Record number of NSF GRFP awards in 2026, awarded to the usual suspects

Several outlets have run articles with the unexpected good news that the National Science Foundation is giving out more GRFP awards than ever, after a deep reduction in 2025.

Hooray! 

But those awards, and I have written about several times before, are highly concentrated in a small number of institutions.

MIT, with about 4.5 thousand undergrads gets 88 awards, versus the entire University of Texas system  of about 200K undergrads getting ~63 awards.

Harvard University, with about ~7k undergrads, gets 51 awards, versus the entire University of California system of about ~200K undergrads getting ~300 awards.

Again, the NSF does not disclose a lot of data about who applied to the awards, so it could be that Texas students aren’t submitting proposals at the same rate. But I recently ran across an analysis of who gets fellowships in by Dominque Baker, which points out that in the awards examined there, they cluster in people working at universities deemed “prestigious.” She wrote:

Longstanding methods of (fellowship) selection… tend to coincidentally find talent in the same places, year after year.

I suspect but can’t prove this describes the GRFP process. Oh, look, it’s just coincidence that a small number of east coast universities suck up most of the awards. Every. Year.

External links

NSF awards record number of coveted PhD fellowships in surprise move 

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

 Who gets Guggenheims?

The 2025 NSF GRFP awards, now with double the bias

Science magazine reports a new skew in the awarding of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) awards.

No awards in life sciences. Zip. Zero. Zilch.

I used to joke that there was no Nobel prize for biology. Now it seems there’s no GRFPs, either. The awards are heavily skewed toward computer science, particularly artificial intelligence. 

And let’s not forget that the number of awards was cut in half.

I strongly suspected that the awards were probably heavily skewed to fancy, well funded research universities and showed little love to the larger public university systems, which has been going on for as long as I know. But I had to poke the wound and look at the award data. Currently easy to download into an Excel file.

I  posted a super quick check on the numbers in a Bluesky thread.

Harvard University, with about 25,000 students total (many who would not be eligible) gets 25 GRFP awards.

Meanwhile, the entire University of Texas system, with about 250,000 students total (again, many not eligible) gets 30.

Embattled Columbia University, about 33,000 students total, gets 29 GRFP awards.

Arizona State University, with over 183,000 students total, gets 8 GRFP awards.

MIT, which is tiny, gets 82 GRFP awards. They always get a lot of awards, but the number of awards per student has jumped. Back in 2022, MIT had 83 awards, but keep in mind that because the number of awards were halved this year, the 82 award count this year is proportionately much heftier than the 83 awards in 2022.

The University of California system, which is gigantic, gets about 147 GRFP awards. (I say “about” because I just searched the Excel spreadsheet for “University of California,” and I know some universities in that system don’t follow that naming convention.) 

Yes, I could try to figure out student enrolment numbers better so they might more accurately reflect the population of students eligible for GRFP awards, but there is no way that the overall trend would budge.

I do not believe talent to so concentrated in such a small number of institutions. It’s a Matthew effect.

A recent article by Craig McClain is also worth pointing out here. McClain points out that the current academic training system makes it extraordinarily difficult to be a career scientist unless you have money to burn. The way they NSF GRFP program runs contributes to this problem.

References

McClain CR. 2025. Too poor to science: How wealth determines who succeeds in STEM. PLoS Biology 23(6): e3003243. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003243 

Related posts

The NSF GRFP problem, 2022 edition  (Links to my older rants – er, posts – about this award contained within)

External links

Prestigious NSF graduate fellowship tilts toward AI and quantum 

Worst week for science ever

Sunday: American Society for Microbiology scrubs mentions of diversity from their websites.

Tuesday: NASA stops everything to scrub mentioned of diversity from their websites; ICE arrests a student on campus; NSF announces plans to make deep cut to staff; USAID is halted.

Wednesday: HHMI kills one of its diversity program; NIH trashes applications for diversity F grants.

Friday: NIH cuts its indirect costs and sets them to 15%.

Yes, these are all American centric. But the United States was, until the start of 2025, the world’s undisputed science superpower. These effects will not be contained within the borders of the United States.

The NSF GRFP problem, 2022 edition

I am not even in the US any more so should not care about this, but...

The National Science Foundation announced the 2,193 awardees of their Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) awards and yet again, some single institutions outperformed entire American states.

83 awards went to students from one institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

61 awards went to students in the entire University of Texas system.

