When I stopped trying to have all the answers, my lab members thrived

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From ScienceMag:

As a new assistant professor running my own lab for the first time, I tried to be everywhere at once. I rewrote my students’ manuscript drafts until they sounded like me, redrew figures and reorganized a postdoc’s slides, and dominated the discussion in lab meetings to sug­gest the next experiment before anyone else had the chance. The lab looked productive—we were publishing high-impact studies and had just secured a major grant. But underneath, something was going wrong. After one lab meeting, a grad student came to my office and said something I have never forgotten: “I feel like I’m doing science near you, not with you.”

My academic path to that point had felt precarious, marked by a decade of temporary positions, constant evaluation, and pressure to prove myself. When I finally became a professor, I thought the biggest obstacles would be obtaining funding, securing state-of-the-art imaging equipment, and hitting the metrics of high-impact publications. To meet those challenges, I made the classic mistake of trying to solve everything myself. At one point, a stu­dent joked that if I kept “editing” so much, I might as well submit the article under my own name and save us both time. I laughed because it was uncomfortably close to being true.

Then came my grad student’s comment. Deep down, I knew she was right. I’d already started to wonder whether my efforts to protect my team from wasting time and making mistakes were actually just holding them back. But it took time to figure out how to let go and lead without hovering over every single move, to be there when people struggled without taking the wheel.

A few years into leading my lab, I was unexpectedly offered a position as vice dean for research. I worried it was too soon for me but saw it as a duty to my institution. I expected to be working on the university’s long-term strategy, upgrading re­search infrastructure, and conducting faculty recruitment. But I kept finding myself discussing issues that were much more human. A technician was frustrated by spending weeks solving problems no one noticed and then feeling blamed when some­thing broke. I once met with a staff coordinator who was strug­gling with a personnel conflict between departments, assuming she wanted me to propose a solution. Instead, she said, “I don’t need you to fix this. I need you to listen to me without judging me.” That moment taught me the importance of leading with dignity and respect.

I tried to apply this lesson in my lab. I started to speak last in meetings and create space for disagreement by asking, “What am I missing?” or “Does anyone see this data differently?” When I met individually with students, I asked them to propose the next experiment before offering my own suggestions. Slowly, a shift began to occur. People stopped looking to me for guidance every time an unexpected result appeared and started to talk to each other instead. Students began to mentor each other. Postdocs started to design entire projects with much less input from me. I began to see that my job was not to have all the answers, but to create the conditions in which others could find theirs.

This realization, in turn, influenced how I approached my job as vice dean. When I was tasked with putting together a proposal for a major infrastructure project, I brought all the researchers, administrators, and their teams into the same room. Previously, I would have arrived with the entire plan already worked out in my mind. But this time I made sure everyone had space to speak. In the discussions we had over the following weeks, people didn’t just contribute ideas that helped shape the proposal, they began to take responsibility for running different parts of it. When our funding was approved, that shared energy became part of the project itself.

Today, my proudest moments go beyond articles, grants, or awards. They include moments when someone I mentored had the confidence to make their own call, like a student who chose to pursue a risky experiment that would truly test our lab’s core hypothesis instead of a safer plan I had suggested. It paid off, leading to a much more significant discovery. Leadership, I now see, is not dominating the room or trying to be everywhere at once, but creating a space where others can become stronger, more confident, and more responsible than they believed possible.

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Chinese postdocs in U.S. hit with a wave of prosecutions and deportations

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“I’ll be working on the final figures for the review paper tomorrow,” Yunqing Jian emailed her adviser. But the 33-year-old postdoc in the molecular plant-microbe interaction (MPMI) laboratory at the University of Michigan (UM), run by Libo Shan and her husband, Ping He, never got the chance. The next day, 3 June 2025, she was arrested by FBI and charged with improperly transporting biological materials in an alleged conspiracy involving her ex-boyfriend, Zunyong Liu, a former postdoc in the MPMI lab.

Jian would be the first in a cluster of Chinese postdocs at UM and Indiana University (IU) arrested over the next 5 months for actions the U.S. government claims posed an imminent threat to national security. The U.S. attorney in the Jian case, Jerome Gorgon, called the material the pair were accused of smuggling—a well-studied strain of a fungus, already found in the United States, that attacks wheat—a “potential agroterrorism weapon.”

The other cases triggered similar dire warnings from high-ranking federal officials. Then–Attorney General Pamela Bondi said Chengxuan Han, who shipped samples of Caenorhabditis elegans, a tiny worm used as a model organism by neurobiologists around the world, to UM, was “attempting to smuggle biological materials under the guise of research, [which] is a serious crime that threatens America’s national and agricultural security.” And after IU postdoc Youhuang Xiang was arrested for receiving a shipment of plasmids—circles of DNA often used to genetically engineer organisms—derived from Escherichia coli, a ubiquitous microbe, FBI Director Kash Patel warned that “if not properly controlled, [these] biological materials could inflict devastating disease to U.S. crops and cause significant financial loss to the U.S. economy.”

The UM and IU cases resulted in four convictions of Chinese postdocs. Six of the seven scientists charged were also deported, a step made easier by their status as foreign nationals on temporary visas. (Liu, the seventh, was already in China.) For these postdocs, deportation is essentially a permanent ban on returning to the U.S. and an end to their dream of contributing to the U.S. research enterprise.

The prosecutions have also disrupted the lives of the senior scientists who employed them. One, neurobiologist X.Z. “Shawn” Xu, has left Michigan and moved his lab to China. Shan and He, both U.S. citizens, were investigated before being cleared. And IU’s Roger Innes, a plant molecular biologist who supervised Xiang, has been locked out of his lab because of an ongoing federal investigation and, along with a colleague, blocked from exchanging research materials with outside collaborators.

The impact of the prosecutions has rippled across both campuses, with some scientists calling them racially biased and an overreaction to minor infractions. “It’s had a chilling effect on both faculty and students,” says cell biologist Dawen Cai, co-president of the University of Michigan Association of Chinese Professors.

The chair of Shan’s department, biologist Ken Cadigan, says some of his colleagues fear the worst. “Even if I’m a U.S. citizen, they can take that away and deport me if I make one small mistake,” he says he’s hearing in the hallways.

Elements of the prosecutions are reminiscent of the China Initiative, which the Department of Justice (DOJ) launched during President Donald Trump’s first term to root out economic espionage by the Chinese government. It led to the arrest of some two dozen senior Chinese-born scientists at U.S. institutions who were alleged to have failed to disclose their ties to Chinese entities. The government lost or dropped many of those cases, however, and in 2022 then-President Joe Biden officially ended the program after widespread complaints that it had unfairly targeted scientists of Chinese descent, most of whom were U.S. citizens.

A different demographic—Chinese postdocs on temporary visas—has become the latest target of DOJ investigations. And the Trump administration and Republican members of Congress have now singled out mislabeling of biological materials as a threat to national security as serious as economic espionage. In a letter to the UM president shortly after the June 2025 arrests of Jian and Han, the chairmen of three committees in the U.S. House of Representatives wrote: “Chinese researchers tied to the PRC [People’s Republic of China] defense research and industrial base have no business participating in U.S. taxpayer-funded research with clear national security implications—especially those related to dangerous biological materials.”

