iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

that moment when you realized the job you just started is going to take five days to run oops

Reposted by Kristine Willis

wp-institute.bsky.social @wp-institute.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

What do scientific breakthroughs actually do for us? An infection that once caused recurring ulcers becomes curable with antibiotics. The immune system becomes a weapon against cancer. A dangerous open operation becomes a minimally invasive procedure. #SupportBreakthroughs #SupportScience 🧪

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

Random, but has anyone else encountered what seems to be a bug in #libreoffice Calc 26.8.0.3? Seems like the count feature of the pivot table crashes the app. Possibly a memory leak? #bugreport #fedidev

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Björn Brembs @brembs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2026

The @Co_Biologists just funded our workshop Playing Dice: Chance as a Biological Strategy It's too early for a venue and dates, so let me know if you want to be added to a mailinglist where we will distribute all information. Little did Einstein know: his "old man" is playing dice and so is all […]

mastodon.social

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 25/06/2026

There’s a new urgency to our discussions about how best to direct our research dollars, but the discussions themselves are not a new thing. One longstanding concern has been that delayed recognition (and funding) of novel research may slow down science’s ability to deliver public goods. 1/

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 16/04/2026

Thanks to the fantastic PreLights team @co_biologists and @JontyTownson for a great conversation about our recent preprints describing how to support and predict scientific breakthroughs, and what that means for how we distribute science funding. Give it a listen! youtu.be/u-X3dYl7dHQ […]

mstdn.science

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 31/03/2026

RE: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/11631851… If the current moment has anything to teach us, it should be that we need a more diverse and resilient ecosystem for funding science.

hachyderm.io

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 30/03/2026

New at The Progress Bar: How do we give our system for allocating scarce grant funds an update for the 21st century? Approach it like any other empirical problem and use data. theprogressbarwpi.org/p/signal-over…

A black and white graph; the data points are most dense along a horizontal line (signal) but many data points are spread over the whole area of the graph (noise) making the image fuzzy

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 27/03/2026

Literally the only nerd using a reference manager to write a substack.

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 20/03/2026

Huge thank you to everyone who has reached out since yesterday to talk about @wp-institute.bsky.social! Really humbled by your enthusiasm and support, and looking forward to many more conversations!

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Reposted by Kristine Willis

wp-institute.bsky.social @wp-institute.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

WPI is currently seeking individual donors and established nonprofit partners working to advance biomedical research who are interested in piloting data-guided decision-making. Email us to connect, info at woodleyparkinstitute dot org

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wp-institute.bsky.social @wp-institute.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

The mission of the Woodley Park Institute is to develop a detailed, quantitative understanding of the factors that drive the success or failure of scientific ideas and investments, and apply this knowledge to accelerate the development of new breakthrough technologies and therapeutics.

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 18/03/2026

Friends, as many of you know, I recently left the NIH to embark on the next chapter in my career. Today I’m excited to share what I’ve been working on, and what it means for the way we support research and produce scientific advances. 1/

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 21/02/2026

“…science takes time to change. This changing process often involves searching for new ways of funding and the influence of leaders in the field.” Let’s find those field-changing ideas and fund them sooner. wapo.st/46dS4mU

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 08/02/2026

Your word list and my word list are not the same.

Capture of the Spelling Bee word game, claiming that “tibble” is not a word

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 01/02/2026

Reading an incredibly thoughtful, deeply referenced review this morning written by an academic in a BRICS state and published in a journal that some of my colleagues in the American academy would no doubt look down on. We lose so much when we give a narrow set of authorities a privileged place […]

mstdn.science

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 30/01/2026

Nice modeling by former NIGMS director Jeremy Berg showing the impact of forward funding more #NIH awards. Don’t miss the subtle point he makes early on about decreasing probability of award driving a delayed increase in application numbers […]

mstdn.science

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 29/01/2026

Current status: making questionable decisions about caffeine consumption.

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 26/01/2026

Supportive of this necessary move, but it highlights a question I’ve increasingly wrestled with: how do you balance the need for Mertonian universalism with the need to establish trust, especially in a system where there are definite bad actors? #metascience ArXiv preprint server clamps down on […]

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 15/01/2026

A thought I find myself coming back to lately.

On the left, in typewriter font, a quote from Science, the endless frontier: Science, by itself, provides no panacea for individual, social, and economic ills. It can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team .. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world” On the right, a worn book cover with a taped spine.