This seems biased. But I don’t know what the applicant pool looks like because NSF don’t release that data.

I don’t have bandwidth to do more analysis, but check out the links before for some previous years.

Related posts

NSF GRFP award skew in 2021

The NSF GRFP problem, 2020 edition

The NSF GRFP problem continues (2018)

Fewer shots, more diversity? (2016)

 

 

 

NSF GRFP award skew in 2021

Matthew Cover pulled numbers I was going to look for on this year’s graduate research fellowships from the National Science Foundation (NSF):

Congrats to the 13 current Cal State University students who were awarded NSF GRFPs!! For context, that is fewer awards to the largest 4-year system in the country (0.5million) than Stanford- 81, MIT- 76, Princeton- 34, Northwestern- 30, Yale- 26, Chicago- 22, Rice- 22, Duke- 20

I’ve been talking this a few years now, so why stop?

You know, there are some problems in academia that you recognize are going to be slow to fix because they rely on cultural changes.

This is not one of them. 

The NSF could dictate how awards are going to be distributed. But the agency seems unwilling to have that conversation.

Update, 5 April 2021: Megan Barkdull ran some numbers for this year’s awards. She focused on institutional “prestige” and found, unsurprisingly, that the Ivy league universities and their peers gobble up most of the awards. Her full analysis is here.

Related posts

The NSF GRFP problem, 2020 edition
Fewer shots, more diversity?
The NSF GRFP problem continues

External links

NSF Graduate Fellowships are a part of the problem

 

 

The NSF GRFP problem, 2020 edition

The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) awards were announced today. And the familiar “Matthew Effect” pattern continues.

• The entire University of Texas system, with 167,028 undergraduate students, gets 55 awards (0.03% awards / student).
• The entire California State University system, with around 484,300 undergraduate students, gets 39 awards (0.008% awards / student).
• Harvard University, with 6,788 undergraduate students, gets 22 awards (0.3% awards / student).
• Yale University, with 5,964 undergrad students, also gets 22 awards (0.3% awards / student).
• MIT, with 4,530 undergraduates, got 68 awards (1.5% awards / student).

The success rate of Harvard and Yale is about ten times higher than the Texas system and about 45 times higher than the California State University system.

If you want a GRFP, go to an Ivy League university. Or some other well-resourced east coast university.

You can download the NSF GRFP data here. Scroll down and search for “Export options” to get an Excel spreadsheet.

It has been five years since Terry McGlynn did the important job of first pointing out how slanted the playing field is. It’s been four years since NSF announced changes to their rules to try to create more diversity. But the same pattern keeps happening.

Is this NSF’s fault? Not necessarily. The NSF doesn’t release data on how many applications come in from each institution (as far as I know), and that is almost certainly extremely uneven. The missions of something like the California State University system is very different from that of an Ivy League institution.

I still think we need to call the NSF on this every single year. Something like an NSF GRFP is the sort of thing that can make a career happen. An award from a national funding agency creates so many opportunities that it’s not clear that the goals of the NSF are best served by those award going to students from extremely well-resourced institutions,

They’re two years old now, but if this question interests you, please do see these two amazing posts by Natalie Telis.

• The price of a GRFP, part 1
• The price of a GRFP, part 2

This concentration of GRFP awards is puzzling given that for regular awards, NSF does think about its overall portfolio of awards and is aware of the problems with concentrating many awards in a few institutions. It considers factors like whether a grant is coming from an EPSCOR state, which is essentially a measure of how successful a state has been at getting NSF funding.

Related posts

Fewer shots, more diversity?
The NSF GRFP problem continues

The NSF GRFP problem continues

This morning, a fine scientist congratulated two undergraduates in her lab about winning National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) awards. I thought, “Huh. They’re out? And two seems like a lot from one lab.”

A few years ago, Terry McGlynn wrote an important blog post about how tilted the playing field is for the NSF GRFP awards. He compared awards to Harvard students (with about 7,000 undergraduates) to the more than 20 campuses in the California State University system (over 400,000, according to a check of Wikipedia).

The NSF is good about making it easy to find a list of all 2,000 awards in this program. I went looking for the same comparison of one Ivy League university to an entire state’s system. Embarrassingly, I screwed up the calculation on the first pass, not realizing that several California State universities don’t say “California State” in their name, unlike the University of Texas institutions.

Harvard got 43, and all of California State get 50 (thanks to Terry for counting here and here).