Prosecuting cases of alleged mishandling of biological materials is a big change for DOJ, says Michael German, former FBI special agent and national security expert. “That is typically not something the government cares very much about unless it involves a dangerous pathogen,” German says.

quotation mark
They are getting the clear message that the government doesn’t want them to be here.
  • Roger Innes
  • Indiana University Bloomington

Biological samples are an appealing target for prosecutors, German and lawyers for the defendants say, because laypeople assume all such material is potentially threatening. “In this particular case, we’re talking about plasmid DNA of E. coli bacteria,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Rinka said at Xiang’s 7 April plea and sentencing hearing. “In the next case, we may very well be talking about something that is harmful, such as anthrax or a strain of some fungus that has never been in the United States.”

Scientists and others familiar with the cases agree that the government needs to enforce existing rules on labeling and shipping biological materials. But prosecuting seemingly minor violations of those rules as felonies criminalizes the routine practice of sharing samples and resources with colleagues, they add. That crackdown is especially hard on foreign scientists, who are likely to request or bring materials from home because they don’t know what materials will be available in their new U.S. labs, Innes says.

Those from China are especially vulnerable, Innes notes, because of the heightened political and economic tensions between the two countries. “Even though it’s perfectly legal to ship or import something like plasmid DNA if you properly label the package,” Innes explains, Customs and Border Protection [CBP] “agents will probably confiscate it because they don’t trust any kind of biological material coming from China or another country of concern.”

Although federal criminal investigations involve a large team from multiple government agencies, the UM and IU cases drew heavily on the work of one person: FBI Special Agent Edward Nieh. Assigned to the Detroit field office of FBI’s counterintelligence division, Nieh played a role in all the arrests—and was directly involved in the cases of Jian and Han. Science has reconstructed his role by drawing on his affidavits to the court; FBI declined to make him available for an interview.

Jian became a target after her former lab mate Liu was stopped by CBP at the Detroit airport on 27 July 2024, when he arrived on a flight from Shanghai. Liu, a new assistant professor at Zhejiang University, a top-tier Chinese university, was taking a working vacation, according to David Duncan, Jian’s lawyer—visiting her and hoping to use the fluorescence microscope at MPMI to study samples of the wheat-blight fungus Fusarium graminearum (Fg) he had brought with him. “It was pretty clear this was a workaholic scientist who didn’t want to leave his work behind, and so he brought it with him in his suitcase,” Duncan says.

Liu was refused entry into the U.S. and immediately sent back to China, thus avoiding prosecution. But FBI confiscated his phone, which contained exchanges that implicated Jian. Among the information Nieh gleaned was that Jian hid undeclared research material in her shoe when she came to the U.S. in August 2022 to work with Shan and He, who were then at Texas A&M University before moving to UM a year later.

On 5 February 2025, Nieh interviewed Jian and then took her phone, on which FBI found a year-old conversation in which Jian, now at UM, asked another scientist at Zhejiang to send her some plasmids. That material had been seized and destroyed by U.S. customs officials.

Facing such evidence, Jian agreed to plead guilty to smuggling biological material and making false statements during her interrogation. On 12 November 2025, after 5 months in jail, she was sentenced to time served and, within a few days, deported.

“Dr. Jian acted illegally,” Duncan conceded during her sentencing hearing. “But her motive … was to speed up her research and help her boyfriend speed up his research,” he added. “Throughout their career, their goal has been to protect crops from these fungi, not spread it.”

Before Jian was sentenced, Duncan solicited a letter from Innes in which he explained that the material Liu had brought with him posed no threat to Michigan farmers or the public, noting it is already present in the state. “Notably, this strain was originally collected from a grain elevator in Michigan in 1996 … and is ubiquitous in the state, which is why farmers spend so much money trying to control it,” Innes wrote in his letter, which became part of the public record.

Jian’s conviction accelerated FBI’s investigation of Xiang. One week after she was sentenced, FBI’s Detroit office notified the Indianapolis office it had come across “shipments from the PRC to individuals at IU whose research focused on pathogen resistance and susceptibility in wheat, the same as that of [Jian and Liu].” In particular, FBI discovered that Xiang had received samples of plasmid DNA in March 2024 from the Chinese Academy of Sciences as part of a shipment from the “Guangzhou Sci Tech Innovation Trading” company labeled as “women’s underwear.”

Innes believes his letter in support of Jian and Liu was what drew scrutiny to his postdoc, and Duncan agrees. “Why would Innes be on the Michigan FBI’s radar, except for that letter?” says Duncan, who has decades of experience defending defendants in federal court. “There’s no other connection.”

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[The prosecutions] had a chilling effect on both faculty and students.
  • Dawen Cai
  • University of Michigan Association of Chinese Professors

Nieh says in the charging document he learned that Xiang would be flying into Chicago on 23 November 2025 after a 2-month stint at a U.K. agricultural research station outside London, whose scientists collaborate with Innes. U.S. law enforcement officials interrogated Xiang upon his arrival and, after questioning him, arrested and charged him with making false statements.

The U.S. government immediately revoked Xiang’s immigrant visa, meaning he was in the country illegally. Posting bail would have likely triggered his rearrest and reincarceration by the Department of Homeland Security for an indefinite period. So Xiang declined to post bail and endured a 4-month odyssey through five U.S. jails and detention facilities while his lawyers negotiated with DOJ officials. On 7 April, Xiang pleaded guilty to one count of smuggling plasmid DNA and was sentenced to time served. He served another 11 days in an Indiana county jail before being deported back to China.

Rinka said he hoped the conviction would send a message to all academic scientists. “Once again, it is not for the faculty of any higher educational institution to determine what may or may not be brought to the United States at their whim and fancy,” Rinka argued.

Nieh’s pursuit of undeclared samples also ensnared Han, whom her lawyer describes as a “nerdy, kind, and polite academic.”

Han, who was close to completing her doctoral degree in neurophysiology from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), was set to begin a 1-year stint at UM as a visiting scientist in Shawn Xu’s laboratory in August 2025. In the year before starting work there, she had shipped at least five packages containing C. elegans and plasmid DNA to three Chinese postdocs in the lab without proper labeling, according to records Nieh obtained from CBP, which had confiscated the packages.

In March 2025, CBP officers contacted one intended recipient, postdoc Xu Bai. Although Xu declined to speak or meet with them, on 8 June Nieh interviewed two other postdocs from the lab, Fengfan Zhang and Zhiyong Zhang, as they were waiting at the Detroit airport to pick up Han, their future colleague. Han was detained as soon as her plane landed and, after a lengthy interrogation, taken into custody and charged with smuggling, conspiracy, and making false statements.

Instead of collecting more data for her dissertation on how organisms process and respond to sensory cues, Han found herself behind bars. “Her career has been irreparably damaged,” her lawyer, Benton Martin, told U.S. District Judge Matthew Leitman on 10 September 2025 before he found her guilty of smuggling material. “She has lost her prestigious research opportunity at the University of Michigan … and in all likelihood the chance to become a professor in China, which requires international research experience.” Han was sentenced to the 3 months she had already served in jail and then deported.

