From ScienceMag:

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.”

Read More

From ScienceMag:

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.

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.

Read More

From ScienceMag:

In some ways, Jessica* and her husband were ahead of the curve. Months before Donald Trump was elected U.S. president for a second time, the chemistry postdoc began to submit applications for faculty jobs in Europe. “We were noticing the momentum in Florida,” she says of the overhaul of public universities that Republican Governor Ron DeSantis had implemented in her home state. The pair was also “very concerned” about Project 2025, the blueprint of presidential priorities laid out by a conservative think tank. “That’s when we thought, maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look outside the U.S.”

By the time she received an offer from a German university in March 2025, many of her worst fears had started to materialize. The Trump administration had begun to cancel grants touching on politically sensitive topics as part of a major shake-up at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), agencies she saw as potential funders of her work. The rise of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric also didn’t sit right with her as someone who wanted to form a diverse lab. She accepted the offer and moved overseas in September. “Our plan is to stay in Germany full time for the rest of our lives,” she said recently while walking to a German language class. (*Jessica requested Science not use her real name because her husband, who has yet to move to Germany, works for the U.S. government.)

It’s still not clear how much of the administration’s transformation of science will endure. And some researchers, especially established ones with large labs and multiple funding streams, may ultimately see little impact on their work. But the turmoil that has gripped the U.S. scientific community over the past year has led others to look abroad for opportunities, like Jessica, or to consider abandoning their STEM career ambitions entirely. “Some of my peers have left science,” says Emma Stauffenberg, a research technician at Stanford University who plans to apply to graduate programs in the fall.

Meanwhile, uncertainty about future funding has left university administrators and principal investigators, some of whom spoke with Science on the condition of anonymity, considering limits on hiring and grad school admissions that would squeeze the pipeline of new scientists. The composition of the people flowing through that pipeline might change as well with the decline in funding for diversity efforts and rising barriers to foreign students and researchers.

Just how many scientists have abandoned careers in the United States may not emerge for years. But to many, the administration has already dealt a major blow to the workforce by making it harder for many scientists to plan for the future—to envision the path forward for themselves, their labs, and their departments. “There have definitely been some cuts and delays in getting funded,” one chemist says of how her field has fared over the past year. But “what we’re more seeing is the toll of the uncertainty.”

Last year, the Trump administration stunned the scientific community with its swift and wide-ranging moves to upend federal funding programs that dole out roughly $60 billion in research support every year to institutions of higher education. Universities across the country were hit with pauses or outright cancellations of their grants. Harvard—one of several universities targeted with accusations of antisemitism—saw its entire $2.2 billion portfolio frozen. Some funding was later reinstated after a series of court cases and settlements, and the country’s two main funding agencies—NIH and NSF—spent their full budgets by the end of the fiscal year.

But U.S. scientists are fearful of what might be on the horizon. Last year, the Trump administration proposed slashing 2026 funding for many science agencies, including a roughly 40% cut at NIH and more than 50% at NSF. It also announced federal agencies would lower the indirect cost payments to universities that cover research overhead, such as building maintenance and administrative costs. The reductions, in some cases by 50% or more, could devastate universities’ ability to support research.

The U.S. Congress seems unlikely to go along with most of the proposed cuts. And the indirect cost cap is on hold as legal challenges work their way through the courts, several of which have already upheld challenges to the change. But in the meantime, it’s difficult for many labs to figure out how many trainees they can support in the coming years.

“On our campus we’ve had to have some very serious conversations about the size of our Ph.D. programs,” says Suzanne Barbour, dean of the graduate school at Duke University. “When our students are admitted, we promise them 5 years of support—and that’s stipend, it’s tuition, it’s fees, it’s health insurance, it’s dental insurance. And we have to make good on that promise.”

But admitting too few graduate students also carries risks. One department chair—who likened research teams to “massive locomotor trains” that, once slowed down, take time to get going again—has been advising faculty to continue to take on lab members as usual and reassess in a year or two. “Especially for early-career faculty, if they pump the brakes right now, that will have lasting impacts—they will be feeling that 5 or 10 years into the future,” she says.

For most STEM fields, graduate enrollment for the fall 2025 semester was roughly on par with what it had been the year before, according to a report released last week by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center that looked at data from institutions across the country. But some fields saw declines, the largest of which was a 14% drop for the computer sciences. Enrollment of international graduate students was also down by 6%. That number had risen steadily over the previous several years, notes Matthew Holsapple, senior director of research at the Clearinghouse, “making this year’s downturn a pretty meaningful shift.”

