026-02-05 15:05:402026-02-05 15:05:40How a research trip helped me overcome separation anxiety as a new mother
When the Entomological Society of America decided years ago to hold its 2025 annual conference in Portland, Oregon, organizers had no inkling of the headwinds they’d be facing. In the weeks leading up to the November meeting, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered National Guard troops be deployed to “War ravaged Portland” amid a flurry of protests outside the city’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. Then, the federal government started what would become the longest shutdown in U.S. history, leaving many federal scientists—including those at the Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which typically send many insect experts to the gathering—officially barred from presenting their research.
Conference organizers saw more cancellations than usual, most of them coming from federal employees. But the meeting still drew more than 3400 attendees—only a few percentage points lower than in 2024. A few months earlier, the society had been projecting the meeting would be its largest since before the COVID-19 pandemic, but its staff were satisfied with their final tally. “We still consider it a healthy turnout,” says Chris Stelzig, the society’s executive director.
The same scenario played out at the annual meetings of many other scientific societies, an investigation by Science has found. Following concerns reported last year that attendance at U.S.-based conferences would drop sharply in 2025, Science contacted two dozen U.S. societies to find out how those numbers actually shifted. Of the 16 that responded, only five reported that attendance had gone down by more than a few percentage points.
Those statistics are only part of the story, however. About one-third of the societies contacted by Science did not provide information about attendance trends, and it’s possible those societies didn’t want to advertise declining numbers. One society representative who spoke to Science on the condition of anonymity said they had heard of drops as large as 30% at other meetings. “If I’m at a society that has a 30% cut, I’m not going to be very proud of that.” And because annual meetings are often a crucial source of a society’s revenue, some scientists are worried that, if sustained over several years, drops in attendance could leave organizations in a precarious position.
Of the five societies that did experience a drop in numbers, most reported declines in attendees coming from both inside and outside the United States. “We lost some of the federal [employee] registrations we would have had,” Ronald Wasserstein, executive director at the American Statistical Association (ASA), says of his society’s August meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, which had a 14% drop in overall attendance. “There’s no doubt that we also experienced significantly fewer international attendees.”
At the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in New Orleans in December, one senior academic scientist says he had to pivot at the last moment to give a presentation prepared by a collaborator at the U.S. Geological Survey. The federal shutdown was over by then, but—like many federal scientists who had planned to travel to the AGU meeting—the colleague had run into problems getting official clearance from agency officials to attend, says the academic, who requested anonymity to protect the collaborator’s identity.
The AGU meeting ended up drawing just over 21,000 attendees, which was a far cry from the 31,000 attendees at its 2024 meeting in Washington, D.C., but roughly on par with attendance at its 2017 meeting in New Orleans. “There are many variables that affect participation in any given year,” an AGU spokesperson wrote to Science.
Scientists who participated in meetings with reduced numbers say they didn’t notice sparsely attended presentations or poster sessions. “Someone later told me [the AGU conference] was smaller—but it didn’t feel that way,” says University of Vermont geoscientist Paul Bierman. “It felt like a very dynamic meeting.” Chrystal Starbird, a biochemist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), felt similarly about the American Society for Cell Biology’s (ASCB’s) December meeting in Philadelphia, which saw a 17% decline in attendance compared with 2024. “I had a wonderful experience,” she says.
Starbird’s reasons go beyond the science: She says social events, panel discussions, and other opportunities provided a space for important conversations about challenges facing the community, including funding cuts and changes in faculty hiring. “I left the conference knowing that others were also deeply concerned about what the events of the past year would mean for science,” she says.
Still, reduced attendance numbers can cause financial woes for the scientific societies that put on meetings. Wasserstein says the ASA conference didn’t lose money, but it pulled in about $600,000 less than it would have if attendance numbers had held steady relative to 2024. That puts a financial strain on other programs the nonprofit organization offers that don’t have their own source of revenue, he says. And because scientists often renew society memberships so they can get reduced rates on conference registration fees, reduced attendance also impacts membership revenue. “Not only did they not come to a meeting, but we’re seeing membership decreasing,” says Kevin Wilson, vice president of ASCB. “That’s difficult.”