Cal Poly Pomona 4
Cal Poly SLO 5
CSUCI 1
CSUDH 1
CSU Fresno 1
CSU Fullerton 8
CSULB 2
CSULA 1
Sac State 1
CSUSB 1
CSUN 5
CSUSM 3
SDSU 6
SFSU 6
SJSU 3
Humboldt State 2

So one lab in Harvard alone equaled the entire combined output of eight different California State universities (separately, not combined).

If this sort of pattern intrigues you, you must for to Natalie Telis’s post where she digs down into the numbers. Not just this year’s, but over 28,000 awardees worth of data, from 2011 to 2017. It’s bloody brilliant. One of her first points is, “The most expensive undergraduate schools have an extreme excess of (NSF GRFP) recipients.” She also makes some comments on Twitter about this.

I can’t wait to see what she finds for 2018 data.

Matt Cover did some similar things the previous year, and found no relationship between institutional enrollment and number of grants.

Update, 2 August 2019: Here’s the second half of Natalie Tellis’s analysis of GRFP awards.

External links

NSF Graduate Fellowships are a part of the problem
The price of a GRFP, part 1
Matt Cover thread from 2017

Why I stopped writing grants

A couple of threads on Twitter recently reminded me of something. This from Liang Gao (my emphasis):

Just visited a new PI. He showed me beautiful research, top publications , and thousands pages of unfunded proposals. What the hell is going on?

Then there was Prof-like Substance:

Remember that when applying to NSF, this is what you’re up against. ~6% success from the process. Which is why I tell people over and over and over that if you don't diversify, you will get eaten alive. You. Can. Not. Go up against 6% success for a decade and think everything will be fine. It won’t.

Then there was this charming reminder from Jacquelyn Gill that in addition to dealing with biases about sex, race, and “academic pedigree,” you have to deal with biases about geography:

An equipment grant I'm a co-PI on is #NSFunded! I'm grateful for the chance to do some fun new research. But two reviewers mentioned how small UMaine is. One said it “only has 13,000 students.” Another said there’s “not much up there but moose.”

A lot of people are reaching the point I got to maybe four of five years ago, when I wrote:

Personally, if you’d asked me when I started this job if I thought that I’d be able to get grants for my research, I’d have said, “I think it’ll take me a few tries, but I think I can do it.” Well, that hasn’t happened. So I’ve had to re-invent myself, my expectations, everything, from almost the ground up. It’s been a decade-long battle to redefine myself as a scientist. I’m still not done.

 
I realized that producing thousands of pages of grant proposals was not satisfying for me, either personally or professionally. The odds were long and not improving. People probably think there’s less in South Texas than there is in Maine.

I also realized that managing those grants I did get were not satisfying for me. I’ve complained for a long time that trying to spend a dollar from a grant requires a bottle of aspirin, because it’s an instant headache.

So I mostly quit writing grants. I’m still writing some pre-proposals for NSF, but none have gotten an invitation for a full proposal.

Instead, I have focused on the bit that I find most satisfying for me: writing papers. I have focused on creating “$5 projects” that can go forward, grant or not. My research doesn’t run on money. It runs on willpower.

And I just submitted a manuscript to a journal today, thank you, that was generated with no grant support at all.

Stop pussyfooting around the problem of biases in awards

At the Sociobiology blog, Joan Strassman tackles inequality in scientific awards. This topic has been making the round lately because of the National Science Foundation’s Waterman award, which this year went to two men. Again. It looks like the last time the award went to a woman was in 2004, to Kristi Anseth. Weirdly, it looks like the Waterman did a pretty good job of splitting between men and women in the first few years, and then it’s been all men since 2005.

Partially in response to community input, the NSF changed the eligibility criteria for the award. It is basically extending the time frame for eligibility since a person received their Ph.D. (And I will pause to take note that you are still considered a “young” scientist in your late 30s.)

I’m betting you right now that’s not going to fix the problem. And I doubt the measures Strassman suggests, like “Let’s be active in nominating women!” will do it, either. But here’s what will fix the problem. Guaranteed.

You get the award organizers to say, in public, “We’re going to give half these awards to women. Agender individuals are eligible for either.”

And that’s it. Dust off your hands. You’re done.

The NSF gave two awards this year and in 2012. Give two awards every year, one to a man and one to a woman. Or alternate years. It doesn’t matter.

