I used to be homeless. That experience shapes my science

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From ScienceMag:

Checking emails between flights at the airport, I was excited to see long-awaited reviews for a paper I had submitted with my Ph.D. adviser. It was an editorial in which I proposed a framework for identifying and mitigating conflict between urban coyotes and people experiencing unsheltered homelessness. Based on my thesis research, it contained more of my heart and soul than any I had previously written. But the reviews were resoundingly negative. I appreciated the valid scientific criticisms, but I struggled with comments questioning our qualifications and expertise. One in particular froze me: “The authors are naïve about homelessness.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

Following a tumultuous home life, I spent my late teenage years and early 20s in and out of homelessness, sometimes living on the street, camping illegally, and living in a car. I earned a 2-year college diploma while working full time and living in an unheated camper without water or power through Canadian winters. I finished my undergraduate degree while working as a wilderness guide, camping through the summers and retreating to a different moldy basement bedroom each winter. Some combination of stubbornness, inertia, and a genuine curiosity about the natural world kept me going. I loved time outdoors, watching animals. I wanted a job where I could ask and answer my own ecological questions.

By the time grad school was an option, it was an obvious choice—after all, I would get paid for it! I accepted a position studying the effects of urbanization on coyote behavior. Fieldwork for this project led to the editorial.

It wasn’t easy to write. My sentences struggled to capture the enormity of the problems I had observed. In my fieldwork, I’d seen coyotes scavenging from encampments, eating low-quality food that would make them sick. Elsewhere, I’d collected coyote scat infected with a potentially deadly tapeworm, knowing the people in the encampments could be exposed but would struggle to access health care. These observations mingled with memories I wish I didn’t have. The unique smell of dumpster diving in a sleeping city. Laughing and braiding the hair of a friend who later died violently in the streets. I pushed those memories away to write as cleanly and objectively as possible.

Homelessness took things from me, but it also gave me things. I am observant. I am resourceful. I am phenomenal at camping. I thrive in bad weather. These skills have helped me walk so many worthwhile roads—as a professional wilderness guide, a recreationist comfortable solo camping in wild places, and, crucially, as an urban ecologist. I am comfortable conducting fieldwork in urban spaces where others might not be. It’s exactly this aptitude that let me notice the things I had described in my paper, which was eventually published at another journal.

I can’t know exactly what the reviewer who accused us of naïvety was thinking, but they seemingly never imagined an author of such a piece might have firsthand experience of homelessness. That assumption shook me: It suggested someone with my history did not belong in academia. It was not the first time I have felt that way. I recalled the way fellow grad students had expressed fear of a man sleeping in the entrance to a university building, and an urban ecology safety briefing that focused on the dangers of homeless people rather than on ways to communicate with or support people in need.

Many of the life experiences that bring diversity to science are invisible, or are sufficiently personal and taboo that we don’t talk about them—abuse, poverty, rape, addiction, a schizophrenic family member, a history of homelessness. Our assumptions about who researchers are and what their past lives looked like create an isolating landscape of erasure—an environment where certain histories are assumed to be absent, keeping the people who hold those histories from feeling they belong.

For years, I worked hard to hide my history of homelessness. Now, I am more neutral—it was a challenging and sometimes unpleasant chapter, like puberty, or, more recently, learning Bayesian statistics. I am committed to not letting my history define me. But I also don’t want my colleagues to assume no scientist could have a past like mine.

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Science’s ‘Dance Your Ph.D.’ contest is open again

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From ScienceMag:

Do you have what it takes to win Science’s “Dance Your Ph.D.” competition? We want you to top this year’s winning entry from a scientist who translated physics’ piezoelectric effect into dance. 

As always, we’re challenging scientists to explain their research obsession with fancy footwork, but no PowerPoint slides or jargon. It doesn’t matter whether you’re just starting your Ph.D. or you completed it decades ago; you just need imagination and the ability to keep a beat.

The annual contest, in its 19th year and again sponsored by the AI and quantum technology company SandboxAQ, features four traditional categories (physics, biology, chemistry, and social science). Winners in each category take home $750. The overall winner of those categories gets an extra $2000. You can see the full slate of past winners here and the rules and other key information here.

