Assistant Professor at UVictoria. Paleobiology of absurdly small things.
218 followers 199 following 79 posts
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So great to have @fraass.bsky.social in as a guest speaker for my first-year composition class today! Though I was horrified by his saying a Caribbean volcano had erupted "in the 1900s": I thought he meant the 1990s eruptions, WHEN I WAS OVER 20, but nope, 1902. Safe to call that the 1900s. #uvic
Hah! The new running joke in all my classes and lab is that I'm old. "Back when this paper came out when I was in graduate school" "I hadn't been born yet" "Get out."
Not that typesetting is that important as an aspect of the science, but as I was curious what was actually in there, the references are done inconsistently, lots of self citations, and it's just... ugly?
I spent the first few days thinking "Nah, there's no way, the meds are just going to give me a panic attack since it's a stimulant", but feeling so calm after taking them was a pretty clear sign that it's correct. I hope you feel the same way!
Yes, making a meme about this while I'm writing a paper is a clear sign that I'm not on the right dose yet, why do you ask?
Also, holy shit, I _might_ have been misdiagnosed with Anxiety and not ADHD (or just anxiety and not both) when I was 20? How would my career have been different?
It's really wild to be diagnosed with and medicated for ADHD in your 40's. Like, I didn't realize that my brain was supposed to work like this? The meds work so fast. 1 day you're fighting 13 trains of thought and the next it's fully calm and ordered inside your skull. Strangest experience.
Next week at #PalaeoPERCS we will be joined by Jenny Rashall from Stephen F. Austin State University, USA. Sign up here: paleopercs.com/participate/ (1/4)
Are you neurodivergent & have done, or considered, a PhD? We’re researching how doctoral study works (or doesn’t) for neurodivergent people. Take our 30min survey & help make academia more inclusive forms.office.com/e/ft9jyWsPUW Questions? Email lindsay.odell@open.ac.uk #PhD #Neurodivergent
So excited to participate in this panel discussing the history and future of #PalaeoPERCS and the amazing, inclusive, and absolutely brilliant international community of early career pal(a)eo scientists! Please join us at 15:00 UTC today for this really important discussion!
I made a little tool to sync my papers in @paperpile.com with @obsidian.md. It generates a markdown file for each paper and should handle annoying things like paper renaming and deletion. I wish Paperpile would expose more data but the basic paper info gets imported. Please use, extend, enjoy!
Opinion: If scientific databases in the Earth and environmental sciences are not adequately supported, we risk losing and potentially needing to replace these resources, an extremely costly, yet preventable, outcome. buff.ly/WTgm4IC Read more: bit.ly/Eos-Jul2025
Data on how ecosystems evolve over geologic time may be key to understanding modern-day ecosystem changes. A study of marine biomass over the past 541 million years gets scientists one step closer.
“Only 2 of 225 US biology PhD programs assessed offer annual salaries meeting basic living wages” Sad parallel with our findings in Canada, recently published in PLOS One (Fraass et al. 2025)
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
New paper led by @aniekebrombacher.bsky.social using x-ray CT and laser ablation to detect plastic environmental responses in fossil individuals www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2421549122 featuring @jamesmulqueeney.bsky.social @clivetrue.bsky.social @thefosterlab.bsky.social
As of today, all current NOAA Climate and Global Change postdoctoral fellows have been furloughed due to the Dept of Commerce not releasing the funding for the program. In addition no new Fellows were awarded this year. cpaess.ucar.edu/cgc
Opinion: If scientific databases in the Earth and environmental sciences are not adequately supported, we risk losing and potentially needing to replace these resources, an extremely costly, yet preventable, outcome. buff.ly/WTgm4IC Read more: bit.ly/Eos-Jul2025
To the non-expert, this will seem esoteric, so allow me to summarise: we have profoundly altered the distribution of nutient elements on the ocean, with a potentially profound impact on the life that lives in it.