Yes, I know people will jump in and say, “But merit...”,  but I don’t care. This is not a job. Nobody’s livelihood is harmed because they did not receive an award. The question is, “Are you serious about fixing inequality or not? If you are, this fixes it immediately. Everything else just allows the problem to linger.”

I’ve had discussions with people about why the Oscars split their acting into two categories, one for men, one for women. But one good thing about it is that every year, women win awards.

External links

Can we fix inequity in awards for women scientists?
When a series of entirely reasonable decisions leads to biased outcomes: thoughts on the Waterman Award
Let’s nominate folks for NSF’s Waterman award, including womenNSF’s Water Man awardNational Science Foundation modifies Alan T. Waterman Award eligibility criteria

Hello Atlantic! Here are my answers to your questions about funding

The Atlantic recently ran an article about science funding that asked for scientists to write in and answer three questions. So, I did. These were my answers.

How did those years of flat (National Institutes of Health, NIH) funding affect you or your colleagues, if at all?

The difficulty in attracting funding affected our students. When I took students to conferences who were considering looking for doctoral positions, they were disheartened by how much of the talk was about whether a lab could get funding.

Flat NIH didn’t affect me or my colleagues much, for two reasons.

1. My university is an emerging research institution, so there is not a huge amount of federal funding in general. Faculty here haven’t reached the point of being competitive for the stand alone R01 research grants that are the bread and butter of many biomedical research labs.
2. My department is not a biomedical department. The National Science Foundation and other organizations are generally better funding fits than the NIH for us. (And it is a bit annoying when reports treat the NIH as if is was the only funding agency for all of biology. There are huge swathes of biology that NIH doesn’t touch.) 

Have you even noticed the 2016 increase?

Nope.

(Other researchers often get annoyed at me when I say declining funding rates haven't affected me personally. They badly want to show solidarity, and impress on people that the funding shortfalls are hurting science – which they are, and I agree with. But it doesn’t affect all of us equally.)

And what would more funding mean to you?

My institution is determined to add many new doctoral programs, including biology. I’good thing that would creating new opportunities for underserved minority students in my region, instead of this:
ve had many discussions with my colleagues about whether this is a good idea, given the steady decline in funding success rates. More funding might convince me that a new doctoral program could be a

Additional: Moments after I posted this complaining how NIH is so often presented as the only game in town for biology funding, what do I see but a tweet from the Society for Neuroscience presenting NIH as the only game in town for biology funding. Sheesh.

Contact your representatives today and ask them to make the case for a strong research funding level for NIH.

If you’re going to all the trouble of contacting your federal representative to support neuroscience, why not mention other agencies that fund that discipline? Like the National Science Foundation?

Related posts

Happy sequestration

External links

NIH Funding: It’s Personal

Fewer shots, more diversity?

The National Science Foundation just announced changes to its Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) that limits the number of applications for grad students to one. The NSF lists several reasons for this:

1) result in a higher success rate for GRFP applicants

You know how else you could increase success rate? Give more awards. But the political reality is that the NSF budget is stagnant, so the best they can do is increase in success rate at the cost of limiting chances to apply.

2) increase the diversity of the total pool of individuals and of institutions from which applications may come through an increase in the number of individuals applying before they are admitted into graduate programs,

You know what else could increase the diversity of applicants? Instead of changing the applicants, change the reviewers. Change the criterion those new reviewers are judging the awards by. Let’s not forget that in the past, GRFPs have been criticized for giving awards to doctoral students in a limited number of institutions. If the review process is biased, tweaks to the applicant pool won’t create more diversity, because they’ll be going through the same filter.

And just because I run a master’s program, let me call out that in the past, only 3.5% of awards went to students in master’s programs (page 3, footnote 3 in this report). Why do you hate master’s students, NSF?!

Terry McGlynn notes, however:

Shifting the emphasis of @NSF GRFPs to undergrads will increase representation because it will recruit people. If you give a GRFP to someone already in grad school, odds are they would be successful anyway. GRFPs can get undergrads into good labs.

This is a good point, but if undergraduates are still competing against graduates, and there’s still a bias towards the advanced doctoral students as the “safer bet,” the change in the applicant pool might not achieve the desired result in diversity. This might be an argument for splitting the program: one for undergraduates transitioning to graduate programs, one for graduate students in programs.

Finally, NSF’s last reason for the change.

3) ease the workload burden for applicants, reference writers, and reviewers.