Beyond that, it’s simple: Go dance some science, create a video of it, and upload it to YouTube. The deadline for submissions is 29 January 2027.

To enter the contest, submit here. We’ll announce the winner by March 2027.

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Could your chatbot tip off a scientific rival? It’s possible, researchers say

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From ScienceMag:

A familiar pattern is beginning to emerge when artificial intelligence (AI) makes a scientific breakthrough. After an AI company announces the feat, a researcher who uses that company’s tool claims it may have ripped off their work.

On 8 September, for example, OpenAI said its agents had solved the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the biggest open challenges in math. But mathematician Tristan Buckmaster of New York University publicly suggested the company had benefited from extensive work he and a colleague, Levent Alpöge, had done using OpenAI’s coding assistant, Codex.

Two weeks later, Anthropic said its model, Claude, had found a new enzyme system. Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a computational biologist at the University of Copenhagen, soon told The New York Times his group had been studying the same systems since 2022, and had shared unpublished drafts with Claude.

OpenAI says an investigation confirmed Buckmaster’s Codex work from the prior 2 months could not “have influenced the model or the math results it produced in any way.” Anthropic says Claude was “not trained on any user transcripts.” Neither researcher says they can prove otherwise.

Still, scientists are now asking an uncomfortable question about tools many use daily. When you type an unpublished idea into a chatbot or coding agent, could it end up being used by the company that built the model—or a rival who asks the right question a year later? And what can you do to reduce the risk?

Many AI companies give researchers—who are also potential customers—free or reduced-price access to their tools, and some worry there is a quid pro quo. “People working in a university environment are a much more valuable segment of the market,” says Mohammad Hosseini, who studies the ethical implications of using AI in research at Northwestern University. “And perhaps their information is used more frequently to train these models.”

In principle, an unpublished proof or paper could become a part of a model’s next training run, he and others say. But can such a tiny drop in the vast ocean of training material still make a splash? There’s some evidence it can. For example, a preprint published in January showed chatbots could reproduce most of a Harry Potter novel nearly word for word.

But such memorization isn’t really the threat for research, says A. Feder Cooper, an AI researcher at Yale University and co-author of the study. “The data sets that these models are trained on are absolutely massive … too large from an information theoretic standpoint for the models to memorize all of it,” Cooper says. But he adds that an AI model doesn’t need to memorize a chat word for word for it to be useful. “It just needs to get enough of an understanding from the chat … to use that information.”

Indeed, a single user’s chats may not matter at all. What may matter more is how thousands of chats add up. AI companies routinely analyze conversations in bulk to see how people use their products. Anthropic, for example, has described a system called Anthropic Insights that summarizes millions of chats and sorts them into clusters. To protect privacy, it discards clusters with small numbers of users, but it doesn’t say what that threshold is.

Such analyses are the likeliest way sensitive research information could leak, says AI privacy researcher Niloofar Mireshghallah of Carnegie Mellon University. The risk isn’t copying, but a company noticing from aggregate chats that a problem is close to being solved and putting its resources behind it. “That gives them enough hints of: ‘Oh, this is solvable, let’s go do it.’”

The privacy safeguards on these analyses may also fail researchers, Mireshghallah adds. They protect users by hiding them among thousands of others with similar chats, but a small number of researchers sending many queries about the same niche problem can still stand out. “Average case privacy methods don’t protect the outliers,” Mireshghallah says.

No setting makes a chatbot fully private, but researchers say these steps make leaks much less likely:

Use an enterprise account

Universities that license ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini typically sign contracts that bar the company from training on user data, whereas consumer accounts get no such protection. If “you’ve been using a personal account for your research, switch to your university’s enterprise account,” says Jennifer King, privacy and data policy fellow at Stanford University.

Even with an enterprise account, however, “no training” doesn’t always mean “no use.” California State University’s contract with OpenAI, shared by CalMatters, lets the company “process information derived from [customers] that has been deidentified, anonymized, and/or aggregated.” King suggests researchers check the fine print of their institution’s AI deals.

Turn off training on personal accounts

If you use a personal account, switch on the setting that stops your chats from being used for training.