In press statements about the June 2025 arrests of Jian and Han, DOJ officials suggested they were part of a concerted effort by the Chinese government to infiltrate U.S. universities. Within days, the three House committee chairs had amplified that message in a stern, 10-page letter to interim UM President Domenico Grasso. They called for a “full review of all grants to MPMI” for possible violations of any federal statutes or regulations. The chairmen sent a nearly identical letter to the heads of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), which have funded Shan and He.

Science has been unable to determine the status or outcome of those investigations. A spokesperson for the House committees said, “We don’t have any updates for you,” and spokespeople for NIH and NSF declined comment. A UM spokesperson also declined comment, although Science has learned that the House letter triggered the university investigation of Jian’s mentors, Shan and He.

The three postdocs in Shawn Xu’s lab were fired shortly after they declined to meet with UM lawyers on 29 September 2025. “They said they had been told by their academic adviser [in China] not to talk to anyone,” says attorney John Minock, who represented Xu Bai. “And when I asked them how responsible for their academic careers that person was, they laughed and said, ‘100%.’ So, it was essentially an order.”

Their J-1 visas were revoked soon after they were fired, which meant they were in the country illegally and subject to arrest and deportation. Nieh told the court he learned the three men had booked a flight to China on 16 October 2025 from John F. Kennedy International Airport and apprehended them there.

But on 4 February, after nearly 4 months in jail, they were released and allowed to fly home. According to their lawyers and several media reports, the Chinese embassy had intervened and struck a deal with the Trump administration to make the charges go away. “We never knew why, or who initiated it,” Minock says.

The U.S. government still gets credit “for arresting and deporting the scientists,” Minock notes, which he says is “an important goal for this administration.” But the episode was costly to U.S. taxpayers. “They had been confined for more than 3 months,” Minock says, “and the government probably spent $200,000 or $300,000 over the course of the prosecution before the cases were dropped.”

German argues the prosecutions have other costs as well. “Amplifying these cases into an alleged threat to national security reinforces the stereotype and the impression that there is this concerted activity, especially if you’re focusing on one particular racial or ethnic group or one particular nation.”

FBI and DOJ officials say they are simply doing their jobs. “The FBI remains resolutely committed to collaborating with our law enforcement partners to protect the residents of Michigan and defend the United States against such grave threats,” said Cheyvoryea Gibson, special agent in charge of the FBI Detroit field office, after Jian was arrested.

Although never charged with a crime, the mentors of these postdocs have also suffered. Shan says Jian’s departure has forced her lab to delay publishing important findings. Shan and He also face lengthy questioning at the airport every time they return from a scientific meeting abroad.

For Shawn Xu, the pall of suspicion hanging over his UM lab was dark enough for him to relocate to China “rather than wait for the noose to tighten,” according to Minock. He is reportedly now working at HUST and his students and postdocs still at UM have received short-term support from the university as they scramble to find other advisers.

Innes, who last year was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, has been outspoken in defense of his colleagues of Chinese ancestry, who he says are lying low. But Innes has also paid a price, including restrictions on his research activities and the cancellation of a long-running project.

The day after Xiang was sentenced, Innes received an email from the head of IU’s public safety office ordering him and a departmental colleague “to cease all importing and exporting activities in connection with your research, effective immediately and until further notice.” The office head acknowledged the unusual directive was “inconvenient and less than ideal during the academic year,” but said it was necessary so IU “could respond to inquiries” from federal regulators “regarding IU’s policies and procedures in connection with the import and export of certain biological materials.”

Innes also faces an ongoing government investigation. In December 2025, FBI agents searched his lab and office in the presence of IU lawyers and confiscated a notebook containing seeds of Arabidopsis thaliana, the model organism he uses to study Fusarium head blight.

“There was some Chinese writing in the notebook, which is probably why they took it,” says Innes, who received the seed packet in 2018 from a colleague in China and never opened it.

On 3 February, Innes received a letter from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) saying his lab “is in compliance” with government regulations. But the next month, USDA canceled a long-running collaboration between its scientists and Innes’s lab. Ironically, the work involves finding better ways of helping plants build resistance against the Fusarium fungus. “And now that experiment will never be finished,” Innes notes.

And 3 weeks after Xiang was sentenced, USDA told Innes it had sent the letter “in error.” On 7 May, the university locked him out of his lab. “We have been notified by the US Department of Agriculture that they will be engaging in activity in a laboratory associated with the biology department,” wrote Russell Mumper, vice president for research, in an email obtained by Science.

USDA declined a request for comment.

Many congressional Republicans have urged the Trump administration to resurrect the China Initiative, seeing a continuing threat. In the wake of these convictions and deportations, those affected wonder whether DOJ has revived it in a new form. “Yeah, it seems so,” says Duncan, who represented Jian. “And postdocs are easier targets than the more senior scientists, most of whom are U.S. citizens.”

Anecdotal evidence suggests the prosecutions are causing more Chinese grad students and postdocs to question whether they want to come to the U.S. to further their scientific careers. “I’ve heard from [my UM] colleagues that top candidates are declining offers and choosing to go instead to the U.K. or Europe or Singapore,” Cai says.

There are no numbers to support the anecdotes, as UM does not break out student totals by country and posts no data on postdocs. And Cai says his colleagues feel UM “is a safer place” than most U.S. universities at the moment because of its continued vocal support for international collaborations.

But Innes worries about the broader environment. “Most Chinese scientists came to the U.S. with the hope of staying for their careers,” he says. “But now they are getting the clear message that the government doesn’t want them to be here.”

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Virologist accused of starting COVID-19 will fight U.S. ban on funding

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From ScienceMag:

Alleging a “pattern of deception” in virus studies done more than a decade ago, the U.S. government has proposed a ban on federal funding to a prominent coronavirus researcher whose more recent work has incited unproven accusations that he helped start the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has already suspended Ralph Baric, a tenured professor at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, from receiving further money for his virology studies. Now it has begun formal debarment proceedings, which could cut off his funding for 3 years or more. As this story was being finalized, UNC announced that Baric,72, was retiring, but he told Science he plans to appeal the recommended debarment, likely with legal help from the school.

Baric received details of the allegations in a 7 May email from HHS, one of several documents he shared with Science. HHS accuses him of deception in communications with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which has provided his lab and collaborators with awards that total more than $200 million over the past 40 years.

Most of the charges center on mouse experiments done with bat coronaviruses in 2014, which HHS contends created a virus that had a “gain of function” (GOF), becoming more dangerous and potentially posing serious risks to human health. On an unrelated charge, HHS says Baric was “not forthcoming” about a 2017 grant on noroviruses from the Wellcome Trust, a private biomedical funder, that the department says overlapped with one he received from NIAID and should have been declared to the agency.

Baric has a succinct response to HHS’s debarment accusations. “They’re bullshit,” he tells Science. Baric contends they’re a direct result of allegations that the coronavirus behind COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, was engineered with his help and leaked from a lab. Baric, who like many scientists believes the pathogen probably had a natural origin, says he has nothing to hide in his emails or lab records.

Baric, who is among the most-cited coronavirus researchers in the world, says his lab’s work played pivotal roles in helping companies bring COVID-19 drugs and vaccines to market, saving millions of lives. “My payment for this is to be debarred?” he asks. “I’m being strung out for being a scientist.”