I am glad to see this listed as a reason, because it is honest. It’s a lot of hard work to review applications, and you have to keep it to a reasonable level. I think it might be even more honest if it was listed as reason #1 instead of reason #3.

External links

NSF Graduate Fellowships are a part of the problem
How the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship is slowly turning into a dissertation grant
Evaluation of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program final report
NSF makes its graduate fellowships more accessible

Picture from here.

Comments for first half of October 2015

Dynamic Ecology rediscovers Up-goer Five. Been there, done that. It’s fun, but don’t confuse it with a path to clarity, as Carl Zimmer notes.

Prof-Like Substance talks about what he’s seeing in National Science Foundation grant proposals.

Grand challenges for biology

Meghan Duffy, writing at Dynamic Ecology, has a nice post about “grand challenges” in biology. The first time I heard this particularly phrase was at a Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting, where the National Science Foundation was soliciting ideas about what the “grand challenges” in biology are. In other words, this is grant speak.

I have some misgivings about this approach, of asking scientists what they big problems are. I think it’s too likely to be blinkered and limited: like asking city dwellers at the end of the nineteenth century what problems they needed to solve. They’d probably have been adamant about needed more and better horses for transportation.

The NSF has five grand challenges for biology, and so does Meghan. There is some overlap in these lists, but they aren’t quite identical.

• Predicting individual organisms’ characteristics from their DNA sequence (NSF) / Linking phenotype to genotype (MD)
• Understanding biodiversity (NSF and MD)
• Understanding the brain (NSF and MD)
• Interactions of the Earth, its climate and its biosphere (NSF)
• Sustainable agriculture (MD)
• Synthesizing life-like systems (NSF)
• Origins of life (MD)

To me, “grand challenge” has a few desirable features. It should be something that many people in the discipline are actively working on. That is, it’s a question many scientists are engaged and committed to answering. There are some reasonably clear ideas for what constitutes success.

For those reasons, a couple of the proposed grand challenges leave me cold.

“Understanding the brain” is, to me, is not a challenge for biology. Neuroscience is its own discipline now. The descriptions of “the brain” – singular – make it clear that people are talking about the human brain, and not the brains of the millions of other animal species.

Worse, the NSF document talks about the “emergent properties” of the brain, which is code for “consciousness.” I don’t think we have even a clue as to what an answer to that question might look like.

“Origins of life” is an unanswered question, yes, and an important one. For a grand challenge, it doesn’t feel like one that a large proportion of people in biology are actively grappling with. There’s a lot of speculation, but I don’t see this as something that people think they have a clear path to make headway on it.

“Synthesizing life-like systems” is a weird way of renaming a technology – synthetic biology – as a challenge. I’m not so much interested in life-like systems as I am in actual living systems studied with techniques to (say) make synthetic DNA.

When the J. Craig Venter Institute announced they had created a cell that ran from artificial DNA, Venter said one of the questions they wanted to answer is, “What’s the minimal genome?” What is the smallest amount of instructions that you can have that will allow a cell to be alive? That’s a fascinating question, but unless / until a lot more labs start pursuing it besides the J. Craig Venter Institute, I don’t think it qualifies as a
grand challenge.

“Understanding biodiversity” is something that I can get behind, although I’d like it even more if it was a bit more focused. Something like, “How many species are there?” We don’t know that. It would be nice to see basic taxonomy put more in the forefront, because that stuff needs more attention. And just cataloguing all the species is a grand challenge.

External links

How many species are there?

The rules ain’t always all that: lessons from Battlebots

Over the weekend, I was watching remote controlled robots bash each other into scrap metal. As one does. And an interesting situation arose in one fight:

The team running a robot called Complete Control sent their robot out with a gift-wrapped present. The other robot, Ghost Raptor, runs into it in the first few seconds, rips open the box... and there’s a net inside. It completely messes up the spinning attack arm of Ghost Raptor, and that was pretty much it for the match. There’s a video here (embedding seems to be disabled, sorry).

Except... everyone is going, “Whaaaa...? How is that legal?”

The Complete Control team gets quizzed fast about this net. They say they checked the rules about entanglement, “It’s not in there any more.”

Now, to me, things seemed pretty clear cut at this point. Award the win to Complete Control. They followed the rules. The rest of the teams had gotten rules, because the announcers had made some comments about the weight limits for the machines (250 pounds, if I remember right).

But no! After a commercial break, the host explained:

Given the fact that Battlebots has historically always banned the use of entanglement devices, the fight has been nullified. They have agreed to a rematch.