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 12/01/2026

New at The Progress Bar: The system for funding science is fundamentally broken. To fix it, we need to do more than change who gets funded, we need to change how funding decisions are made. theprogressbarwpi.org/p/doing-exper…

partial trajectory showing the development of Nobel-winning research on fluorescent proteins (orange circles) and super-resolution microscopy (yellow circles)

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 10/01/2026

Ugh. I really really want to run and it is 48F and raining. Worst running weather ever.

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 10/01/2026

“The system of funding science is fundamentally broken. In some respects, it’s been an unmitigated disaster. It was a house of cards, and it’s not surprising that it’s now falling apart.” Happy to see Mike Lauer, former director of extramural research at #NIH, and I are on the same page here […]

mstdn.science

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 09/01/2026

Getting used to being a free-range academic again

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 08/01/2026

80 years after Vannevar Bush, we have an opportunity to rework the systems that fund and shape research. We can accelerate scientific progress - if we make the right choices. New substack: theprogressbarwpi.org/p/the-next-fr…

theprogressbarwpi.org

The next frontier

Scientia ad initium novum

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 08/01/2026

“To understand what work AI can do on its own today, researchers collected hundreds of examples of projects posted on freelancing platforms that humans had been paid to complete .. the best AI successfully completed only 2.5% of the projects” Unsurprisingly, genAI chatbots made errors, dropped […]

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 04/01/2026

So many important points here it was hard to pick a pull quote, but this one speaks to my personal experience at #NIH: “We are systematically underutilizing our collective capacity for discovery and transformation… Our own funding mechanisms have become a bottleneck rather than a catalyst” […]

mstdn.science

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 01/01/2026

New year, new science, new Substack. I'll be talking about studies of scientific progress, and how we can leverage our understanding of how science works to produce more breakthroughs in less time. If that sounds interesting, give me a follow […]

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 31/12/2025

Highly recommended reading. A great framing of how far biomedicine has come in a short time, and how we’re still striving for more progress every day www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/medic…

scientificdiscovery.dev

Medical breakthroughs in 2025

... and a happy new year.

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 29/12/2025

PubMed wrapped: categorizing the top 5 high-level topics of papers published in 2025. LLM-based classification of 1,783,299 documents in total 1/3

Treemap showing the proportion of papers published in 2025 that can be classified into one of the 5 largest high-level topics in the PubMed database: (1) health care systems, care providers, health policy, interventions; (2) algorithms, statistical modeling, image analysis, analytics; (3) hospitalization, critical care, mortality, patient outcomes, general surgery; (4) mental health, depression, psychological stress, social support; (5) biomedical engineering, nanoparticles, drug delivery. Together these 5 categories represent 37% of 2025 papers indexed in PubMed.

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 28/12/2025

Great story illustrating the impact of recent funding instability on lab techs, who are often underpaid, under-credited, and under-appreciated by the modern research enterprise. One of my long held pet theories is that some part of our struggles with reproducibility is linked to the lack of […]

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 22/12/2025

Happy Monday before Christmas! We’ve almost made it through the year. But before we wrap it up, I have one more paper to add to your holiday reading list 1/

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 18/12/2025

We found an additional 19 signals when we analyzed the data for 2014-2017. To learn more about those predicted breakthroughs, one of which has already won a Lasker award, read the preprint! 11/15 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 18/12/2025

Today is a big day. After many years of work, I’m excited to finally share a paper describing a novel approach to identifying potential breakthroughs in biomedical research, up to twelve years before the breakthrough itself occurs. 1/15

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Björn Brembs @brembs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/12/2025

When the study confirms intuition: "We find that the number of papers cited at least as well as those appearing in high-impact factor journals vastly exceeds the number of papers published in such venues." journals.plos.org/plosbiology/artic… Decades […]

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Reposted by Kristine Willis

Matthew Facciani @matthewfacciani.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

Rebuilding trust in science requires people to see themselves in science: expanding representation and social connection across race, gender, class, religion, and rural identity, not just sharing more information.

nature.com

Representation in science and trust in scientists in the USA - Nature Human Behaviour

Druckman et al. document gaps in trust in scientists in the USA. People from groups less represented among scientists (for example, women and those with lower economic status) are less trusting. Incre...

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 13/12/2025

US R&D spending on fundamental research in constant 2005 dollars from 2013 Press, W. Science 342:817

Chart showing proportion of funding for fundamental research provided by industry, government, or other sources over more than 40 years. More than 50% comes from government funding.

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 11/12/2025

Dr. Yaghi said his invention (which can harvest water from air!!) “was inspired by his boyhood scrambles in Amman, Jordan, to secure water for his family.” “That discovery would not have happened if I didn’t have that background,” Dr. Yaghi said. “Mixing talent helps us solve big problems.” […]

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