The contested coronavirus experiments, he says, were not GOF research and used viruses distant from SARS-CoV-2. Moreover, there was no U.S. ban on GOF work, or even a formal review process for it, when NIAID approved his study, although he had to pause the work because of an effort by then-President Barack Obama’s administration to develop the first GOF policy. He appealed, and NIAID gave him a green light to proceed. Stanford University biologist David Relman recalls discussing the experiments back in 2014, saying Baric disclosed the work to NIH and honored the pause despite frustration over it. “I do not think Ralph was deceptive… Ralph did what was required, expected, and appropriate at that time.”

On the Wellcome grant, Baric says UNC made the mistake of not linking it to his NIAID award, and there was little overlap between the proposed work. The infraction, he says, “is very minor.”

Gigi Kwik Gronvall, an immunologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who specializes in biosecurity issues, says it’s “absolutely ridiculous” for HHS to suspend Baric and initiate debarment proceedings against him. “HHS is punishing a world-class scientist who was working to protect people against pandemics, and if he had been listened to more thoroughly, we might have been better prepared for SARS-CoV-2,” Gronvall says. “It sounds to me like this is political.”

HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. And its suspension letter does not mention SARS-CoV-2, let alone allege that Baric helped create it. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his 2023 book The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race attempted to link Baric’s work to the origin of the pandemic because he collaborated with researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) on the 2014 experiments. The first outbreak of COVID-19 occurred in Wuhan, and Kennedy and others argue SARS-CoV-2 escaped from WIV—and may have been created there rather than being a natural virus (Editors’ note: The book repeatedly criticizes COVID-19 origin reporting by Science and this reporter.)

Kennedy’s view has increasingly gained traction with Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration despite a lack of direct evidence and other data suggesting the virus jumped into people from an animal host at a Wuhan food market. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has frequently referred to a “lab-leak coverup.” And President Donald Trump has publicly championed the theory as well.

Virologist Robert Redfield, who was director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during Trump’s first term and the start of the pandemic, has gone further still with regard to Baric. “I think there is a real possibility that the virus’ birthplace was Chapel Hill,” Redfield said on a podcast in 2024. He has called Baric “the scientific mastermind” of a Chinese government project to engineer the virus. Reflecting the lack of evidence around the possible lab-leak scenario, another camp asserts Baric did not create the virus, but taught the WIV scientists the methods they used to make it.  

The unproven accusations have upended Baric’s life. He frequently receives death threats, forcing UNC to tighten security at his lab. In 2024, he voluntarily participated in a daylong interview with the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic about his work and whether it related to the origin of the pandemic. A nonprofit, U.S. Right to Know, has doggedly pursued litigation against UNC for not releasing Baric’s related records. A member of the North Carolina House of Representatives similarly requested records from UNC and says he received “a ton of documents.”

In April 2025, not long after Trump returned to office and named Bhattacharya NIH director, the agency froze Baric’s ability to receive pay from his multiple grants to conduct a “compliance review.” The next month, it asked for clarifications about the 2015 Nature Medicine paper reporting the 2014 work, the Wellcome Trust grant, and potential conflicts of interest with companies that collaborate with his lab. UNC put him on administrative leave that May, barring him from campus for many months, before reinstating him in January.

In February, NIH notified UNC it had “additional concerns” because of the school’s unsatisfying responses to earlier requests. “NIH continues to seek clarity related to all communications that Dr. Baric had with UNC officials between January 1, 2014 and January 1, 2025, along with communications with NIH staff in the same timeframe,” the letter states. After receipt of the suspension letter last week, UNC once again put Baric on administrative leave.

The furin furor

Fueling suspicions that Baric is somehow connected to the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is a research proposal the HHS accusations don’t mention, involving the “spike” surface protein on the virus. When an enzyme called furin, made by an animal host, cleaves the spike protein, the virus often infects cells more efficiently. Researchers have discovered many SARS-CoV-2–related coronaviruses in bats and other species, but only it has a furin cleavage site—prompting suspicions it was added through genetic engineering.

In September 2021, The Intercept reported a previously undisclosed grant proposal that Baric, a research nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, WIV researchers, and others had made to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2018. (HHS last year debarred the principal investigator of the DARPA proposal, former EcoHealth director and zoologist Peter Daszak, from federal funding because of reporting irregularities about alleged GOF in coronavirus mouse research that EcoHealth did with WIV.)

The DARPA proposal called for the Baric lab to possibly introduce “proteolytic cleavage sites”—which would include the ones cleaved by furin—to bat coronaviruses, hoping to better understand what would happen. The work was not funded, in part over safety concerns, but even some of Baric’s supporters questioned why he did not make the proposal public once COVID-19 erupted and the SARS-CoV-2 genome was known.

In his January 2024 testimony to the House panel, Baric said he did not mention the DARPA proposal before it became public because he had “forgotten” about the rejected grant. He also emphasized that he didn’t know whether adding a furin cleavage site to those bat coronaviruses would have led to a gain or loss of function. “It’s not like it’s portrayed in the news where researchers were going to take furin cleavage sites and just shotgun them into every coronavirus they could find until they found something happened,” Baric said. “It was a systematic process.”

In The Wuhan Cover-Up, Kennedy writes that this experiment was “toying with insanely dangerous alchemies that precisely predicted the very laboratory alterations that could have led to the creation of COVID-19.” Baric and other scientists, however, have outlined reasons why it’s more likely SARS-CoV-2 naturally evolved its furin cleavage site.

GOF debate

The 2014 experiments at the heart of his suspension last week and proposed debarment have a loosely related focus. Their goal was to see whether a novel bat coronavirus found in China by WIV researchers posed a threat to humans. No lab could grow the virus in culture, so WIV shared its genetic sequence with Baric’s group. They inserted that strain’s gene for spike into a version of the coronavirus that emerged in China in 2003 to cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), an often-fatal respiratory disease that preceded COVID-19. The team chose this particular SARS virus as a backbone to the foreign spike because NIAID researchers had already adapted the virus to grow in mice.

Baric’s team then tested the chimeric virus in mice, finding that the SARS virus with the new spike protein did not grow as well in rodents as NIAID’s mouse-adapted strain. The infected mice lost some weight but had far less severe disease. “There was no gain in function,” Baric says. Indeed, he and the other authors of the Nature Medicine paper included a graph that shows a loss of function. The study did stir some controversy at the time. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” virologist Simon Wain-Hobson said in a Nature news story.

The HHS suspension letter says Baric referred to the virus his team created as “a chimeric gain-of-function virus” at a National Academy of Sciences symposium in 2014. Baric now says he misspoke, and that it would have been more accurate to say the experiment had GOF potential.

In a separate 2014 experiment with human epithelial cells that line airways, Baric’s group compared the chimeric virus to the original SARS coronavirus. Viral levels of both rose to roughly the same levels in the human cells. “There was a retention of function,” Baric says, but no gain. That work was also reported in the Nature Medicine paper.

HHS recently asked Baric for more evidence that no gain occurred, requesting data on a head-to-head comparison in mice of the wildtype SARS and the spike-engineered mouse-adapted versions. “The NIH found that Dr. Ralph Baric failed to provide this requested data in his response, and found that he minimized the concern about a potential increase [in] infectivity in human cells,” the suspension letter states. 