I found this interesting, because it’s a great example of the tension between explicit rules and community standards, which is something that is a very live and real tension in science. A lot of people want standards, want explicit rules. I find this to be particularly true of early stage students: they crave structure, so they can know if they’re doing things “right.”

The Complete Control team, however, show one of the problems with this. The team was apparently known for pushing the limits of what was allowed. As Teresa Neilsen Hayden wrote:

Over-specific rules are an invitation to people who get off on gaming the system.

In this case, “It’s known in the community” won out. Somewhat to my surprise.

The downside to the community standards approach is that it sure seems uninviting to newcomers and outsiders. There was a great example on Twitter the other day when Rachel French complained about the format of an NSF proposal. Prof-Like Substance spoke up to say, “It doesn’t really mean that,” leading to Rachel and Karen James annoyed by “super-sekrit NSF in-crowd culture” (as Karen put it). And understandably annoyed, in my view. I wouldn’t have guessed that.

“Community standards” and “community practices” at loggerheads all the time in science. How authorship is assigned and interpreted is a big one. (“We know who did what on that 1,000 author paper.”)

There has to be a balance, but with so many issues floating around these days about how science is seen by many as unwelcoming, I would like to see our scientific communities push more towards creating explicit rules than “the people in the know, know that.”

Zombie (scientific paper) outbreak!

Many papers from the parasite symposium I co-organized with Kelly Weinersmith back in January at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology conference in Austin are now available as pre-prints at the Integrative & Comparative Biology advance access page. We’ve got nine available now, with a few more to come.

The following is the slated list of papers, in the order they should appear in in the journal. They should all be out in August in volume 54, issue number 2, if all goes well. I’ll update this to include DOI links for the other papers as they arrive.

This is a good time to thank the National Science Foundation once again for supporting this symposium!

---

Weinersmith K, Faulkes Z. Parasitic manipulation of hosts’ phenotype, or how to make a zombie—an introduction to the symposium. Integrative & Comparative Biology: in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icb/icu028

Joseph M, Faulkes Z. Nematodes infect but do not manipulate digging by, sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti. Integrative & Comparative Biology: in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icb/icu064 Open access

Paranjpe DA, Medina D, Nielsen E, Cooper RD, Paranjpe SA, Sinervo B. Spatio-temporal dynamics of side-blotched lizards (Uta stansburiana) and their micro-parasites. Integrative & Comparative Biology: in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icb/icu069

Kaushik M, Knowles SCL, Webster JP. What makes a feline fatal in Toxoplasma gondii’s fatal feline attraction? Infected rats choose wild cats. Integrative & Comparative Biology: in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icb/icu060

Libersat F, Gal R. Wasp voodoo rituals, venom-cocktails, and the zombification of cockroach hosts. Integrative & Comparative Biology: in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icb/icu006

Carreon N, Faulkes Z. Position of larval tapeworms, Polypocephalus sp., in the ganglia of shrimp, Litopenaeus setiferus. Integrative & Comparative Biology: in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icb/icu043 Open access

Fredensborg BL. Predictors of host specificity among behavior-manipulating parasites. Integrative & Comparative Biology: in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icb/icu051

Adamo SA. Parasitic aphrodisiacs: manipulation of the hosts’ behavioral defenses by sexually transmitted parasites. Integrative & Comparative Biology: in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icb/icu036

de Bekker C, Merrow M, Hughes DP. From behavior to mechanisms: an integrative approach to the manipulation by a parasitic fungus (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis s.l.) of its host ants (Camponotus spp.). Integrative & Comparative Biology: in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icb/icu063

Boze BGV, Moore J. The effect of a nematode parasite on feeding and dung-burying behavior of an ecosystem engineer. Integrative & Comparative Biology: in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icb/icu017

Weinersmith K, Warinner C, Tan V, Harris D, Mora A, Kuris A, Lafferty K, Hechinger R. A lack of crowding? Body size does not decrease with density for two behavior-manipulating parasites. Integrative & Comparative Biology: in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icb/icu081

Mauck KE, De Moraes CM, Mescher MC. Evidence of local adaptation in plant virus effects on host–vector interactions. Integrative & Comparative Biology: in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icb/icu012

Hughes, DP. On the origins of parasite-extended phenotypes. Integrative & Comparative Biology: in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icb/icu079

11 June 2014: Added two more. Two to go...

15 June 2014: Added link to second last paper. Just one more for you to see!

19 June 2014: And now we’ve got the last one up!

External links

SICB parasite symposium page
SICB 2014 meeting page
Symposium: Parasitic manipulation of host phenotype, or how to make a zombie
ICB special issue on parasite manipulation
Integrative and Comparative Biology, volume 54, number 2

Zombie takeover

I am incredibly pleased to report that the symposium “Parasitic manipulation of host phenotype, or how to make a zombie” has been awarded support from the National Science Foundation! So thank you, NSF, for supporting zombie research.