New paper in @natureportfolio.nature.com's Scientific Reports! We investigated emotional & psychological impact of late ADHD diagnoses in women Highlighting how undiagnosed ADHD contributes to life-long challenges & how diagnosis in adulthood can be life-changing #ADHD #WomenWithADHD #ADHDawareness
Paper about diversity within Canadian academic geoscience departments. www.lyellcollection.org/doi/full/10....
🧵🌊 Tiny ocean fossils called foraminifera or "forams" hold a deep record of Earth's climate past. By studying these beautiful microfossils in ocean sediment cores scientists like our own @fraass.bsky.social reveal how life and climate have changed over millions of years wdcnews6.com/the-history-...
It’s perfect!
I use it in my intro geology class (in the “let’s talk about how batshit the geology is” sense). Hell, the undergrads in my department hosted a movie night with it.
I'm used to academic spam at this point, but getting asked to review a paper about parental learning interventions in Kuwait because of my language skills (?) is a new one.
If you're coming to the @geosociety.bsky.social GSA meeting in San Antonio may I recommend this awesome field trip to visit the K/Pg boundary along the Brazos River and in a bunch of cores at the Gulf Coast Core Repository: store.geosociety.org/products/ft2...
Deadline for session, field trip, and short course proposals is July 18!
Science denying know-nothing GOPers are trying (and in some cases succeeding) to ban fluoride in water based on anti-science BS. A new study shows a nationwide ban would bring a 7.5% increase in tooth decay and cost almost *10 billion dollars* over five years. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
Thanks! Once I get it all together I'm very excited to mess around and figure out the different capabilities, since it's been a long time since our demo.
Don't you start.
Pretty cool to get interviewed for this with a bunch of people I respect: knowablemagazine.org/content/arti...
Well, just the fancy one, the workhorses still haven't been bought because it's been difficult to wrangle quotes, but progress!
In the winter of '22, I wrote a plea (grant) to my institution to let me have some of our funding envelope to buy a fancy microscope and a bunch of workhorse microscopes. Years, a medical leave, several additional grant stages to both national and provincial level agencies, and it's here.
My latest story for @knowablemag.bsky.social is all about the astonishingly plentiful fossils of foraminifera, featuring @chrislowery.bsky.social, @fraass.bsky.social and @tracyaze.bsky.social! knowablemagazine.org/content/arti...
A big feature here was work from @foradamifera.bsky.social and @anshumans.bsky.social, but because this was put out by the Annual Reviews magazine, they needed AREPS authors to be focused on.
It's been a pretty strange week. I was interviewed a bit ago for an article about Foraminifera and a recent spate of papers. Sadly, but predictably, @chrislowery.bsky.social got the best quote in. @seos-uvic.bsky.social @uvicscience.bsky.social
🧪 Listen to my colleague Dr. Andy Fraass @fraass.bsky.social talk about his recent work re: levels of graduate student funding in Canada 🇨🇦 compared to the US 🇺🇸 & UK 🇬🇧. He was on CBC Radio One On the Island yesterday morning www.cbc.ca/listen/live-... @seos-uvic.bsky.social @uvicscience.bsky.social
Very glad to hear that!
I was on the local CBC radio station talking about our graduate stipend paper yesterday morning. There's a laundry list of things I wish I could have added or gotten to. Hard to fully explain through something as complex as Canadian graduate funding in just 8 minutes!
Sorry, kids needed me last night. This matches up with our findings, UT and UBC have the ability to make cost of living work despite the extraordinary costs of living in those areas. Would be happy to see or collaborate on similar projects in non-NSERC fields, but would expect similar results
The paper is much clearer in details, thread on social media not so much. When we focused on biology programs, if there were two, we picked whatever fit closest to ecology because we wanted to stay in NSERC funded territory.
One might try to argue that grad students are students and not employees… But then why do I need them to meet the demands of my employer? If I can’t do my job without them, they deserve a fair wage #HigherEd 🧪
Perfect encapslation of how our group Slack operates.
Thanks! There was definitely a bit of working through my own baggage as someone who was precarious for a long time, and with some additional security now, felt like a good thing to do.