Baric said he never conducted the requested study because there was no reason to do it, given that the SARS virus does not thrive in mice. But his group in 2012 had published a study that asked why the mouse-adapted strain worked well in mice, genetically tinkering its spike to mimic the natural SARS virus that mice resist. That engineered SARS virus—unlike the chimeric—did not cause weight loss in the mice. The HHS suspension letter says this meant the chimeric had a gain of function, and accused Baric of being “deceptive” on this point. (HHS also says NIAID officials concluded Baric misled the agency in 2014 when asking them to lift the Obama pause on GOF work.)

Baric says he, too, has concerns about the dangers posed by risky virology research. In the Nature Medicine article, he and his colleagues wrote: “Scientific review panels may deem similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky to pursue.” Their finding, they said, represented a “crossroads” for GOF concerns: “The potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens.”

Indeed, Baric signed a letter published in the 14 May 2021 issue of Science calling for more investigation into whether SARS-CoV-2 leaked from WIV or another lab in Wuhan, although he says he never believed the virus was created by scientists. And last year, Baric was a co-author with Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin on an opinion piece for The New York Times that criticized WIV for continuing to do risky experiments in labs that had “insufficient safety precautions.”

Lipkin, who has collaborated with Baric on research, says the actions against his friend will cause future harm. “Ralph Baric is a brilliant and principled scientist,” Lipkin says. “Canceling his support will decrease our ability to respond to emerging threats.”

Baric has 30 days to appeal the suspension and proposed debarment, which he intends to do. If he loses there, he could take it to federal court.

Todd Canni, an attorney at BakerHostetler who specializes in debarments but does not represent Baric, says these types of cases are typically resolved by the agencies that bring the charges, not the courts. Suspension and debarment adjudications are based on facts, Canni says, and it’s normally a transparent process. “The beautiful part of suspension and debarment is it’s a fair system,” Canni says.

But Baric’s case, tangled up in the politically fraught debate about the origin of a pandemic that killed many millions, is unusual. “You don’t see something like this every day,” he says.

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How to face the grad school exam that separates ‘student’ from ‘candidate’

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From ScienceMag:

Experimental Error logo
Experimental Error is a column about the quirky, comical, and sometimes bizarre world of scientific training and careers, written by scientist and comedian Adam Ruben. Barmaleeva/Shutterstock, adapted by C. Aycock/Science

Some parts of graduate school have kept up with the times. Campuses modernize; hybrid learning abounds; and according to a Microsoft plugin I don’t remember installing, artificial intelligence is making everything better and we should all yield to its whims.

But some parts of grad school feel like they haven’t changed in decades or even centuries, and I’m not just talking about your stipend. There’s one particular part of grad school that has always felt downright, for lack of a better word, medieval. It’s a ritual you could picture happening in the halls of whatever passed for academia in dimly lit stone chambers, with everyone in heavy robes. And still, to this day, it’s fairly universal: the oral exam.

Some programs call them comps, or quals. At my school, we called them GBOs, graduate board orals, and they essentially constituted the dividing line between being given the thumbs-up to continue toward your Ph.D. after your first 2 years of course work and lab work or being asked to kindly slink toward the exit and pursue a career in the humanities.

Actually, there was a third option: “pass with conditions,” which—depending on the conditions—could be a sliver away from an unconditional pass, or potentially worse than a fail. I knew one student whose conditions required her to take a year’s worth of undergraduate chemistry courses that were probably, because of our university’s high concentration of overachieving premeds, much more rigorous than any graduate course. Another student had to meet with a committee member weekly for one-on-one review sessions. You might think the latter is easier than the former. But apparently, that professor was repeatedly unavailable during the time slots when he had scheduled the review sessions, leaving his student to wonder how she could fulfill the requirement he had created and then made impossible.

With all that at stake, it’s no surprise these exams are scary. And it doesn’t help that there’s a good chance you’ve never taken a test before in this type of format, standing in front of a panel of relaxed-looking professors and lecturing about science as if you’re a budding expert in your field, not a nervous grad student, answering questions spontaneously and competently—no “I’ll come back to this later” and flipping to the next page, no avoiding live, immediate judgment. Adding further to the pain, many scientists are introverts who chose this field precisely because they want to minimize human interaction.

If you find yourself freaking out because your school is forcing you to participate in the least entertaining type of performance art, hopefully you’ll find the following advice helpful.

Study efficiently and effectively.

Well, duh. Of course you should do this. But what makes studying effective? For me, I knew I would not only have to learn the material, but also train myself to recite and apply it out loud. And the only way to do that would be to understand it backward and forward. So I started a month in advance with a stack of blank paper, and I started to make study guides—vocabulary, chemical structures and mechanisms, graphs. Writing out the study guides forced me to relearn the material, and studying them reinforced it. Then I would hide them and see whether I could explain the same thing, out loud, to an imaginary thesis committee. The imaginary committee was very forgiving.

Study what the committee is likely to ask.

This is challenging, because they can literally ask you questions about all of science. But don’t try to study all of science. You already know they will probably ask about your specific research project, so start there. Know your project well. Read and understand the most important papers and reviews. Then broaden your reach: Study the fields that pertain to your research. I worked on the binding kinetics of particular enzymes in the parasite that causes malaria, so I reviewed the basics of kinetics, the basics of malaria, and the scientific principles behind all of the machines and assays I used in the lab. Think like your committee: If you were assessing a Ph.D. candidate who measured one kind of kinetics every day, wouldn’t it be logical to ask them about different kinds of kinetics? I must have reread the kinetics chapter of my biochemistry textbook a dozen times to prepare for my exam, and guess what, the committee asked me a bunch of questions about kinetics.

Seed your studying with a zinger or two.

It’s impossible to predict all possible questions your committee might ask. But you can keep an eye open for a few, and prepare accordingly. For me, that approach happened to pay off. Without going into too much detail, almost all the enzymes I worked with were aspartic proteases, which are a pretty standard kind of enzyme, and it’s well-known how they work. But one was a histo-aspartic protease, which was so rare that the name of the enzyme was literally “histo-aspartic protease,” and no one knew its mechanism. It occurred to me while studying that a clever question might be to ask me to draw out how a histo-aspartic protease might work, in theory, from basic chemical principles. I will readily confess that I could not have figured this out on the spot—but I didn’t need to, because I figured it out in advance and then memorized the answer. Sure enough, my committee asked me that exact question, and I had to hide my glee when I pretended to think for a moment, then wrote the answer perfectly. “Maybe … like this?” I said, while thinking, “Damn right it’s like this.”

But don’t neglect the basic basics.

Somehow, in my studying, I had assumed I would just kind of remember all of organic chemistry. Oops. At one point, my committee asked me to draw a molecule and show them where the resonance could be found. That’s, like, week one stuff in organic chemistry. But week one was 4 years earlier, and I totally blanked. I only remembered that “resonance equals dotted lines,” and I think I drew some dotted lines.

Choose your committee wisely.

You might think your committee should consist of professors in your exact field. And you should definitely include some of those if you can. But there’s another criterion that I think people often forget: You should ensure that your committee includes nice people. We had one professor in my department who probably conducted more orals than anyone else, not because his knowledge extended into their fields, but because he was a nice, forgiving guy who didn’t try to trip anyone up. Conversely, we had another professor who was young and untenured, and rumor had it that he would always try to find fault with students as a way to prove his own worth to the other committee members. The makeup of your committee can truly mean the difference between a positive experience and a nightmare, a pass and a fail. It may seem arbitrary and unfair, but that’s only because it’s arbitrary and unfair.

