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lexy

@lvdlab.org
1.3K followers 665 following 216 posts

asst prof in the star of the north single-molecule microscopy and genetic manipulation of meiotic recombination @ lvdlab.org banner: diffusion limited aggregation

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 31/07/2025
Reworking my "intro to single-molecule" slides and tried/failed to find the old Betzig/Hess/JL-S era PALM flowchart with all the ways to fail ("Can you clone? Can you do MATLAB? cell culture?...") Does anyone else remember that? 😄 @weisslab.bsky.social @juliebiteenlab.bsky.social @lewlab.com
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 22/04/2025
love this for us
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David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 18/04/2025
What even is a university for, and will leadership at the University of Minnesota fight for it? My latest from @startribune.com. (Gift)
startribune.com
Opinion: If Trump comes for the University of Minnesota, will its leaders fight or fold?
I don’t know what happens next, but there’s plenty to do.
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 19/04/2025
"Premature" and "circulated among the task force members" are not exactly disavowals of the demands!
Screenshot of text: 

It is unclear what prompted the letter to be sent last Friday. Its content was authentic, the three people said, but there were differing accounts inside the administration of how it had been mishandled. Some people at the White House believed it had been sent prematurely, according to the three people, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about internal discussions. Others in the administration thought it had been meant to be circulated among the task force members rather than sent to Harvard.

But its timing was consequential. The letter arrived when Harvard officials believed they could still avert a confrontation with President Trump. Over the previous two weeks, Harvard and the task force had engaged in a dialogue. But the letter’s demands were so extreme that Harvard concluded that a deal would ultimately be impossible.
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Joe Allen @joeallenjoe.bsky.social · 19/04/2025
Harvard with an evergreen quote for this first 100 days👇 —> “It remains unclear to us exactly what, among the government’s recent words and deeds, were mistakes or what the government actually meant to do and say.”
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Julia Carrie Wong @joolia.bsky.social · 18/04/2025
The only appropriate response to this is impeachment and removal from office. Every moment the political press spends spinning out theories about 2026 and immigration polling is a minute they are not spending asking Republicans in Congress about their plans to enforce the rule of law
A screenshot of a tweet by the official White House account. 

Text: “Fixed it for you, @NYTimes.
Oh, and by the way, @ChrisVanHollen - he's NOT coming back.”

There is also a screenshot of the front page of the NyT with a large headline and photo about Van Hollen meeting with Abrego Garcia. They have edited the headline with red ink handwriting to say “ Senator meets with deported ms-13 illegal alien in El Salvador who’s never coming back.”
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Sam Wang @samwang.bsky.social · 18/04/2025
At Princeton University we are being clear about our continued commitment to diversity and nondiscrimination, in full compliance with law (as opposed to executive order) and consistent with our ethical responsibilities as educators for the entire nation. www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2025...
dailyprincetonian.com
University websites updated to reflect commitments to diversity, non-discrimination
Many University websites, including those affiliated with admissions, academic departments, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, have been updated to reflect Princeton’s ongoing com...
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Melissa Baker @melissabaker.bsky.social · 18/04/2025
Nebraska, Rutgers, Indiana, and Michigan State faculty senates have now voted in favor of creating a mutual defense compact amongst Big 10 schools. www.chronicle.com/article/thes...
chronicle.com
These Faculty Senates Are Trying to Band Together to Stand Up to Trump
The idea of a compact among institutions is based on the idea that there’s strength in numbers, and it comes amid frustration that few presidents are speaking out against the administration’s actions ...
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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 17/04/2025
I think saying "in America, everyone is innocent until proven guilty" works better for low-info normies than saying "due process" does
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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 17/04/2025
Lot of people dunking on this clip, but Murkowski, asked for advice for people who are afraid to speak up, acknowledges that she shares that fear. But she then says it's "not right" that people are made to be afraid of retaliation for speaking up, and says it won't stop her from doing her job.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 16/04/2025
yes! this dude will back down to anyone who tells him to fuck himself! this is the only response worth having!
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Stephen Nuñez @socio-steve.bsky.social · 15/04/2025
Feels like we are in a threshold cascade: I will join as long as X percent of my alters join. You will join as long as Y percent of your alters join. These sorts of things can domino through networks but they can also come to an abrupt halt if a pivotal node does not reach its threshold.
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 15/04/2025
Moving obituary of David Stephens, "in many ways, the perfect academic" journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...
journals.biologists.com
Remembering David Stephens (1971–2024)
In the autumn of 2024, David Stephens, a prominent member of the UK cell biology community and a brilliant scientist, leader and mentor, passed away. With his pragmatism and natural authority, combine...
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lexy @lvdlab.org · 14/04/2025
wow... AI really is so powerful
me posting a subpanel with two graphs into powerpoint. suggested alt text at bottom: "A collage of images of a person's face" with approve/edit buttons for my consideration
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 13/04/2025
Rubio justifies deporting these students in generalities because once you look at the details, they are indefensible donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-attack...
Why are these students being kicked out of America? When pressed by reporters, Rubio said:

We are not going to be importing activists into the United States. They're here to study. They're here to go to class. They're not here to lead activist movements that are disruptive and undermine the — our universities. I think it's lunacy to continue to allow that.
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Paul Gowder @gowder.io · 11/04/2025
LET THIS BE A LESSON TO ALL OF YOU. As I've been saying (most recently to the northwestern student behavior) you fight authoritarianism by collectively imposing costs on every dictator move. File all the lawsuits, give ZERO INCHES dailynorthwestern.com/2025/04/10/c...
dailynorthwestern.com
HHS confirms NU’s funding freeze due to antisemitism
After reports first surfaced Tuesday that the Trump administration had frozen $790 million in federal funding from Northwestern, even the University’s top officials said they’d been left in the dark o...
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Talia Lerner @talialerner.bsky.social · 12/04/2025
Fighting back works - but this suit was filed by individuals, not Northwestern. Noted. www.wbez.org/education/20...
wbez.org
Northwestern legal clinic leaders sue Congress to block a demand for names of funders, budgets
A congressional committee has accused the clinics of “progressive-left political advocacy.” Two clinic leaders sued Wednesday to keep clinic documents out of the committee's hands.
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lexy @lvdlab.org · 13/04/2025
I recently joined the nat'l AAUP and my local chapter - it's a great way to contribute, hear about what people are doing, and get involved!
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Arghavan Salles, MD, PhD @arghavansallesmd.medsky.social · 12/04/2025
The government doesn’t want researchers to use these words, but we wrote “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” 31 times in this manuscript. We didn’t want there to be any confusion as to what we’re talking about.
thelancet.com
Why and how academic medicine must champion diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility
US President Donald Trump has launched a series of Executive Actions1 to dismantle diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts; defund scientific research; and freeze federal funds and pro...
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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 12/04/2025
alright i have my laptop, guess i'm livetweeting the dire wolf preprint. so a quick reminder: this is not yet peer-reviewed, so there's some different expectations re: quality. also let's be clear, i'm a hella biased reader, bc i don't trust the hype they're courting
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lexy @lvdlab.org · 10/04/2025
Shared governance is all. ❤️‍🔥
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Genevieve Lakier @genevievelakier.bsky.social · 10/04/2025
AAUP has written a letter to NW U explaining why it has no legal obligation to comply with the request from Congress to hand over an incredible amt of info—including a professor’s performance reviews!—about its legal clinics 🧵https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/AAUP_Letter_to_Northwestern.pdf
aaup.org
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Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 09/04/2025
The only way forward, that I can see, requires both courage and collective action. If we’re not going to fight for our students and our scholarship, then what the hell are we doing anyway?
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lexy @lvdlab.org · 09/04/2025
Even still, Spring is beautiful.
Sunset from the East Bank campus last night, with a view of an art museum and train tracks running across the Mississippi. A thin (cirrus?) cloud cuts across horizontally.
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lexy @lvdlab.org · 05/04/2025
#handsoff the next generation of scientists!
Francesca Walsh, 28, is in the last six months of earning her Ph.D. in neuroscience and behavior. She wants to study how the brain functions when making economic decisions, in an effort to protect economic markets and consumers from financial harm. The postdoctoral jobs she planned to apply for have suddenly disappeared. “I felt the door of an entire sector of jobs, including federal research jobs, slam overnight,” she said. “It’s very disheartening, and sometimes I wish I just became an accountant.”Young scientists’ careers are inextricably tied to the grant application cycle. Carole LaBonne, a molecular biologist at Northwestern University, recently told the podcast “Odd Lots” to think of labs as small businesses that run on very tight operating margins. A grant that provides funding for, say, four years would need to be renewed in the third year. And if they can’t do that, people must be let go quickly — which almost always means junior members of the lab. Peter Jacobs, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is unsure whether Department of Energy and National Science Foundation grants that help fund his program will be renewed; he’s not certain he can keep on his three postdocs, all of whom are already looking at other positions, including in Europe or Asia.At Fort Lewis College in Colorado, where nearly 40 percent of the student population identifies as Native American, one researcher said he and his colleagues were told not to bother submitting a renewal application for an N.I.H.-associated grant that funds increased representation in the biomedical sciences and that has helped at least a dozen Native Americans earn Ph.D.s in the past 15 years. The Frist Center for Autism and Innovation at Vanderbilt University was expecting $7 million in National Science Foundation funding meant to train scientists and engineers with autism, but those awards have been rejected or are in limbo. “It is heartbreaking having to tell these students — who have persisted through challenges throughout their lives for the opportunity to apply their talents for their own careers but also for their country — that they aren’t so valued after all,” said Keivan Stassun, an astrophysics professor and the center’s founding director.America had also been an attractive destination for science because of its express support for free inquiry — the ability of researchers to study what mattered most to them, even if there wasn’t a straight path to success and profit. That commitment appears to be crumbling. “I mourn a world in which science must defend itself through its end products, rather than its underlying search for truth and beauty,” said Daniel Bauman, a 25-year-old Stanford University graduate student studying evolution. “When efficiency is mandated, current and future careers are lost or abandoned. If science funding is made contingent on immediately beneficial results, who will be left to tell the story of nature? Will anyone even be listening?”