Watch for exemptions

On ChatGPT, rating a response with a thumbs up or down “can make the entire associated conversation eligible for training,” even if you’ve opted out, Mireshghallah notes in a recent analysis of company policies. Anthropic keeps feedback data, too, including the related conversation, for 5 years, and may use it to train AI models. Other providers have similar policies.

Chats that AI systems flag as potentially unsafe, such as those touching on bioweapons or mental health, are another possible carve-out. For example, when Anthropic’s systems flag a chat, the company keeps the inputs and outputs for up to 2 years, and other kinds of safety-related data for up to 7 years

Practice data hygiene

Once a project is complete, King suggests downloading your chat record, “then maybe delete it.” A log of your AI use may be needed for replication or disputes, but it needn’t stay with your provider. Deleting isn’t watertight. Anthropic, for example, says deleted chats leave its servers within 30 days, but it can hold onto them longer for safety reasons. And deletion doesn’t remove data from models already trained on them.

Host your own model

For those savvy enough, the most private option is running an open-weight model on your own hardware. But that does mean “moving off of some of these platforms that host it for you, have nice tooling, and do a lot of things as part of the product,” Cooper says.

If it’s really sensitive, consider not using AI

The decision often boils down to weighing potential risks against the rewards. But even “not sending stuff [to AI] yourself will only get you so far,” Cooper says, pointing out that a peer reviewer or colleague could run a manuscript through AI even if you don’t.

As for Buckmaster and Mestre, both still use AI, but want much more control over where their work goes. “I still use AI extensively and believe it can be enormously useful,” Mestre says. “What has changed is how much control and visibility I want over the data, infrastructure, and actions of the agent.” Academics, Buckmaster says, “need to somehow push back and take some sort of ownership of our user data.”

Science’s AI in Science reporting initiative is supported by Ray Rothrock & family.
Editor’s note: Niloofar Mireshghallah is a faculty member at the Future of Life Institute, which has provided funding to the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.

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Former baseball star Brad Lidge rolls the dice on second career as archaeologist

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From ScienceMag:

As a star relief pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies when they won the 2008 World Series, Brad Lidge would chew gum only in odd-numbered innings and go unshaven for days during a “hot” streak. Professional athletes are notorious for indulging in such quirky behaviors in hopes of improving their chances of success on the playing field. Now an archaeology Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder, Lidge thinks the same might have been true of the Etruscans, a pre-Roman civilization in central Italy whose widespread use of dice suggests they were seeking divine intervention 2800 years before Lidge became a sports hero in Philadelphia.

Hints of what would become Lidge’s second career started early. Growing up in Colorado, a rich area for paleontology, Lidge enjoyed searching for dinosaur bones when he wasn’t playing baseball. After hanging up his cleats in 2012, he rekindled his passion for buried treasure as a volunteer on a dig at the site of the ancient Roman city of Carsulae. And he got lucky.

“On my first day I flipped over some soil and there lay some Roman coins—a fourth century [C.E.] coin from [when] Constantine [was emperor],” he recalls. “I couldn’t believe they were right there underneath our feet. It brought me an extreme sense of joy, and at that point, I kind of knew what I wanted to do next.”

Lidge didn’t have to worry about making a living as an archaeologist, having earned some $55 million during his 11 seasons as a major leaguer. But he didn’t want to rely on his fame to break into the profession. “There’s a lot of imposter syndrome for a retired athlete entering into a new field, and I wanted to do it the right way,” he explains. So while he continued to work as a volunteer on digs in Italy, he enrolled in an online master’s program at the University of Leicester and earned his degree in 2017.

Now, 2 months from his 50th birthday, Lidge hopes obtaining a Ph.D. will be the final step in a path to directing his own dig. “If you don’t have those initials after your name,” he says, “it is very difficult to work with the governing bodies that must give their approval before you can direct a project.”

His adviser, CU anthropologist Gerardo Gutiérrez, has no doubt Lidge will do well if given the chance. “He’s very mature, he’s serious about his goals, and he’s already famous, so he’s not doing it for his ego,” Gutiérrez says. “I wasn’t aware that he was a famous baseball player because he didn’t mention it in his application.”