Don’t get discouraged.

One of the hardest facts for me to accept was that the committee’s job is to find the limits of your knowledge. If they only ask you questions that you can easily answer, they won’t know what you really know. Practically, this means they may ask a question, see the relief on your face as you start to confidently respond, and then immediately switch to a different topic. It also means they will end up asking you a bunch of questions that will baffle you and make you think you should have chosen a different field. It means you will end your orals believing you failed, and why not, because there’s so much you don’t know.

That’s how I felt exiting that room. I finished my 90-minute grilling and entered the hallway, ready to collapse. My lab mate was waiting there to hand me a beer, a little tradition in our lab. His congratulations felt bittersweet because I knew, knew, I had screwed up. At best, I would pass with conditions, and I just had to hope those conditions would be reasonable.

Then the door opened, and one by one, the committee members exited and shook my hand. Even then, I still thought they were going to deliver bad news. When they started to walk out of the building, I wondered whether I should schedule a second session to review what I assumed would be some pretty onerous conditions.

But no. I passed unconditionally, though the committee did note—correctly—that I should probably take some time to rereview organic chemistry.

As I stood there in the hallway, holding my laptop and the bottle of beer, I just kept thinking I should have failed. Toward the end, I had answered so many questions with a deflated “I don’t know.” There was just so much I didn’t know.

Of course, there was so much I didn’t know. Yet.

That’s why I was here.

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How I learned to talk about my religion as a scientist

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From ScienceMag:

When I asked a colleague whether he’d like to accompany me to a Mass organized by university students, I didn’t know what to expect. Like most people in my country, he wasn’t a believer himself—but he seemed curious about my faith and eager to join. To my surprise, he said yes—and before I knew it, the rest of the research group was coming along, too. But I began to feel nervous. What if they laughed or said something inappropriate during the service? What if they made fun of me afterward? Or, worst of all, what if they started to doubt me as a scientist?

I was raised Catholic and have practiced my faith since childhood. But like many religious people in the Czech Republic, for most of my life I’ve avoided talking much about it. Under communism, believers were often banned from teaching and scientific positions, and to this day, many people still see faith as a purely private matter. Sometimes it comes with a sense of shame, especially among young people.

I never experienced bullying or humiliation because of my faith. But it was never easy for me to discuss it. At elementary school, kids challenged me by saying that if God existed, there would be no wars. Later, at my high school, which specialized in mechanical engineering, classmates questioned how I could believe in something no one can see or measure. I had no easy answers, and wasn’t confident in speaking or defending myself, so I decided it was better to keep my beliefs to myself. When I left to go to university, I kept my faith hidden. I didn’t see a conflict between faith and science, but I knew many people did.

Things changed when I began my Ph.D. in applied mechanics. I finally started to feel I was doing what I wanted to do with my life, and this gave me more confidence and a sense of belonging. As a result, I felt increasingly comfortable sharing more of my religious life. Still, I worried my colleagues, who were mostly atheists, would judge me or think less of me as a scientist because of my beliefs.

After I took my colleagues to Mass, though, those fears dissolved. The service went smoothly that evening, and afterward we all went out for beers. My lab mates didn’t confront or mock me—instead, they began to ask questions with genuine interest. They were respectful, even though I sometimes did not have the answers to their questions, or responded that it wasn’t possible to fully understand something infinite and eternal.

I also noticed other fellow students at that particular Mass, including some I had no idea were practicing Catholics. Seeing others like me out there, and knowing I could be myself without the fear of judgment from my colleagues, helped me build the confidence to talk more openly about my faith. My colleagues now know, for example, that I pray regularly, including when facing difficult or stressful situations at work, such as when I defended my Ph.D. thesis, or when I give a major lecture for hundreds of students or travel abroad to prestigious conferences to deliver a talk.

My faith helps me navigate academia in other ways, too. The humility I have learned helps me accept rejection, which is all too common in science. My beliefs have also fostered my fascination with the beauty of nature, and have given me a sense of responsibility for how scientific knowledge is pursued and used. I don’t work during religious holidays and on Sundays, which helps me find a better work-life balance in a culture that often incentivizes long hours and weekend work.

Academia sometimes treats religious beliefs of all kinds as incompatible with scientific rigor, as if believers are more prone to blind trust or unable to challenge ideas. That attitude discourages open and constructive conversation within research communities. I hope that by discussing my faith, I can help others who might still hesitate or fear being open about their spirituality. Each individual is free to choose whether to disclose their religion, of course. But when I am open about my own experiences, I’ve found others tend to open up themselves. I’m lucky to have found a supportive community—I hope others can, too.

Do you have an interesting career story to share? You can find our author guidelines here.

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Pushed by Trump policies, top U.S. battery scientist is moving to Singapore

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From ScienceMag:

Shirley Meng grew up in China and earned her degrees in Singapore, but the United States is where she built her career trying to make better and cheaper batteries for a power-hungry world. After 2 decades here, the University of Chicago (UChicago) materials scientist, who also heads a Department of Energy (DOE) research hub, is now heading back to Asia.

On 1 July, Meng will become vice president for innovation and global affairs at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU), her undergraduate alma mater and a growing research powerhouse. Only 35 years old, NTU was ranked 12th this year in one global assessment of research universities—one rung above UChicago.

Meng took the job because she thinks the U.S. has turned away from a commitment to decarbonize its economy. She’s leaving with mixed emotions—and the hope that the political environment for more sustainable energy sources will improve once President Donald Trump leaves office.

In making the move, Meng is also stepping down as director of the $62 million Energy Storage Research Alliance (ESRA) based at Argonne National Laboratory, one of two DOE battery hubs launched in the waning months of former President Joe Biden’s administration. ESRA has not had its funding reduced, and Meng says the hub’s focus on using artificial intelligence in designing next-generation batteries appeals to the White House. Even so, she says, “The last 15 months have been extraordinarily difficult for the energy storage field, with many important projects being sidelined.”

The Trump administration’s immigration policies, including its restrictions on Chinese-born scientists, are another factor in her decision to move to NTU. “I’ve always been an internationalist,” says Meng, who became a Singapore citizen in 2004, “and I think that Singapore is a place where people can collaborate, regardless of what country you come from.”

Meng joined the UChicago faculty in 2022 after spending more than a decade at the University of California San Diego, where her husband, Graham Elliott, is a professor of econometrics. UChicago “has given me 2 years to decide” whether to return or sever ties to the institution, she says. “If things start moving in the right direction—and my family wants me to come back—I hope I can do it.”

In the meantime, she says, she will maintain a partial appointment at UChicago and continue to run her lab, which recently developed the first anode-free sodium solid-state battery, an alternative to lithium batteries that could allow more affordable and faster charging of electric vehicles.

Meng spoke with Science this week after NTU issued a press release about her new post on 22 April—Earth Day, as she notes. Here are excerpts from that conversation.

Q: What made the NTU offer so attractive?