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Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 05/04/2025
It’s. 👏🏼 Not. 👏🏼 Just. 👏🏼 About. 👏🏼 The tariffs. 👏🏼 (via Apollo’s slide deck this am)
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Brian Merchant @bcmerchant.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
This is what happens when you push back on overt fascist creep with strength and a spine
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 19/03/2025
1. For the past thirty years I've had the best job in the world. 
I've had the opportunity to follow my curiosity; explore the workings of nature and society; mentor students and junior colleagues in the same process; and teach generations of students about it all.
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News Eye @newseye.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
Extraordinary scenes in Serbia’s capital Belgrade right now. Around 500,000 people are on the streets in what may be the biggest protest in Serbian history. All demanding the resignation of President Vučić & his government. What began as a student protest is now a full democratic uprising. 🇷🇸
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Anton Gerashchenko @antongerashchenko.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
Budapest today. People are demanding that PM Orban resign.
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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 15/03/2025
This! For most people, most of the time, it simply doesn’t matter whether a country is a democracy or an autocracy; and the immediate dangers of an autocracy fall on a disfavored few. But the costs of being an autocracy scar countries and swindle opportunities for decades.
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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
Again: if there is *de facto* no longer such a thing as being a permanent resident of the US, there is no responsible way for learned organizations or universities to ask visa holders based in the US to leave for the sake of a conference talk or an interview.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
The Times defense of higher education, while welcome, still engages in a lot of the tropes that Trump is using. I would love if there was some reflection on the role the Times has played, especially on its opinion page, which has been blasting higher ed for a decade. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/15/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | Colleges Are Under Attack. They Can Fight Back.
This is a moment to trumpet the strengths of higher education and address its weaknesses.
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cait (and adonis) @cait.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
i keep seeing responses to this from non-Americans saying "we already know this and we're all laughing at you". like, fair enough, but i am telling you you don't actually know the extent of it, as evidenced by the fact that every day i see someone learn about the pledge of allegiance to the flag
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AAUP @aaup.org · 14/03/2025
We condemn in the strongest possible terms any university that would sacrifice its own students to the demands of an authoritarian government. This is absolute cowardice & capitulation to an administration hellbent on the destruction of American higher education. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/n...
nytimes.com
Columbia Disciplines Students Who Occupied Campus Building Last Year
Sanctions for the Hamilton Hall occupation include expulsions and suspensions.
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lexy @lvdlab.org · 13/03/2025
Whatever else is going on, we've been getting some great data, and the world outside looks golden. Feeling grateful.
photo of the sunset in Minneapolis. an art museum, classroom, and the west bank skyline are visible.
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Sherry Pagoto, PhD @drsherrypagoto.bsky.social · 12/03/2025
New report shows that NIH grants fueled $95 billion in economic activity and 407,782 jobs in 2024. That's not to mention the countless lives that biomedical research has saved. Show me a better investment than that. www.forbes.com/sites/michae...
forbes.com
NIH Grants Fueled $95 Billion In FY 2024 Economic Activity, Finds New Report
National Institutes of Health grants generated almost $95 billion in economic activity nationwide in FY 2024 according to a new report by United for Medical Research.
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Steve Vladeck @stevevladeck.bsky.social · 06/03/2025
Pitch-perfect response to Interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin from @georgetownlaw.bsky.social Dean Bill Treanor. It’s always a privilege and honor to be part of the GULC community (and to be Bill’s colleague), but *especially* today.
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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 05/03/2025
something I've been thinking about recently is how phrases like "The True North, Strong and Free" from Canada's anthem serve as organizing principles for human beings to take real action
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Marsha Pierce @marshapiercephd.bsky.social · 05/03/2025
I’m grateful for @holdenthorp.bsky.social and his leadership during the chaos in science unleashed by the current administration. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
Come together, right now
The chaos, conflicting information, firings, and hurtful rhetoric of the Trump administration’s approach to science over the past month are causing anxiety, grief, and concern for the scientific community in the United States. The dramatic events are ...
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Jeremy Berg @jeremymberg.bsky.social · 05/03/2025
Preliminary injunction in nationwide indirect cost rate case. This means that the judge found that the plaintiffs (AAMC, et al.) are likely to win on the merits when the ruling is finalized. www.statnews.com/2025/03/05/n...
statnews.com
Judge issues preliminary injunction blocking Trump cuts to NIH research overhead payments
A federal judge issued a nationwide preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration from slashing NIH payments for research overhead
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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 05/03/2025
it wouldn't all fit in the post
Every critical "AI" theorist and researcher: we need to be very careful about if, when, & how we integrate "AI" into our daily lives, as it does real harm to our cognitive development, our social fabric, and even the very production of knowledge itself.