🚨 New Paper 🚨 Coauthors and I just published our work in PLOS One on Canadian graduate funding. We found that Canadian graduate funding falls _well_ below cost of living. On average, $10kCAD below cost of living. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
Every PI who wants to have grad students in the lab in Canada should have to read this.
to the DG size you'd massively shrink the amount of graduate education going on in this country and programs would go under due to the shrink. I think the important thing for anybody looking at fellowship programs is to consider the student's finances _after_ tuition and fees are removed.
My gut tells me, however, that what would really fix this is for NSERC to double the base Discovery Grant funding while mandating that any student paid with NSERC funds must recieve a stipend adjusted to cost of living after tuition and fees. If a mandate like that happened without changes...
@supportourscience.bsky.social does lots of that. I'm not a policy expert (I'm actually a micropaleontologist), so I don't have the background to be able to make coherent policy suggestions. Well, successful and reasonable ones.
That is part of the story, but not all of it. There is more variability in levels of support in the lower x-axis on figure 2, meaning some departments that aren't rich do better than expected. If that were the entire problem, then there'd be a strict correlation between the two.
Further, we all had aspects that made us not impartial observers, making it even more important to be as clear as possible about the research vs advocacy line. I'm a prof with nserc funds, other coauthors are grads or recent grads, and connected to @supportourscience.bsky.social.
Sure! It was a way to help us be as impartial as possible in the paper, with us wanting this to be in the scientific literature. The study was focused on outlining the magnitude of the problem, if it's system wide, etc. Wasn't really the venue or space to advocate for specific policies.
Team effort certainly, but thanks!
lags behind what is currently required for our students to meet the cost of living here. My colleague, @fraass.bsky.social has published a paper documenting this shortfall in @plosone.org dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...
🧵🧪 With ongoing reductions in the funding in the US (NSF, NIH, NASA) there are calls for countries like Canada 🇨🇦 to step in to absorb US researchers and their work. However, that requires a significant commitment in resources. Funding for graduate students in the natural sciences in Canada
Grants + Institutional + TA funding is the base, then students can apply for competative institutional or departmental awards which can be either for a few hundred or multiple thousands of dollars. Profs aren't allowed to then lower to decrease the amount coming out of our grants.
MScs a different). Departments can doll out those amounts with a few restrictions (we change our amounts so that all grads are supported equally). We then add money from our NSERC grants - usually - or other grants, which aren't for specific projects... sort of.
which a prof can provide over, but not under, and also only covers a limited amount of time. Profs make up the 'funding package' by adding funds together. Institutions provide some funding to a department, UVic decides how much we get based on how many students we have (PhDs get one amount of $,
For the non-Canadians, graduate funding in Canada is really different and complex, so what follows is all "Typically". Students pay tuition back to the institution, waivers are not a thing. TA positions only pay a couple thousand, and again, no waivers. Departments often have a 'minimum stipend'...
@seos-uvic.bsky.social
The real finding here is that the situtation is bad across the entire system in Canada. Suggests to me that the way to solve this is through the funding aparatus (tri-councils). We worked extremely hard in this paper to keep policy suggestions out, given the academic and research nature of the study
Richer universities do better supporting their students, but that's only part of the story. Some departments do _much_ better than others in the same institution, which suggests there's more to the story than just UBC and UT have tons of cash and that solves the problem.
We also collected data on how hard it is to get that information and it's _very very very very_ hard. There were more than a few sentences we had to cut from the paper, written after I'd spent too long collecting data. Tution costs were usually complicated, fees worse, minimum stipends hidden etc
2/140 programs meet cost of living after taking away tuition and fees. Average shortfall is more than $9,500 CAD per year for a domestic student, nearly $17,000 for international. Roughly 33% on average goes back the institution for a domestic student, 76% (59% median) international.
We looked at all graduate programs in Canada in Physics and Biology, found the minimum stipend, tuition, fees, and other useful information (e.g., how many hours TAing), and compared to cost of living in the specific location - as best we could.