It’s too early to tell what the numbers will look like this year. Some universities, including Harvard, plan to admit fewer students. But many academics told Science that final decisions haven’t been made, or that they’ll be made by individual departments and faculty members, rather than by the institution as a whole.

What we’re … seeing is the toll of the uncertainty.

• Anonymous chemist

Positions further along the academic pipeline may also get harder to come by. Postdoc openings are difficult to track because many are filled by word of mouth and not posted publicly. But tenure-track job openings appear to be down at U.S. institutions in three fields for which crowdsourced tracking documents are available: ecology and evolutionary biology, where openings dropped by 18% during the fall 2025 semester compared with 2024; biomedical engineering, which dropped by 16%; and chemistry, which saw a 25% decline. “We’ll be right at or above COVID levels,” predicts Chemjobber, a chemist who anonymously blogs about careers in the field and maintains the chemistry job list. Fewer faculty positions could create a backup in the system, leading some promising early-career researchers to stay on in postdoc positions hoping they’ll land a tenure-track job the following year, the blogger notes. That could leave fewer openings for new lab members.

Some may pivot to industry, which has increasingly become the destination of choice for many Ph.D. graduates. But hiring is also slowing at some companies—notably those in the biomedical sector, which have been hit by changes in the federal funding landscape and a reduction in venture capital investment. And any early-career scientist coming out of academia will be up against applications from the flood of researchers who left the federal workforce over the past year. “It’s all a compounding effect,” the chemistry blogger says.

The complexion of the U.S. scientific community could also change as a result of an executive order the Trump administration issued in January 2025 that targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs throughout the federal government. Since then the administration has cut millions of dollars in funding for programs aimed at broadening participation in research. The loss of that funding could cause promising students from groups underrepresented in science to miss out on a career in the field.

Néstor Carballeira saw the impact of those funding cuts firsthand. In the spring of 2025, the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras chemistry professor received word that NIH was canceling two programs, known as URISE and GRISE, that helped institutions offer research, mentorship, and career development training to a diverse pool of undergraduate and graduate students, including racial minorities and those from lower income families. Programs Carballeira had overseen at his institution for more than 20 years were abruptly halted, meaning fewer internship opportunities, the loss of an invited speaker series, and no funding to send students to scientific meetings outside Puerto Rico. “You have the momentum going,” Carballeira says, “and then the momentum is lost.”

He says current grad students at his institution remain “quite committed” to pursuing careers in science, but he worries about undergrads who missed the chance to get their first taste of research. Many science majors start out with medical school in mind, he notes, so “they need to be hooked into the scientific enterprise very early.”

NSF has canceled similar funding streams, as well as research grants to develop STEM educational approaches that reach as many U.S. students as possible. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy did not respond to a request for comment on the administration’s stance. In an address last year about the administration’s push to support “gold standard science,” its director—Michael Kratsios—said DEI initiatives “degrade our scientific enterprise” and represent “an existential threat to the real diversity of thought that forms the foundation of the scientific community.”

You have the momentum going, and then the momentum is lost.

• Néstor Carballeira
• University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras

Many in the scientific community see it differently. “It’s been a terrible loss,” laments one university administrator who has studied the STEM workforce. The eliminated programs aimed to “broaden who has access to science and the opportunities that come with a science career,” she says. “As a society, we would be better off if everyone had that opportunity.”

Brandon Jones, who until September 2025 worked on workforce development and broadening participation within NSF’s directorate for geosciences, says he was disappointed to see NSF shutter a program called Cultural Transformation in the Geoscience Community that helped institutions make their research environments more welcoming and supportive, including by improving mentorship, antiracism and antiharassment practices, and accessibility. The program “was supporting the transformations in the system that are necessary for individuals to thrive,” he says.

Jones, who took an early retirement from the federal workforce last year and serves as president of the American Geophysical Union, worries U.S. competitiveness will flag if the country fails to invest in supporting its pipeline of researchers. “We have global competitors who are doing that, and we are backing away,” he says. “We’re shooting ourselves in the foot.”

Also at risk is the flow of researchers from outside the country. U.S. labs increasingly rely on early-career researchers born elsewhere: Temporary residents make up 41% of U.S. Ph.D. students and 58% of postdocs in science, engineering, and health fields, according to data collected by NSF in 2023. But many academics Science spoke with said they expect the numbers to contract—both because the administration has made visas harder to get and because working in the U.S. may simply become less appealing to international researchers.