While working in Italy, Lidge became fascinated with the inscriptions on Etruscan artifacts. That eventually led him to Anthony Tuck, a University of Massachusetts Amherst archaeologist who directs excavations at Poggio Civitate, an Etruscan settlement dating from the eighth century B.C.E.

“Brad is deeply curious and incredibly committed to learning how research is done,” Tuck says. “So it took him no time at all to get up to speed on what we do.” That work includes a summer school for undergraduates from around the world that Tuck runs at the site.

Being a mentor to younger players in the Phillies’s organization, Lidge believes, has served him well when teaching at Poggio Civitate. “With the Phillies I loved being able to sit down with the young guys and teach them the nuances of the game,” he explains. “Those leadership skills have helped me when we’re out there at an excavation and in the classroom. … It’s also really cool to see the look in their eyes when a student discovers something really old and I can help them understand how special and unique it is.”

Poggio Civitate is where Lidge and Tuck found those dice. In February they co-authored a paper discussing how the dice might have been part of rituals to divine upcoming events as well as for gaming or other recreational activities.

In describing their quest to understand what those objects might have meant to its residents, Tuck and Lidge note the potential similarity to another set of “irrational, ritualized behaviors designed to ameliorate performance … among a subset of baseball players, relief pitchers.” It’s almost certainly the only reference in the scientific literature to flame-throwing hurlers like Lidge, who earned the nickname “Lights Out” after he posted a perfect record—41 saves in 41 appearances—during that magical 2008 season.

Brad Lidge celebrates a World Series championship
In 2008, Brad Lidge celebrated striking out the final opposing batter to win the World Series for the Philadelphia Phillies.Jerry Lodriguss/The Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS via Zuma

To gain additional expertise, Lidge also sought out Italian archaeologist Luca Nejrotti, who directs another Etruscan site. “I went there to up my game in terms of understanding data sets and geographic information systems and x-ray fluxes.” Lidge bought himself a portable x-ray fluorescence machine, a purchase enabled by his baseball earnings, which can be used to determine the elemental signature of certain kinds of materials. That can come in handy, say, for identifying the clay used in a particular piece of pottery and, thus, its likely origins.

His earnings as a baseball player have also helped Lidge literally pay back the warm welcome he enjoyed from archaeologists in launching his second career. In 2010, while Lidge was still on the Phillies, archaeologists Jennifer Houser Wegner and Josef Wegner, curators in the Egyptian section of the Penn Museum, gave him a tour of the museum. Now, Lidge is helping fund Josef Wegner’s ongoing excavation at Abydos, one of the oldest cities in ancient Egypt. He’s also become a major donor to the museum, which this year appointed him to its Board of Advisors.

Interpreting ancient Etruscan symbols may seem worlds away from throwing a small orb past other elite athletes. But Lidge says he’s never been satisfied doing only one thing.

“As a professional baseball player, you’re at the field for 9 or 10 hours a day, and you need time off,” he says. “So having something different to do that you really enjoy is really important. That’s what archaeology has been for me. And I’m just lucky to have had a chance to pursue my passion.”

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How I learned to speak up with confidence

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From ScienceMag:

It was 4:45 p.m. and I was watching the clock as closely as the slides. Day care closed at 5:30. Our project meeting had already gone past the hard stop. We were circling around a disappointing set of results: The data did not fully support the conclusion we had hoped to make. One senior colleague wanted to run more experiments; another thought we should submit the manuscript with a more conservative conclusion. I didn’t feel experienced enough to cast my vote. But the tension was mounting, and we were no closer to a resolution. Meanwhile, my son was surely going to be the last child at day care. “Let’s make a decision before we leave today,” I blurted out. The room went quiet.

For years, I had assumed authority belonged to people who spoke quickly, answered without hesitation, and never appeared uncertain. I was none of these. In meetings with senior researchers and administrators I often had an observation that could have moved a discussion forward, but I held back because it did not sound polished enough. A few minutes later, someone would make a similar point with greater confidence and the conversation would move on without me.

Then, a senior leader told me, “You need more gravitas.”