The societies Science spoke with didn’t report being in dire straits financially. But many scientists worry they could be hit harder in the years to come if federal funding were to drop precipitously or if international researchers are increasingly put off by—or prevented from—traveling to the U.S. “One bad year could kill one of our favorite scientific societies,” says UNC cell and developmental biologist Mark Peifer.
Staff at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) are among those who are worried. Their membership includes scientists and public health professionals in about 100 countries, many of whom were affected by the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and other changes last year. “The community at large has been quite demoralized,” says past ASTMH President David Fidock.
The society’s 2025 meeting didn’t have the massive drop in attendance that organizers had braced for, according to CEO Jamie Bay Nishi, in part because it was held in Canada—a country that many international members felt comfortable traveling to. But this year their conference will shift to Washington, D.C. “We aren’t facing an immediate existential risk,” Nishi says of her society’s financial outlook. “But our annual meeting is our flagship activity each year and diminished participation for a prolonged period puts significant financial strain on our organization.”
http://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.png00Vincent Barbierhttp://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.pngVincent Barbier2026-01-30 14:40:322026-01-30 14:40:32Trump slump? Attendance plummets at some science meetings, but others hold steady
I sat at my laptop intending to work, but I couldn’t read, think, or write. Three days earlier, one of my graduate students had come to me wanting to switch research groups. The student was slowly making progress and was on track, so I was confused. What did I do wrong? After taking time to reflect on my path in the 4 years since I became a faculty member, I concluded that I was transferring the stress I was under onto my graduate students—and that wasn’t fair.
When I moved back to my home country, China, to start my faculty position, I was quickly overwhelmed by the relentless pressure to secure competitive grants, publish articles in highprofile journals, and advise students. I was new to the demands of academia and had been trained in the United States, which left me unprepared to work with Chinese funding agencies. China’s funding system underwent constant reforms, raising competition and uncertainty. Funding my small research group required an endless cycle of writing proposals, leaving me short on time and patience.
My tenure hopes added to the pressure. I felt compelled to accelerate my publishing output to compete with the overall speed of Chinese academia. As I brought graduate students into my lab, I put pressure on them to publish articles, too. I scheduled meetings often and left limited time for them to read and think. Sometimes, when their progress was slower than expected, my tone was sharp and didn’t show empathy and understanding. I pushed them relentlessly, overlooking signs that they needed help. This went on for years.
Then came my student’s request to switch groups. She couldn’t take the pressure or my behavior anymore, she told me. I was shocked, because I thought I had made every effort to ensure her academic success, and I only wished she would grow by learning. But I am grateful for her courage to come to me, because it was the wake-up call I needed. Without it, I am not sure how long it would have taken me to figure out the effects of my behavior.
In my reflections, I started reading Peter Drucker’s book, The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done, which advises leaders to focus on opportunities rather than problems. I had been doing exactly the opposite. My energy was always going into trying to notice and fix problems, such as our group’s lack of high-profile research grants. I didn’t pursue opportunities, such as collaborative research with other groups and exploring innovative research direction with my students.
My student’s feedback also prompted me to think back to why I decided to pursue my career in academia in the first place. I recalled the excitement I felt as a postdoc, when curiosity was king for me. I worked in a lab where people were comfortable asking questions regardless of their job titles. They felt free to discuss compelling studies, even when those studies were not directly linked with their projects.
I lost sight of the importance of curiosity when I was consumed by problems and fears under the tenure clock. But I realized that an environment where people would feel free to share their thoughts with me and think creatively, regardless of the power hierarchy, was exactly what I wanted in my lab.
I had meaningful conversations with my students to understand their needs, which led to changes in how I managed my team. I reduced the frequency of check-in meetings and focused more on lab members’ overall progress. I provided basic training sessions to improve my students’ skills and began to grant them more autonomy. I was pleased to see that, after open conversations about the situation, the graduate student who had requested to switch groups decided to stay.