Every corporate/university admin type: *finds the largest pipe labeled "AI" they can, wraps their whole mouth around it, and cranks the lever*
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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 05/03/2025
I'm gonna lose it. Like genuinely what in the actual fucking fuck. What the FUCK. Elsevier? I wasn't surprised. Wiley and T&F? That was pretty shocking. Fucking NATURE is advocating for LLM "AI" in their peer review pipeline? Oh this one fucking rattles me.
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Dr. Rebecca Calisi-Rodríguez @rebeccacalisi.bsky.social · 05/03/2025
DEI is under attack, but the stakes are higher than many realize. Universities *must stand firm* in defending it. I lay out why in my latest piece for Nature. Silence is complicity. Without DEI, we fail our students, our research, and our future. www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪
nature.com
‘Silence is complicity’ — universities must fight the anti-DEI crackdown
Higher-education establishments must not be bullied into abandoning their mission of diversity, equity and inclusion.
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Jjinandtonic @jjinandtonic.bsky.social · 04/03/2025
A humorous and satirical "Apology Form" meme featuring political theorist Francis Fukuyama. The top section includes a photo of Fukuyama in a thoughtful pose, with the text "FRANCIS FUKUYAMA" prominently displayed.

The form itself is addressed "To: FRANCIS FUKUYAMA," dated "Nov 5th 2024," and includes a series of tongue-in-cheek "Reason for behavior" options with checkmarks beside them, such as:

- "The Italians convinced me he was dead."
- "I didn't watch the actual thymotic urge."
- "I only looked at the title of his book."
- "I don't know people without a struggle struggling against liberalism."
- "I was jealous of Francis Fukuyama."
- "Mercury was in retrograde."

The form concludes with a declaration:  
"I will hereby respect FRANCIS FUKUYAMA and I will NOT talk down on the future first-ballot Hall of Famer."

The layout and tone suggest parody, playfully referencing Fukuyama's academic and cultural impact.
A humorous and satirical "Apology Form" meme featuring political theorist Francis Fukuyama. The top section includes a photo of Fukuyama in a thoughtful pose, with the text "FRANCIS FUKUYAMA" prominently displayed.

The form itself is addressed "To: FRANCIS FUKUYAMA," dated "Nov 5th 2024," and includes a series of tongue-in-cheek "Reason for behavior" options with checkmarks beside them, such as:

- "The Italians convinced me he was dead."
- "I didn't watch the actual thymotic urge."
- "I only looked at the title of his book."
- "I don't know people without a struggle struggling against liberalism."
- "I was jealous of Francis Fukuyama."
- "Mercury was in retrograde."

The form concludes with a declaration:  
"I will hereby respect FRANCIS FUKUYAMA and I will NOT talk down on the future first-ballot Hall of Famer."
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lexy @lvdlab.org · 04/03/2025
post from @saramchenry.bsky.social: I love leaving voice mails for my senators where I say things like "the USPS is very important to our country" [...]
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