At first, I thought gravitas meant sounding more certain than I felt. I overprepared for everything, from weekly check-ins to presentations for senior leaders, and rushed to answer questions before they had fully been asked, hoping speed would read as competence. During one presentation, a senior leader started to ask about the methodology I’d used to measure materialism in young children. I cut in with a polished response I had rehearsed because I expected to be challenged. I later learned I should have waited: The leader was trying to express support for my methodology. At other times, I said nothing because I did not have a perfect answer. Neither approach worked. Rushing kept me from listening; staying silent made me disappear.

Becoming a parent changed the stakes. I still cared about doing good work and earning the respect of accomplished researchers. Speaking up before my ideas were fully developed was still uncomfortable. But being late to collect my son from day care, or arriving home too depleted to be fully present with him, felt far worse.

In that meeting, I didn’t provide a brilliant answer to any of the questions on the table, or suddenly become the most persuasive person in the room. I merely named the issue we had been avoiding: Which risk were we more willing to accept—delay submission in pursuit of a stronger claim, or move faster with a more limited contribution? It was one of the first times I had spoken up in this way, and it felt really good.

I began to understand gravitas differently. It’s not about confidence, charisma, or having the most polished answer. It’s about clarifying a discussion and moving it forward. Over time, I came to think of gravitas as embodying five qualities and practices: remaining steady, trustworthy, and anchored; navigating complexities; and being decisive. When discussions grow heated or disorganized, I strive to stay steady, helping the group step back from disagreements and refocus. I show I am trustworthy by speaking clearly about what the evidence does and does not show. I keep the conversation anchored to the issue at hand and navigate competing priorities and perspectives people bring to the table. And, whether answering questions during a presentation or guiding a meeting to end on time with clear next steps, I have learned to be decisive.

I’m still not the person who has the loudest voice, or who speaks first or most frequently in a meeting. I still feel the urge to wait for perfect words. But I have become more willing to offer my voice. The clock didn’t make me braver; it made the cost of staying silent clearer.

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For women academics, feeling devalued can be a fatal career blow

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From ScienceMag:

Held to higher standards. Left off invitations. Pointed to as “diversity” but ignored. These are just some of the hundreds of examples of devaluation women faculty in the United States shared with computational social scientist Katie Spoon. These experiences, more common for women than men, are to blame for the higher rate of attrition for women faculty, Spoon, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, and colleagues report in an analysis published today in PNAS Nexus.

The new study “gets at things that are hard to measure, which is the climate in academia,” says Donna Ginther, an economist at the University of Kansas who studies the academic workforce. “It speaks to the subtle experiences of women not feeling like they belong.”

The work builds on an enormous survey of 10,000 U.S. current and ex-faculty, spanning institutions and fields, which found that women leave because they feel pushed out—not pulled toward another opportunity. At the end of that survey was a free-text box inviting respondents to “tell [their] story” and share negative experiences or reasons they left academia, says Spoon, then a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Little did Spoon know she’d get 6615 responses—an outpouring of heartbreak, documenting instances of disrespect, struggles with work-life balance, lack of institutional support, and more. “I was like, ‘OK, I think we need to do like a follow-up study instead of just ignoring all of that,’” she says.

Trained as a computer scientist, Spoon saw the opportunity to spot patterns that could explain why women feel pushed out. Working with sociologist Lauren Rivera at Northwestern University, they manually assigned themes to each response and then looked for relationships with identity and attrition. Categories included issues directly related to professional responsibilities of research, service, and teaching, as well as topics capturing the work environment, such as administrative policies, caretaking responsibilities, and leadership.

Of the 12 distinct themes investigated, devaluation—feeling excluded, disrespected, mistreated, or held to different standards—showed the biggest gender gap: Forty-one percent of women versus 18% of men who left comments felt this way. Informal devaluation was more common than formal devaluation such as problems during official evaluation procedures. This may suggest policy changes aimed at reducing discrimination in these processes are having some effect. But systems are still failing in other ways. Frequently cited alongside experiences of devaluation was so-called “institutional betrayal”—institutions failing to take complaints seriously.

And whereas the gender gap in other issues remains steady or even narrows with seniority, for devaluation it widens. It seems men gain respect over their careers, while women continue to report “‘I have all these accolades, and I have all this stuff, and [yet], I have to keep proving myself,’” Spoon explains.

