iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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 · 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 · 29/01/2026

Current status: making questionable decisions about caffeine consumption.

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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 · 29/12/2025

For comparison, here are the top 5 high-level topics of papers published in 2000. If you’re thinking biomedical research has shifted in a clinical/translational direction … you’re right! 2/3

Treemap showing the proportion of papers published in 2000 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) molecular genetics, protein structure/function, intracellular localization, biochemical properties; (3) signaling pathways, oxidative stress, inflammatory disease, apoptosis, metabolic regulation; (4) differential diagnosis, clinical manifestations, case studies, etiology; (5) surgical procedures, post-op complications, laparoscopy. Together these 5 categories represent 40% of 2000 papers indexed in PubMed.

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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 · 22/12/2025

What might surprise some is that this gradual shift happened without increasing the overall representation of clinician scientists in the NIH workforce (although the representation of investigators with both an MD and PhD has gone up). 10/

black and white graph showing the percent of NIH applicants (y-axis) who hold an MD or MD-PhD over a 30+ year time frame (x-axis)

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

Another signal from this period (1994-1997) correlates with the development of tools that improve clinical care for HIV patients, which is notable because behavioral and social science advances are less likely to be recognized with major prizes 10/15

Percentage of new publications on a breakthrough topic (y axis) plotted against mean percentage human MeSh terms (x-axis). Cluster size indicates the percentage of papers that report NIH support for the work

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

Each historical CCN is like a time capsule: they contain only data that would have existed if time stopped in that year. We strung together different years, following the trajectory of our prize-winning gold standards as the topic evolved and gained recognition. 6/15

evolution of the field of super resolution microscopy/fluorescent proteins over time, viewed through the lens of the literature

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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 · 10/12/2025

Proportion of #NIH awards to medical schools versus other institutions, 1952-1961 from Basic Data Relating to the National Institutes of Health, 1961 -1965

Composite graph showing NIH budget per year (bars) and proportion awarded to medical schools versus other institutions (lines)

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 09/12/2025

percentage of #NIH R01 applications by priority score, using human subjects as a (useful but imperfect) proxy to identify clinical research from 04 Kotchen et al JAMA

Bar graph showing % applications (y axis) that do (black bars) or do not (gray bars) involve human subjects, a proxy for clinical research, by priority score (x-axis)

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 08/12/2025

Thinking about new beginnings. Timeline for the first 20 years of #NIH from 96 Mandel, A Half Century of Peer Review

black and white graph showing the post-WWII development of NIH programs

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 05/12/2025

Friends. I have news. This coming Monday will be my last day at NIH. Serving the public good and the American taxpayer has been an honor and a privilege - truly! And I will miss it every day. But I have mixed emotions, because what comes next is exciting. I […] [Original post on mstdn.science]

Plaque at the National Institutes of Health that reads: "The National Institutes of Health speaks the universal language of humanitarianism. It has been devoted throughout its long and distinguished history to furthering the health of all mankind, in which its service has recognized no limitations imposed by international boundaries; and has recognized no distinctions of race, or creed, or color." Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1940

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 03/12/2025

Award rates for applicants for new #NIH grants, FY1968 to 1977 From 1979 Wyngaarden NEJM 301:1254-1259

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 02/12/2025

NIH support for fundamental research in 1982, as a fraction of national (left) or federal (center) support for fundamental research; and as a fraction of total federal support for fundamental research at universities & colleges (right) source: 1984 NIH Data Book

Pie charts showing the percentages described in the main text (20, 37, & 48 left to right)

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 01/12/2025

“.. the Institute’s traditional administrative practices for budget allocation did not provide an adequate basis for managerial decision-making, since attempts to establish program priorities were ineffective. .. This dissonance stemmed from the presence of two […] [Original post on mstdn.science]

purple and white cover of a 1973 book titled “Project SOAP”

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 06/11/2025

“Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for ages […] [Original post on mstdn.science]

Old and worn blue cover of “Science, the endless frontier” written in July 1945 by Vannevar Bush

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