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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

@jzsimon yeah that is a weird choice by PubMed and I can’t explain it.

Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

@jzsimon these days, if you’re developing new optics, or engineered materials for implanted devices, or a million other cases, it’s hard to know what adjacent advance might be useful to you; disciplinary boundaries are porous. But you do have to draw the line somewhere, and they’re always […]

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

@jzsimon and that was the context in which PubMed was established - as a resource for physicians and physician scientists.

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

@jzsimon super helpful thank you. The rationale for indexing articles outside core biomedical disciplines, as I understand it from former NIH colleagues, is that it may be necessary to refer to an underlying scientific concept in order to understand its direct application to biomedicine. You […]

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Kristine Willis @kristine-willis.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

@jzsimon thanks! Can I ask why you say “possibly” misguided? There’s quite a lot of straight physics (ie not biophysics) in PubMed - way more than most people, even most biomedical scientists, realize I think. According to Katy Börner, it’s something like 4% of all journals indexed are straight […]

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

If you’re aware of data that might be relevant that I seem to have missed, please do give me a shout.

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

Seriously though. This accidentally epic semantic analysis is a side quest I embarked on because I wanted to know what fraction of the articles in PubMed are outside of traditional biomedical disciplines. By “outside”, I mean hard core physics, math, geosciences, civil and mechanical […]

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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

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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 […]

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

Today I’m sharing a summary of that work, together with my thoughts on how we might put it into practice. I hope you'll give it a read and tell me what you think open.substack.com/pub/macroscience/…

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

Last December, my collaborators and I preprinted an approach we developed to predict which scientific topics may go on to produce a breakthrough-level advance. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20… 2/

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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 […]

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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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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

I’m grateful to everyone who has supported this work so far, and excited to see where it leads. If these ideas resonate with you, I hope you’ll follow along @wp-institute.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy (fin)

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

Because theory is meaningless without practice, 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 7/

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

You can show your support for faster recognition of scientific breakthroughs by making a tax-deductible donation to the Woodley Park Institute through FAS; for donation purpose, be sure to select fiscal sponsorship, and say WPI is the project you support! […]

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

I’m honored that @scientistsorg.bsky.social.ap.brid.gy, who have been working since 1945 to deploy science and technology to build a healthier, safer, more prosperous and more equitable world, are sponsoring WPI’s nonprofit status while we apply for a 501c3 designation from the IRS. 5/

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

WPI is founded on the idea that data can help us identify promising new ideas more quickly and efficiently, and that this faster recognition will ultimately accelerate the development of breakthrough technologies and therapeutics. 4/

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

The systems we use to distribute our research dollars have changed little over the past fifty years or more, even though the enterprise has grown dramatically and data science has given us powerful new ways to sort and process information. 3/

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

I’m building a new independent research organization, the Woodley Park Institute, that will study how scientific progress occurs, how funding systems shape discovery, and how to distribute funding to best support breakthrough research. 2/

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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

For anyone not familiar with the NIH org chart, Mike Lauer was the Director for Academic Research, generally considered the third most senior official. It is extraordinary, and to my knowledge, unprecedented for someone from leadership to be so publicly critical of the agency.

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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 […]

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