And that, more than anything else, pushes them out. Devaluation accounted for the majority of the gender gap in those considering leaving, and in those who had left—far more than topics such as work-life balance and child care, which are major targets of interventions.

Devaluation was also the most racialized issue, affecting nearly half of all women of color. White women were the next most affected, followed by men of color, then white men.

“It was a very impressive study,” says Bruce Weinberg, an economist at Ohio State University. Although survey responses inevitably overrepresent negative experiences, the breadth of the study “[gets at] the pervasiveness of this,” he says. Evidence of these types of issues is often anecdotal or narrow in scope, which can make it harder to address. Of the new study, though, he says, “I would call this data,” making it possible to analyze intersections with career stage and race. “That’s valuable.”

Ginther questions whether the problem is specific to academia or persists across careers. Regardless, one definite problem in academia, she notes, is the unusually slow pace of turnover, meaning “there’s not a lot of change in department climate and culture.” And with more women than men departing midway through their careers, Spoon adds, it’s not a given that any improvements at the junior level today will trickle down.

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Trump administration proposes $100,000 fee for work authorization for international students

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From ScienceMag:

President Donald Trump’s administration unveiled a proposal this week to attach a $100,000 fee to a program that allows international students in the United States to stay and work in the country for up to 3 years after graduation. The program, called Optional Practical Training (OPT), is a crucial pathway for students in science fields to enter the U.S. workforce and strengthen their applications as they pursue more permanent status in the country.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, the fee seeks “to combat fraud, strengthen the integrity of the immigration system, and protect U.S. workers.” But some experts fear it’ll hamper the U.S.’s ability to attract foreign talent. It “will obliterate the pipeline,” Michael Clemens, an economist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Government & Policy, told Nature. The Wall Street Journal reported in July that the federal government was considering the new fee.

The proposed rule would require universities to pay up to $100,000 for each student they recommend to the OPT program. Until now, the monetary burden of the application fell solely on students, who are required to pay up to $2250 when submitting their initial OPT requests to the Citizenship and Immigration Services. The administration says the move would encourage universities to better vet employment efforts secured by students. But it’s unclear how universities will react to the large sum, or whether they would require students to shoulder the new fee.

Although the proposal has rung alarm bells for international students, it may not ever take effect. Courts have repeatedly challenged federal immigration changes. Most recently, a judge blocked the administration’s attempt to cap international students’ stay in the country to 4 years, a limit that would have particularly impacted those pursuing Ph.D. programs that tend to last more than 4 years.

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Why I’m going back to academia

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From ScienceMag:

Every day as I walked to my office, I felt a pang. The research institute where I worked was on a university campus, but it felt a world apart. I saw my academic colleagues building fulfilling relationships with students through teaching and mentoring—opportunities I could only engage in on a limited basis, in the time I had left after completing my research responsibilities. My decision a few years earlier to leave academia and pursue more applied research had felt completely logical. Several colleagues had made similar moves, and they seemed happy. I had packed my boxes and told myself I was closing one chapter for good. But I was starting to wonder whether there might be a way back.

For some time, I convinced myself I had made the right choice. I worked on projects I enjoyed and was proud of, building national and international collaborations, writing policy reports, and contributing to R&D that had a direct impact on farmers and farming communities.

And I still had some opportunities to interact with students. Colleagues from the university sometimes invited me to cosupervise Ph.D. students with relevant research interests. I jumped at the chance, even though I had to do it on my own time as it was not an official part of my job responsibilities. I gave and attended occasional lectures at the university, and the resulting interactions with students were always invigorating. I loved that every year new students arrived with fresh perspectives, different cultural backgrounds, and questions that sometimes forced me to rethink assumptions I did not even realize I was making. After a lecture a few years ago, one student asked why a particular crop was not grown in a specific region—a simple question that stopped me midsentence. That conversation eventually grew into a research proposal. Every time I supervised or mentored a student or gave a lecture, I left feeling energized. I couldn’t deny that I wanted more.