The symposium, co-organized with Kelly Weinersmith, will take place at the next SICB meeting in Austin this January.

But wait! There’s more!

We are also holding an associated workshop, “Parasites and links to host phenotype.”We want to help share skills between parasitologists, neurobiologists, ethologists, ecologists, each of whom have skills relevant to understanding how parasite manipulate host behaviour. We will be getting some help from the American Society of Parasitologists with this.

This SICB meeting is shaping up to be great, so don’t miss it!

Related posts

How to make a zombie: The SICB symposium

External links

Parasitic manipulation of host phenotype, or how to make a zombie
Parasites and links to host phenotype

Comments for second half of July 2013

Here’s the bi-weekly collection of blog posts worth talking about!

Small Pond Science looks at the paucity of grant applicants who are trying to reach under-represented minorities. Also, how is NSF reviewing pre-proposals?

Prof-Like Substance asks if tenure committees live in the real world of declining federal funding.

The Singular Scientist looks at predatory publishers.

At Arthropod Ecology, I make a cameo in a presentation about academic publishing, with my example of publishing a paper here on my blog.

Matthew MacManes looks at his experiences in looking for a tenure-track job.

Dynamic Ecology wants to know if you ever spend your own money on research.

The National Science Foundation releases some data on awards and proposals.

Neuroscience doesn’t need a grand theory to advance

In a new post on the planned BRAIN Initiative, the National Science Foundation characterizes neuroscience as:

Desperately seeking a theory

Not just seeking, but desperately seeking.

In other words, scientists lack a basic, overarching theory about healthy brain function that would explain how memories, thoughts and behaviors emerge from dynamic activities in the brain – any brain.

That doesn’t sound like a theory of the brain. That sounds like what is desired is a theory of consciousness. This does not surprise me; it’s the big hairy audacious goal for many neuroscientists. I have a message for my fellow neuroscientists about this.

People, chill out. You don’t need a theory to make excellent progress in understanding how any of those things work.

Let me draw a parallel. Consciousness is a network property of certain combinations of matter. Life is also a network property of certain combinations of matter. We want to explain what are the conditions necessary for those network properties to appear. So, the task of understanding consciousness for neuroscientists is very similar to the task of understanding of life for biologists.

We do not have a theory of life in biology.

By this I mean no theory predicts what configurations of matter are capable of life. Could you have a silicon based life form? A life form that exists in liquid methane instead of water? We have no idea. We have been surprised by extremophiles on Earth that live in conditions that were generally predicted not to be able to support life.

In my estimation, one of the last hopes for a unifying theory that separated life from non-live was vitalism: the idea that all living things had an “essence” that non-living ones did not. But we now know that there is no clear distinction between animate and inanimate matter, and vitalism is dead.

Of course, we may develop a theory of life, particularly if we can ever discover other independent origins of life, whether it be “shadow life” on our planet, evidence of life on other planets, or develop artificial life.

It’s not that we lack theories in biology; we do have them. Evolutionary theory and cell theory are the two main (some would argue only) theories in biology. But neither of these do the job of predicting what configurations of matter have what properties of life, and which don’t.

Similarly, neuroscience does have has theories: neuron theory, for instance. It doesn’t explain the “consciousness, but then again, its biological relative, cell theory, doesn’t explain “life,” either.

Yet this lack of a theory has not prevented an explosion in our understanding of biology. Inheritance and the development of complex multi-celled embryos from single cells were once viewed as great mysteries. Work on DNA and stem cells and gene regulation and so much more means that we have extremely good understanding of these processes. We did all of that without a “theory of life,” and there is no end in sight for biological discoveries. Biologists are not complaining that not having a “theory of life” is limiting their research. Almost nobody in biology is worrying about it.