Even though I am still busy, I am happier and more creatively engaged than before. The increased trust seems to be helping my students thrive. Research funding remains a core concern. But because I have enough support for the next couple years, I allow this anxiety to sit quietly, and I leave space for me and my lab members to pursue interesting research ideas. I don’t know whether I will achieve tenure, but I do know that for me and my students, research is a marathon and I have to manage it sustainably.
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http://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.png00Vincent Barbierhttp://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.pngVincent Barbier2026-01-29 14:55:362026-01-29 14:55:36I needed a culture shift in my lab. I’m grateful one student spoke up
Some 10,109 doctoral-trained experts in science and related fields left their jobs last year as President Donald Trump dramatically shrank the overall federal workforce. That exodus was only 3% of the 335,192 federal workers who exited last year but represents 14% of the total number of Ph.D.s in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) or health fields employed at the end of 2024 as then-President Joe Biden prepared to leave office.
The numbers come from employment data posted earlier this month by the White House Office of Personnel Management (OPM). At 14 research agencies Science examined in detail, departures outnumbered new hires last year by a ratio of 11 to one, resulting in a net loss of 4224 STEM Ph.D.s. The graphs that follow show the impact is particularly striking at such scientist-rich agencies as the National Science Foundation (NSF). But across the government, these departing Ph.D.s took with them a wealth of subject matter expertise and knowledge about how the agencies operate.
2024
48,304 years
of federal work experience were lost across the 4576 employees with Ph.D.s who departed STEM or health roles 1 January–30 November
2025
106,636 years
of federal work experience were lost across the 10,109 employees with Ph.D.s who departed STEM or health roles 1 January–30 November
Losses surged in 2025
Every one of the 14 agencies that Science analyzed lost far more STEM Ph.D.s in 2025 than in 2024, before Trump took office. The National Institutes of Health tops the list with more than 1100 departures, compared with 421 in 2024. On average, the 14 agencies lost roughly three times more of these experts in 2025 than in 2024, with the highest percent increase in departures at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS). At the same time, the number of STEM Ph.D.s hired at every agency was dramatically lower last year than in 2024.
Where the losses were greatest
Although the payroll for both STEM Ph.D.s (red bars) and non-STEM Ph.D.s (gray bars) shrank across the agencies that Science examined, research roles at four were hit particularly hard. NSF, EPA, the Department of Energy, and USFS all lost a greater percentage of that highly trained workforce than workers with less education. At NSF, the net reduction of 205 STEM Ph.D.s between 1 January and 30 November constituted 40% of its total pre-Trump Ph.D. workforce of 517, by far the largest percentage at any agency. STEM Ph.D.s also make up a larger percentage of the total workforce at NSF than at any other agency—some 30% in the waning days of the Biden administration. The losses reduced that percentage to 26% by 30 November 2025.
Why they left
Science’s analysis found that reductions in force, or RIFs, accounted for relatively few departures in 2025. Only at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where 16% of the 519 STEM Ph.D.s who left last year got pink RIF slips, did the percentage exceed 6%, and some agencies reported no STEM Ph.D. RIFs in 2025.
At most agencies, the most common reasons for departures were retirements and quitting. Although OPM classifies many of these as voluntary, outside forces including the fear of being fired, the lure of buyout offers, or a profound disagreement with Trump policies, likely influenced many decisions to leave.
Many Ph.D.s departed because their position was terminated. At NSF, 45% of the 204 STEM Ph.D.s who left last year were rotators—academics on leave from their university to work for a few years at the agency. Last year, NSF eliminated three-quarters of those positions.
Departures and hires reflect all employees in monthly accessions and separations data published by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) as of 12 January 2025.
Departures include all federal civilian employees who quit, retired, were terminated because of reductions in force, were fired, transferred out of an agency, or who left for any other reason. Hires include all federal civilian employees who were newly hired or transferred into an agency.
Changes in the number of personnel across agencies in December 2024 and November 2025 reflect all employees recorded in OPM’s monthly employment data as of 12 January 2025. These data include all active employees in either a pay or nonpay status as of the last day of each month.