A: I was really searching for a position that would let me do my work, which is to translate the fundamental science into industry impact. I’ve been entrusted with a very high position in my home country, but at the same time, I’m seriously concerned that, if I were asked by the [U.S.] Department of War to perform certain tasks, I probably won’t be able to do it. Things like [making better batteries for] drones, or humanoids for war fighting. Maybe they already have their own expertise. But I just don’t want to risk it.

I also think it’s important that I maintain my reputation as someone who’s always building things, not destroying things. So, I decided it’s probably better for somebody else to [direct the DOE hub].

Q: How has the increasingly tense U.S.-Chinese relationship affected you?

A: I’m not a big fan of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]. So I had no hesitation about giving up my Chinese citizenship. But I think a lot of my frustration in the last 2 years is the lack of differentiation in discussions about U.S. relationships with China. The word Chinese is being mixed up with race, nationality, and culture, and it’s been extremely tiring to deal with that situation.

Q: What is the situation for foreign-born scientists hoping to work at Argonne and other DOE national labs?

A: I think it’s important for the nation to impose strict [security] controls on the labs. So I’m not complaining. But it also creates difficulties for students from certain nationalities.

As long as they can get a visa and get through the paperwork, it is OK. But it’s not easy to go through all the checkpoints. There was a postdoc from [South] Korea we wanted to hire. But we would have had to pay $100,000 because he needed to come in on an H-1B visa, and nobody understands the rules and where the money would come from. So, in the end we just had to say no.

Another student who is funded by Tesla was told they cannot work [at Argonne]. And when I asked why, I was told the reason is that Tesla has a China operation. I wanted to say, “What international company does not do business in China?”

Q: How are these tensions playing out within DOE’s Office of Science, which is funding the battery hub?

A: I think the DOE managers do a fantastic job. For 18 years, program managers have watched me grow up and mature into a senior scientist, and I’m very grateful for all the support DOE has given me. But they are also caught up in this current situation, and they have been told not to talk about it.

Q: How do you feel about this administration’s emphasis on fossil fuels and tariffs?

A: The leaders of industry know that we need to decarbonize our economy. They also understand that the world has to work together, and that globalization is unstoppable. Unfortunately, the Trump administration has been moving in the other direction. I was in Saudi Arabia this winter [on a delegation led by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright], and the Saudi energy minister took me aside at one point and said, “You know, your [energy] secretary is more pro-oil than me.”

Q: Is there a way for scientists to mitigate the strained relationship between the two countries?

A: We are now in this perpetual cycle of doubt and distrust. A lot of Chinese scientists benefited from the U.S. system in the past 2 decades, and they have gone back to Asia and become very successful. That’s great. But I wish they would show a little bit more gratitude for what America has done for them. I think that would help ease tensions on both sides.

Q: How will you carry out your responsibilities at NTU while maintaining your lab in Chicago?

A: I learned that 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. was working time between Singapore and MIT [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] when I was part of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology [a collaboration begun in the early 2000s] while getting my Ph.D. I’m a lot older now [Meng turns 50 in October], but I think I can survive again on that schedule.”

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How academia fed my unhealthy fixation with accolades

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From ScienceMag:

I read the email over and over. The rejection from the high-impact journal didn’t just feel like a professional setback; it was a personal indictment. Sitting in my darkened office, the familiar, cold knot of inadequacy tightened in my chest. To my colleagues, I was the highly competitive Ph.D. student who aimed for perfection. But in the glow of the screen, I wasn’t a scientist reviewing peer feedback. I was a child again, desperately striving for an accolade that could heal a hidden wound.

The home I grew up in felt precarious because my father suffered from alcohol use disorder. I learned to read the air before I could read a textbook. When he returned from work, the sound of his key in the lock wasn’t just a homecoming. If the turn was too slow or the metallic scrape too loud, I knew the minefield was live. It rarely took long for the silence to shatter and a violent row to erupt—shouting and chaos tearing through the house while I tried to disappear into the shadows.

I reacted by forging a relentless drive for achievement, throwing myself into science competitions and olympiads. I harbored a child’s desperate logic: that if I accomplished enough, my father might finally choose me over the bottle. That if he had a son to be proud of, he would find a reason to stay sober. But the more awards I won, the more I realized no amount of success could bridge the distance created by addiction. He remained unreachable, but my fixation to keep achieving did not subside.

When I eventually started a Ph.D. program, my survival mechanisms masqueraded as professional virtues. Cutthroat competition for grants and the race for first authorship didn’t feel daunting—they felt like home. For years, I told myself that in science, this hypercompetitiveness simply came with the territory. But, for me, the truth was more complex.

I was ravenous for prestige, lunging at every award, every travel grant, and every fellowship as if they were life rafts. Each “congratulations” email provided a hit of dopamine and a fleeting, digital proof that I was finally outrunning my origins. I wasn’t just building a career; I craved validation from a system that, much like my father, was never quite satisfied.

I continued on that path until I met my wife. She offered me warmth and a life where I could be the father I never had for my son. She also didn’t tolerate the emotional weight I brought home from the lab, and although she never gave me an ultimatum, I knew I had a choice to make.

So, shortly after defending my Ph.D., I decided to leave academia for a data analyst role at a defense company. I thought I was solving the problem by taking academic validation and prestige out of the picture. At first it seemed to work. I built a solid career, progressing into management and director levels. But each promotion was, in reality, driven by a renewed need to compete. I had changed my environment, but I hadn’t changed the person who didn’t know how to exist without a battle to win.

The turning point came nearly a decade into my industry career, when a couple I knew well suddenly split because of a hidden struggle with alcohol. It caught me off-guard; to me, they seemed almost perfect. It reminded me of a pattern I had spent years perfecting: the art of maintaining a flawless exterior while the foundation was quietly eroding.

This realization pushed me toward psychotherapy, where, for the first time, I looked at my reflection and named it: I am an adult child of an alcoholic. I began to understand the machinery of my own behavior—the relentless need for the external validation that had propelled me to grasp for whatever award or career rung came next.

Since then, I have learned to base my career choices on what truly matters to me. Last year, I traded an overtime-heavy role for a managerial position at an artificial intelligence (AI) technology firm, where I could focus on what I love—people and technology—and have time to be fully present for my son.

I also found the strength to forgive my late father for his addiction. Understanding and speaking my truths was profoundly cathartic. It allowed me to finally accept who I am and—most importantly—to decouple my self-worth from the applause of others.

Do you have an interesting career story to share? You can find our author guidelines here.

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As a scientist in China, I worry politics is unraveling my U.S. ties

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From ScienceMag:

“Problem.” As soon as I saw the subject line on my collaborator’s email, I had a sinking feeling. We had been working together—I in China, my collaborator in the United States—to finalize a manuscript from a joint biomedical research project. For a moment, I thought the email might be about journal policies or additional experimental details. But I soon realized better controls or more data would not help. “I may have to be off the paper,” the email read, next to a link to a news article about proposed legislation that would prohibit U.S. researchers from receiving federal funding if they collaborate with Chinese scientists. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

I have worked with U.S. scientists for decades. About 20 years ago, after completing degrees in China and England, I moved to the U.S. to pursue my Ph.D. I was lucky to be trained by and collaborate with prominent American scientists, first in graduate school and later as a postdoc, at top U.S. institutions, where my professional identity was shaped. I was taught the universal values of science—the insistence on rigorous methods, open debate, and scientific integrity. I vividly remember one supervisor telling me, “Science is not private property and only grows through sharing.”