“U.S. universities are [still] the place where top research is being done,” and they draw many talented early-career researchers from abroad, says Ina Ganguli, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies the scientific community. But in the years ahead foreign researchers may look at the volatile funding landscape and anti-immigration rhetoric and decide to apply for jobs elsewhere. “What would it take for the U.S. to lose its position as the leader in global science?” she asks. “I think that’s the question that we don’t know.”

A drop in international applicants could create openings for U.S. citizens. But one university administrator noted that unless salaries for early-career researchers go up at U.S. institutions, U.S. nationals may not rush to apply. “Graduate students have been really poorly paid for a long time. And a lot of international students are willing to take those jobs because they are a pathway to a life in America.”

Barbour says the squeeze on academic careers could lead to needed conversations about how to train scientists for nonacademic jobs. It’s not a new issue, she says: Most graduate students today aren’t aiming for a faculty position, and are instead interested in careers in industry and other sectors. “But up until now I’m not sure how attentive we’ve been to make sure students have the skills they need in that nonacademic workforce.” Trump may provide an additional spur.

Adjusting to a new funding landscape will inevitably be painful, Barbour says. “But I think there are things we can learn that will help us to be even more impactful for our students. It’s foolish to waste a good crisis.”

Read More

From ScienceMag:

As artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT gain footholds across companies and universities, a familiar refrain is hard to escape: AI won’t replace you, but someone using AI might.

A paper published today in Nature suggests this divide is already creating winners and laggards in the natural sciences. In the largest analysis of its kind so far, researchers find that scientists embracing any type of AI—going all the way back to early machine learning methods—consistently make the biggest professional strides. AI adopters have published three times more papers, received five times more citations, and reach leadership roles faster than their AI-free peers.

But science as a whole is paying the price, the study suggests. Not only is AI-driven work prone to circling the same crowded problems, but it also leads to a less interconnected scientific literature, with fewer studies engaging with and building on one another.

“I was really amazed by the scale and scope of this analysis,” says Yian Yin, a computational social scientist at Cornell University who has studied the impact of large language models (LLMs) on scientific research. “The diversity of AI tools and very different ways we use AI in scientific research makes it extremely hard to quantify these patterns.”

These results should set off “loud alarm bells” for the community at large, adds Lisa Messeri, a sociocultural anthropologist at Yale University. “Science is nothing but a collective endeavor,” she says. “There needs to be some deep reckoning with what we do with a tool that benefits individuals but destroys science.”

To uncover these trends, researchers began with more than 41 million papers published from 1980 to 2025 across biology, medicine, chemistry, physics, materials science, and geology. First, they faced a major hurdle: figuring out which papers used AI, a category that spans everything from early machine learning to today’s LLMs. “This is something that people have been trying to figure out for years, if not for decades,” Yin says.

The team’s solution was, fittingly, to use AI itself. The researchers trained a language model to scan titles and abstracts and flag papers that likely relied on AI tools, identifying about 310,000 such papers in the data set. Human experts then reviewed samples of the results and confirmed the model was about as accurate as a human reviewer.

With that subset of papers, the researchers could then measure AI’s impact on the scientific ecosystem. Across the three major eras of AI—machine learning from 1980 to 2014, deep learning from 2016 to 2022, and generative AI from 2023 onward—papers that used AI drew nearly twice as many citations per year as those that did not. Scientists who adopted AI also published 3.02 times as many papers and received 4.84 times as many citations over their careers.

Benefits extended to career trajectories, too. Zooming in on 2 million of the researchers in the data set, the team found that junior scientists who used AI were less likely to drop out of academia and more likely to become established research leaders, doing so nearly 1.5 years earlier than their peers who hadn’t.

But what was good for individuals wasn’t good for science. When the researchers looked at the overall spread of topics covered by AI-driven research, they found that AI papers covered 4.6% less territory than conventional scientific studies.

This clustering, the team hypothesizes, results from a feedback loop: Popular problems motivate the creation of massive data sets, those data sets make the use of AI tools appealing, and advances made using AI tools attract more scientists to the same problems. “We’re like pack animals,” says study co-author James Evans, a computational social scientist at the University of Chicago.

That crowding also shows up in the links between papers. In many fields, new ideas grow through dense networks of papers that cite one another, refine methods, and launch new lines of research. But AI-driven papers spawned 22% less engagement across all the natural sciences disciplines. Instead, they tended to orbit a small number of superstar papers, with fewer than one-quarter of papers receiving 80% of the citations.