Personnel were classified as an employee in a STEM or health role with a Ph.D. if they had an education level of doctorate degree or postdoctorate and were in a job classified as a STEM or health occupation, per OPM’s Enterprise Human Resources Integration (EHRI) Dynamics data.
Years of federal service experience lost includes “the number of years of federal civilian employment, creditable military service, and other service made creditable by specific legislation,” also per OPM’s EHRI data.
http://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.png00Vincent Barbierhttp://postdocinusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-PostdocInUSA-300x165.pngVincent Barbier2026-01-26 18:10:352026-01-26 18:10:35U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office
When a paper I had spent years working on tirelessly was published in Science, others expected me to be happy. One senior scientist immediately urged me to work on securing my own funding for a follow-up project and added, “If you want to become a PI [principal investigator], you now have to give 150%.” The advice was well-meaning; in his view, the Science publication was a step toward a job leading a lab. But it wasn’t clear how I would find the energy to keep going. After 8 years pouring myself into one postdoc project and submitting to Nature and Science, I barely had 50% left.
Years earlier, when I moved to France to start the project, I was full of enthusiasm and happy to work long hours. But as time went on and I struggled to get my project off the ground, pressure and insecurity became my main motivators. If I failed, I feared I would never get a job in academia.
Haunted by low self-esteem, I put pressure on myself to work harder and felt guilty whenever I took a break. Weekends disappeared into experiments, vacations shrank to a few days, and my mind no longer knew how to rest.
Nearly 3 years into the project, I finally saw a glimmer of hope: Under specific conditions, my mutants began to show a phenotype. It wasn’t the dramatic breakthrough I had imagined, but as I followed these early hints, the findings deepened.
Around that time, our group realized another lab was poised to potentially scoop us. That ramped up my anxiety even further. After some time working separately, we decided to join forces with our competitors. That eased the pressure. But I constantly feared they’d end the collaboration and submit first, as my experiments were perpetually behind schedule. Eventually, though, we submitted a joint paper to Nature.
The manuscript was rejected. But the editor left a small back door open, so we worked through about 50 reviewer comments, running new experiments and rewriting the paper—an effort that consumed 1 year of work. After another rejection, we fought on for another year. In the end, the appeal was denied. The editors offered to send the manuscript to one of Nature’s sister journals, which could have been an easier path to publishing. But we opted to submit to Science instead.
When the next round of reviewer comments—some very negative—came back, I almost cried. “Not again,” I remember thinking. Again it took well over a year to address another long round of revisions. But in the end we received an acceptance letter.
When the paper finally appeared in print, I was in no condition to rejoice. An old tic disorder had returned. My back and neck ached constantly. Skin rashes appeared. I struggled with focus, depression, and exhaustion. My creativity and energy had deserted me. I tried to write a follow-up grant but I couldn’t finish it. I was spent in body and mind.
After my postdoc contract was not renewed, I decided not to seek a new position in academia because I feared the stress would overwhelm me. I spent 2 years sending applications to biotech and pharma companies, without success.
Unemployed and receiving basic social welfare, I felt worthless and like an even bigger failure. This was the lowest point of my life, and I sought psychotherapy. It helped me see that I had tried to mold myself to academic expectations and lost sight of who I was and what I needed to thrive.
Now, at 44, with the help of my therapist, I have rediscovered myself through writing, dance, volunteering, and working as a barista. I also decided to dip my toes back into science. I wrote a grant proposal with a former colleague, and I plan to start doing some work in her lab next month. If our proposal is funded, I’ll lead a small team, on my terms.
The relentless pursuit of academic success through publications in prestigious journals nearly broke me. Looking back, I’m not sure it was worth the sacrifice. I might not have felt the need to step away from academia had we aimed for a lower impact journal. After taking time for recovery, I have come to appreciate that success isn’t solely a matter of high-impact papers or the steep climb up the academic ladder. For me, it now means tracing my own path, one that is sustainable and isn’t defined by what others expect of me.
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