I was also growing frustrated with some of the challenges and limitations of working at a research institute, where bureaucracy and multiple levels of management can slow even seemingly simple actions such as bringing visiting researchers on for collaborations. Universities, of course, have their own challenges, limitations, and bureaucracies. Competition for funding is intense. Teaching takes time. I was under no illusion that returning to academia would solve every frustration.

Still, whenever I came across a faculty job posting, I felt a spark of excitement and often found myself wondering whether I should give it a try. I even bookmarked a couple of faculty job ads, returning to them for days before finally closing the tabs.

A committee meeting for a Ph.D. student I co-supervise was the final push I needed. The student mentioned how overwhelming it felt to start a Ph.D. in a new country, and we spent a few minutes talking about how he could build a support network. When the meeting ended, I realized the most enjoyable part of my week had been that hour with a student. I no longer wanted to relegate the most rewarding parts of my professional life to essentially a side project. Having made what I thought was a career-defining pivot away from academia, I decided to find a way back.

It’s often said that once you leave the established path to the professoriate it is hard to get back on, and returning hasn’t been easy. My CV looks quite different from those of many others going up for university professor jobs through the traditional tenure-track route. But I talked to my professional network, explored unconventional on-ramps back to academia, and applied for openings, highlighting my unique background and the skills I’ve developed as a result. I was offered a part-time university appointment, and I now have two students to help get my research program off the ground.

I have come to realize teaching, mentoring, and academic life are part of who I am. No matter where my career or destiny takes me, I do not think I can completely walk away from them.

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NIH ends 2026 with a boost for early-career researchers, but new awards are down overall

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From ScienceMag:

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) ended the 2026 fiscal year with mixed news for the biomedical research community it supports. The agency came back from a lag early in the year to spend its entire extramural budget of $35.3 billion by 30 September. It also funded a record number of early-stage investigators—defined as those less than 10 years out from finishing their graduate degree or clinical training—who were seeking their first grant, Trump administration officials announced today. But a White House mandate to fund many multiyear grants as a single lump sum means fewer awards overall, potentially putting established labs that were counting on fresh funding at risk of downsizing or even closing.

The agency funded 17,543 new grants and renewals of existing research and training projects—a number that’s about 500 more than last year, but 11% below the 2021–24 average. A total of 1648 early-stage investigators won NIH’s bread-and-butter research grants, known as R01 equivalents, compared with just 1144 last year and a previous peak of 1608 in 2022. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya announced the record number of early-career grantees this morning at a science summit where President Donald Trump is expected to speak later today.

“It’s definitely good news,” Michael Lauer, NIH’s longtime extramural research chief who retired in early 2025, says of the funding for new investigators. “I’m glad to hear that the agency has reaffirmed its commitment to help early-career scientists as much as possible.”

Bhattacharya has said his plan to fund more early-career researchers centers on prioritizing edge science, which he says is more likely to be proposed by young scientists. However, the process seems to be unchanged from before his arrival. A recent NIH blog post explains that NIH’s 27 institutes and centers set annual funding targets for awards to early-stage investigators. Lauer says that’s the strategy NIH has used for years. “We set a specific goal” for each institute, he says. “About halfway through the fiscal year, we would send every 2 weeks detailed spreadsheets” to institute leaders “letting them know where we stood.”

Caught up but still behind

After a delay because of a federal shutdown, the U.S. National Institutes of Health picked up the pace and spent its entire $35.3 billion extramural budget by the end of the fiscal year on 30 September. But the count of 17,543 new awards and competitive renewals fell 2259 short of the average in fiscal years 2021–24. Award counts include subprojects.

chart showing NIH awards
(GRAPHIC) V. PENNEY/SCIENCE; (DATA) Grant Witness

“I don’t like the word quota,” he adds, because it suggests subpar grants might be funded. In all cases, the grants had “an outstanding review.”

The 2026 funding picture for established investigators may be less rosy. The overall number of research and training awards—including new projects, renewals of expiring grants that competed for new funding, and annual payments for continuing awards—fell below the 2024 total for the second year, to 61,151. That’s a 13% drop compared with an average of 70,061 in the 4 years before the White House budget office told NIH to make more multiyear-funded awards, according to the nonprofit watchdog group Grant Witness. But the actual number of active grants likely did not fall as much, the agency and observers note, because multiyear-funded awards made in 2025 or some previous years would have been ongoing in 2026, even though they received no additional payment this year.