“When your attention is attracted by star papers like [the protein folding model] AlphaFold, all you’re thinking is how you can build on AlphaFold and beat other people to doing it,” says Tsinghua University co-author Fengli Xu. “But if we all climb the same mountains, then there are a lot of fields we are not exploring.”

“Science is seeing a degree of disruption that is rare,” says Dashun Wang, who researches the science of science at Northwestern University. The rapid rise of generative AI—which is reshaping research workflows faster than many scientific institutions can keep up—only makes the stakes higher and the future shape of science less certain, he says.

But the narrowing of science may still be reversible. One way to push back, says Zhicheng Lin, a psychologist at Yonsei University who studies the science of science, is to build better and larger data sets in fields that haven’t yet made much use of AI. “We are not going to improve science by forcing a shift away from data-heavy approaches,” he says. “A brighter future involves making data more abundant across more domains.”

Further down the line, future AI systems should also evolve beyond crunching data into autonomous agents capable of scientific creativity, which could expand science’s horizons again, says study co-author Yong Li, who studies AI and the science of science at Tsinghua.

Until then, Evans says, the scientific community must reckon with how these tools have affected incentives across the board. “I don’t think this is how AI has to shape science,” he says. “We want a world in which AI-enhanced work, which is getting increased funding and increasing in rate, is generating new fields—rather than just turning the thumbscrews on old questions.”

Read More

From ScienceMag:

Just 2 months into my Ph.D., I was on the verge of quitting. I felt out of my depth, and my broken English left me struggling to keep up with my colleagues. At lab meetings, the conversation progressed so quickly that by the time I understood a question, the discussion had already moved on. My difficulty following my supervisor’s instructions led to me using the wrong volume of water in a sample, ruining an experiment. In a presentation, I talked about “gene dilution” instead of “gene deletion,” the silence that followed making me blush with embarrassment. I didn’t know how I was going to make it through my studies. But amid my struggles, a caring colleague said something that would forever shape my approach to science and mentoring.

I’d moved to Hong Kong from my hometown in mainland China full of excitement. I remember stepping off the overnight train onto the humid streets of the city with a small bag, a notebook of English phrases, and a single conviction: I was here to become a scientist.

But I immediately felt out of place. The laboratory was intimidating, full of shiny instruments I had only ever seen in textbooks. On my first day, my supervisor handed me a pipette and asked me to set up a reaction I had never done before. I pretended to know what to do, then slipped into the corner and watched a senior student until my shaky hands could finally imitate her movements. I often stayed in the lab until midnight, afraid of being left behind.

Most of all, I struggled with the language barrier. I was used to classes taught in Mandarin, but in Hong Kong—a highly international city—everyone spoke English in the lab. After the presentation that left me red in the face, just as I was contemplating leaving science, a senior lab member pulled me aside. “You are not here because of your English,” he reminded me. “You came here because you can think.”

His simple words gave me the courage to continue. I started to carry a tape recorder with me to every class and meeting, replaying presentations late at night to fill in the gaps. My English progress was slow but steady. By the time I defended my Ph.D., I could express my ideas clearly, and I had come to see my accent not as a hindrance, but as a part of my identity that I was proud of. My confidence had skyrocketed.

After continuing my training in Hong Kong, Canada, and the United States, I eventually returned to China to run my own lab. My students all spoke Mandarin, and I assumed they wouldn’t struggle as much as I had during my Ph.D. because they didn’t face the same language barrier.

But gradually I saw that they still experienced many of the same doubts I had faced at their age. They grappled with anxiety about career development, confusion about identity, and doubts about the value of knowledge in an era of rapid technological development. I realized my job was to teach them to think critically, solve problems creatively, and, most of all, give them the confidence to succeed in science and in life.

One afternoon, I saw a student struggling with a Western blot. The bands were smeared and uneven, and her shoulders drooped, just like mine used to. I remembered my clumsy hands on the pipette, my own confusion between “gene deletion” and “gene dilution.” I told her what my lab partner once told me: “You are not here because your experiments always work. You are here because you can think.” Her smile told me she was buoyed by these words.

Today, what I value most in my job is the transformation I see in the students who arrive timid and uncertain, but who leave with enough confidence to challenge me, their professor. Every time I walk into the classroom, I see a younger version of myself—hesitant, afraid, and eager to belong—and remember the bridge I had to cross to get where I am today. For me, helping others cross that bridge is the true reward of scientific life.

Read More