A few years ago, life pulled me back to China as my parents aged. I am the only child in the family and feel obliged to stay closer to them. I brought the scientific values I had cherished in the U.S. to my lab and continued to collaborate with my U.S. colleagues. Such ties matter because disease doesn’t stop at the border, and international collaboration is a key way to strengthen the conclusions in biomedical research. Reviewers sometimes want to see that clinical samples have been collected from multiple ethnic populations. And in my discipline, which relies on imaging devices, it’s important that centers around the world collaborate to ensure the data are comparable.

After reading the email from my colleague, I worried that if the legislation went through, it wouldn’t just mean I would lose my many U.S. co-authors on the paper we were finalizing. It could put a stop to all collaborations with those researchers moving forward. As it turned out, the legislation did not pass, and our manuscript was eventually accepted with the names of my U.S. collaborators on it. But the political climate that discourages U.S.-Chinese collaborations has not gone away.

As tensions between the two countries have grown and Chinese scientists working in the U.S. have been targeted by investigations, I have found myself hesitating to reach out to U.S. contacts for future collaboration. “Will our collaboration put them at risk?” I ask myself. Such ties now seem more like a danger than an opportunity. That’s been a hard pill to swallow, because I have spent most of my professional time in the U.S. Now, I must focus on rebuilding my network outside the U.S. from scratch.

I also see this breakdown affecting the younger generation of Chinese scientists, who no longer have equal opportunities to connect with researchers at U.S. universities. I am unsure whether I should even encourage my trainees to attend U.S. conferences. They may be denied visas and unable to present their findings. When they can participate, it is far less likely than before to foster any actual collaborations. Many are already reluctant to go. “What’s the point of attending?” some have asked me.

Over my career, I have found that the universal research language brings strangers together across disciplines and borders. I became the scientist I am because my supervisors and collaborators were willing to share ideas, resources, and mentorship.

It is a strange feeling for me to see that culture threatened. Given the current political situation, I worry about what the future holds for joint U.S.-Chinese research. Right now, it appears as though winter is coming.

Do you have an interesting career story to share? You can find our author guidelines here.

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How podcasting helped me rediscover my love of science

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From ScienceMag:

A couple weeks after our podcast aired, I received an email from the brain surgeon we had interviewed. A patient who had just been diagnosed with a brain tumor had been in contact, he said, and wanted to know whether they might qualify for an ongoing surgical trial mentioned on the episode. I read the email twice, feeling an unexpected surge of joy and relief. At a time when I felt frustrated by my own research, here was a reminder that science has the capacity to change lives—and that I could, in some small way, help someone facing a frightening diagnosis.

I had been struggling with my Ph.D. for a while. I’d spent months troubleshooting a new technique, making such slow progress that my enthusiasm was waning. I knew I needed to get involved in an activity outside the lab, to break the monotony and sustain my interest in science. I’d long been an avid podcast listener, and I began toying with the idea of creating a podcast of my own that explored the stories behind research.

Starting out by myself felt daunting, but by chance my friend Michael was also looking for activities outside the lab and was keen to join me. We learned that an established podcast called Neuro Podcases was planning a new series in which clinical researchers would be interviewed about their work, so we got in touch with the producers. I was thrilled when they agreed to let us produce an episode—and later made us co-hosts.

From the outset, podcasting demanded skills that my Ph.D. had not taught. Drafting interview briefs forced me to dissect each guest’s latest paper down to its central claim. What was the core question? What evidence supported it? We had to learn how to craft questions to yield clear answers, and how to pace an interview to create a narrative structure and sustain attention.

These skills did not develop overnight. When we hit record on our first episode, I was surprised to find myself feeling shy and embarrassed. I kept my eyes focused on my notes and not the person I was interviewing. But over time, our confidence improved, and the experience of interviewing began to feel genuinely energizing. Once we found our rhythm, the interviews evolved from rigid question-and-answer sessions into genuine discussions. Some episodes felt as though they could have been recorded in a café, over coffee, as part of an easy and friendly conversation. I felt I’d finally found the creative outlet I’d been craving.

I also noticed that my newfound skills helped me in my Ph.D. When writing manuscripts, I began to think about how to structure a narrative to clearly explain the claim, evidence, and implications. In lab meetings, I found myself thinking more comfortably on my feet because live interviews had trained me to better follow a thread of logic. When presenting my own data at conferences, I recalled how I would probe podcast guests about limitations in their study. That helped me anticipate the most obvious critiques of my work and address them in advance.

But none of these professional gains compared with the moment I read that message about the patient. We thought only scientists were listening; it hadn’t occurred to me that patients or their families might also be interested in what we were doing. The message also brought home how good research communication can shorten the distance between the laboratory and lived experience.

Many people will feel stuck in a rut at some point during their Ph.D. My advice is to find another activity outside the lab, so when your research isn’t going well, you’ve got something else to turn to. Any creative project—whether it is a blog, a science outreach program, or volunteering—can help provide momentum when research feels uncertain. Science is often slow, repetitive, and unpredictable, but engaging with it from a different angle can restore perspective and motivation. For me, stepping outside the lab did not take me away from science. It helped me rediscover why I cared about it in the first place.

Do you have an interesting career story to share? You can find our author guidelines here.

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NSF names record number of graduate fellows, rebounding from 2025 dip

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From ScienceMag:

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has chosen a record number of students this year to receive its prestigious graduate fellowship, rebounding from last year’s unusually small cohort. The size of this year’s class, announced today, together with a more traditional distribution across fields, could ease fears that NSF, under pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration, had decided to shrink and alter the nature of a program that has supported 50 future Nobel laureates since it began in 1952.

“My take is that the STEM community’s activism around last year’s cuts appears to have had significant positive impacts on this year’s class,” says Susan Brennan, a cognitive psychologist at Stony Brook University and former fellowship program officer.

The 2599 fellows in this year’s class surpass the previous record of 2554 in the 2023 cohort and is 42% larger than last year’s unusually small class of 1500. The 2025 class was announced in two stages, and the second cohort of 500 was dominated by artificial intelligence and quantum information science, top priorities for the White House.

This year’s class returns to a more familiar distribution, with engineering and biology once again leading the pack. But whereas in 2023 and ’24 those two disciplines each garnered about one-quarter of the awards, this year saw a shift toward engineering, with some 35% of the awards going to students in that area, followed by 19% in biology. At the same time, the life sciences was the discipline most represented among the honorable mentions, comprising 40% of the 1440 total. Among awardees, computing and information science saw a slight uptick, from 7% in 2023 and ’24 to 10%. And psychology took a hit, from 5% and 6% to 2% of the overall pie.

The NSF fellowship provides students with an annual stipend of $37,000 for 3 years and gives their institutions $16,000 annually to defray tuition and other educational costs. It’s also a portable scholarship, in contrast to the typical arrangement in which a graduate student’s support is tied to their institution, either from their adviser’s research grant or a graduate training program in a particular field. NSF says it received nearly 14,000 applications for this year’s class.

NSF has launched an initiative to identify high-tech companies willing to contribute to the support of future classes of graduate fellows. But an agency spokesperson says, “NSF plans to support [this year’s] fellows with available appropriated funds in [fiscal year] 2026.”

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