I am not saying it wouldn't be nice to have a grand unified theory for consciousness. Theories are wonderful things to have. With the Society for Neuroscience meeting being one of the biggest scientific meetings in the world, it seems that neuroscientists are not being limited in making discoveries by their lack of an overarching theory.

Hat tip to Erin McKiernan.


Related posts

When is neuroscience not neuroscience? When it’s neurobiology
Nominees for the Newton of neuroscience

External links

Prying open the black box of the brain

Photo by FunGi_on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons licence.

Changing the players, or changing the goals?

A story from Science is making the round on the social media via my fellow scientists. It’s about draft legislation led by Lamar Smith that would affect the National Science Foundation. It starts with a dramatic lede:

The new chair of the House of Representatives science committee has drafted a bill that, in effect, would replace peer review at the National Science Foundation (NSF) with a set of funding criteria chosen by Congress.

The suggestion that scientists would not be picking what science to fund is a surefire way to get the hounds of academic braying like they’re on the scent of blood. Peer review is the defining characteristic of serious academic scholarship. There is no faster way to lose credibility than to mess with peer review. (Case in point: CPRIT in Texas.)

Let’s look past the first sentence to see what is being suggested.

(T)he draft would require the NSF director to post on NSF’s website, prior to any award, a declaration that certifies the research is:

1. “…in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense by promoting the progress of science;
2. “… the finest quality, is groundbreaking, and answers questions or solves problems that are of utmost importance to society at large; and
3. “…not duplicative of other research projects being funded by the Foundation or other Federal science agencies.”

I don’t see that as evidence of getting rid of peer review. It changes what peer reviewers are supposed to be looking for, but there’s certainly no indication that scientists won’t be picking the winners and losers. I was not around when NSF implemented the “broader impacts” criteria, but I don’t recall anyone ever saying that they were subverting peer review. Confusing, maybe. Not taking seriously, perhaps. But never “not peer reviewed.”

Honestly, I could get behind criterion #3. Criteria #1 and #2 are problematic, because they encourage short term thinking. Science is not about turning a next quarter profit, which is where these sorts of directives lead you.

A bigger problem with this proposal is that it encourages micromanagement. This is also why I don’t think it has much of a future. There is just too much work for politicans and their staffers to be making these kinds of decisions on a routine bases. Currently, the American federal funding agencies are able to get a lot of value for money because scientists volunteer to do peer review, because they believe in its importance. If politicians started trying to pick what to fund, maybe they’d learn that the “lazy professor” meme is a myth.

Should politicians have a say in what science gets funded? Well, that’s a motto point. They always have. They always will. NASA was a political creation. So was the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. There are pros and cons to politicians getting involved in funding decisions.

Additional: One possible downside to criterion #3 is that it could be used against research that involves replication. Fair concern, especially given that replication has a hard enough time being published. There is a reasonable discussion to be had about where to draw the line between replication and duplication (i.e., funding five different major labs all trying to track down the same gene in the same model organism).

Additional, 1 May 2013: Slate has a good background piece on this. It highlights something I sort of allude to above: the specific proposals are not as important as the short-term thinking and disdain for research.

(I)t’s difficult for (social scientists) to justify their own funding in a time of severe government cutbacks. ... The new attempts to claw away at research have gone on for months, and the academics haven’t put up a compelling defense beyond one event on the Hill and the yeoman blogging of some professors like John Sides. “Going forward,” Sides wrote after Coburn’s win, “a coordinated lobbying effort is needed not only to roll back the restrictions on political science but to defend the NSF’s core mission as a promoter of scientific research in the public good, broadly defined.”

So far that lobbying effort doesn’t exist. Instead, Republicans are able to challenge NSF funding in order to pursue long-term political goals without too many people noticing.

External links

U.S. Lawmaker Proposes New Criteria for Choosing NSF Grants
Congress tries to reset science grants, wants every one to be “groundbreaking”
Bad laws for science and all growing things

Picture from here.

Comments for first half of December, 2012

Prof-like substance has good advice for people seeking NSF funding. Even good advice bugs me sometimes, though. Comments there escalated to another post.

I make a cameo in Biochem Belle’s Ever On and On blog because of my dislike of LinkedIn.

Doc Free-Ride considers the role of interviews in hiring academics. Are they just adding noise?

Identifying a crayfish on the Life Traces of the Georgia Coast blog.

OdysseyBlog examines sending reviews of scientific articles directly to the author before the editor does.

United Academics fumbles basic neuroscience.