Bhattacharya also described a plan to recruit 100 early-career principal investigators for NIH’s massive $5 billion in-house research program. Its 1200-strong roster of principal investigators has shrunk since early 2025 when Trump-imposed staff cuts, hiring freezes, and limits on travel and purchasing drove many researchers to leave the agency.

A push to hire new intramural investigators “might be the first real improvement over where we were 2 years ago,” says Ian Morgan, an NIH postdoctoral fellow who has spoken out against Trump policy changes. “It would bring new blood and new ideas.” He cautions, however, that the agency will need to address problems such as restrictions on purchasing large equipment. Those limits “could make setting up a new lab really difficult right now.”

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As a new assistant professor, I thought I needed to hide my family responsibilities

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From ScienceMag:

I was rushing out of the office to pick up my two young children from day care when I ran into a senior colleague in the hallway. They wanted to chat about a proposal I was working on and how I was settling into my new tenure-track position. I was grateful for their interest and collegiality, and I didn’t want them to think I wasn’t giving the job my full attention. So, I acted as if I had all the time in the world. I didn’t mention where I was headed, or that I had a kids’ pickup deadline. I barely made it. That night after dinner and bedtime I caught up on emails, never letting on that I was working so late because of my family responsibilities. I was convinced I had to manage my demands invisibly.

To the outside world, I was building a lab, mentoring students, teaching, writing grants, and pursuing the milestones expected of an early-career faculty member. But outside the margins of my CV, I was also coordinating child care, navigating day care illnesses and closures, recovering from pregnancies, breastfeeding, pumping, and trying to think clearly through antepartum and postpartum brain fog.

For a while, I thought the solution was to become more efficient. If I planned carefully enough, woke up early enough, answered enough emails after bedtime, maybe I could make the chaotic parts of motherhood invisible in my professional life. I could be the same kind of early-career scientist I had imagined before children, just with less sleep.

This approach almost worked, until it didn’t. Day care would call and a sick child would erase a carefully planned day. School closures would rearrange an entire week. Travel anywhere involved heroic efforts to organize small lives in addition to mine. No amount of optimization gave me full control and I was simply exhausted. There was almost always something I felt I was not doing as well as I wished I could.

Then, when I was a little over 1 year into my faculty position and pregnant with my third child, an email landed in my inbox inviting me to join a gathering for pretenure mothers at my institution. A few assistant professors had bonded over the ups and downs of juggling motherhood with the responsibilities of a tenure-track faculty member, and they wanted to connect with others doing the same. The invitation offered something I had not realized I needed: a space where my identities as a mother and scientist did not have to remain separate. I filled out the scheduling poll.

At our lunches, I kept hearing people say aloud the things I had been facing silently: the guilt of leaving campus early, the exhaustion of writing after bedtime, the pressure of keeping up with peers whose lives might look very different from ours. We shared strategies, offered reassurance, and considered what types of support we actually needed. Those conversations did not magically make working life easier. But they made it less lonely.

I began to see that my struggle was not a personal failure to become efficient enough. The many demands in my life were real, even if academic culture kept them out of view.

I became more willing to acknowledge my limitations, accept help, and resist blaming every disruption on poor organization. If I need to move a meeting because of child care pickup or a sick child at home, I say so plainly. I am careful not to make my trainees responsible for my family logistics, but I also do not pretend those logistics do not exist. I want my trainees to see that being a good scientist does not require pretending to have a life untouched by caregiving, illness, rest, or limits.

This shift has also changed how I think about my life outside the lab. Recently I was volunteering at my oldest son’s kindergarten Aloha Day party. Another mother arrived with a watermelon carved to look like Stitch from Lilo & Stitch. It was spectacular compared with my store-bought popsicles. The old me might have felt a familiar pang: Should I be doing more? Does my contribution betray my divided attention? Then I looked at the delighted children and felt grateful. This parent had offered something I could not, but I had shown up in the best way I could. I did not need to disguise the constraints of my career to prove I was a devoted mother, just as I do not need to disguise the demands of motherhood to prove I am a serious scientist.

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