🚨 New Paper 🚨 Coauthors and I just published our work in PLOS One on Canadian graduate funding. We found that Canadian graduate funding falls _well_ below cost of living. On average, $10kCAD below cost of living. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
It’s Mary Anning’s birthday, so time to share @katebeaton.bsky.social’s brilliant cartoon again.
Micropal (Foraminifera) postdoc position 😎 available at Köln University (Germany), with Patrick Grunert. 🌊 🧪 academicpositions.com/ad/universit...
🚨 All staff for NSF’s Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM (EES) have just been fired. In email to grantees: “the entire Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM has just been dissolved and the entire staff fired.” High time for scientists, public, Congress, YOU to take action to #SaveNSF
A report from the scene of a horrifying kidnapping on the streets of Worcester, MA today by @billshaner.bsky.social www.welcometohellworld.com/they-dont-ne...
Choose Science. Choose Europe. A new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 call is now open. With a budget of €404.3 million, it will support around 1,650 researchers from Europe and beyond. Apply by 10 September → europa.eu/!fBTMgF
🌊 Great opportunity @uvicscience.bsky.social @oceannetworks.ca
Now published online in Current Biology! www.cell.com/current-biol...
It's worth reading this @thebulletin.org article about preserving the Keeling Curve. Go deeper: Many scientists have trumpeted the scientific—& even cultural—value of long-standing datasets like this, even suggesting that some deserve World Heritage status to protect them. eos.org/opinions/tak...
This was a good reminder that I desperately need to update my website.
Great job everyone
**BIG NEWS in the geology world!** For the first time, scientists spotted an active eruption along the mid-ocean ridge!! They visited the hydrothermal vent the day before, where a vibrant ecosystem thrived in the sweltering water. The next day, everything was gone. ⚒️🧪 My latest for @nytimes.com
**Rapid Response Bridge Funding Program** -- $25,000 grants earmarked for early-career researchers whose NSF-funded research on STEM and education has just been terminated. www.spencer.org/grant_types/... hub.jhu.edu/2025/04/28/j... Thanks @lizneeley.bsky.social !
Who cares about ethics when you just study dumb old rocks anyway. 🙃
not to mention, science is GOOD FOR THE ECONOMY per this report that came out yesterday: -a 25% reduction in government science would result in GDP loss comparable to that seen during the Great Recession -at 75% cuts, GDP declines reach levels not seen since the Great Depression 🧪
IMPORTANT NEWS: The IUGS Executive Committee decided to abolish the Commission on Geoethics. Read the letter in the picture.
More bad news for US science, indirect rates capped at 15% will further gut our research institutions & univerisities www.nsf.gov/policies/doc...
Nature reports that the National Science Foundation has stopped awarding new grants and allotting funds to existing ones. All of them. @colincarlson.bsky.social says that unless the freeze is lifted, it “is going to destroy people's labs.” 2/10 www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Who bears the brunt of these cuts? Well, here's a word cloud of the most frequent terms from the titles and abstracts of terminated grants, with word size proportional to frequency:
Check out the @txgeosciences.bsky.social press release www.jsg.utexas.edu/news/2025/04... @chrislowery.bsky.social @fraass.bsky.social @glyptocrinus.bsky.social
Ooooh, it's that fun time where there's something of mine formally accepted and under a formal press embargo. Also, this paper is very much not like my usual stuff. Not forams, not paleo, not well... anything like what I've ever done!
PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081
So instead of a US science "brain drain" its more of a self-induced "coma" or "stroke"? Someone probably has a better terms than those to describe it (6/x)
Casting this as a US science "brain drain" has bothered me for a while. I don't think there is not going to be much of "drain". Let me explain. 1/x) www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Hey! Did you know you can Propose Sessions, Short Courses, and Field Trips for the FORAMS 2026 conference in Amherst? Because you can: sites.google.com/view/forams2...
This is a very cool paper! Highly suggested read.
Happy openning day of Canadian Research Season to all who celebrate!
Nitrogen isotopes are a promising tool to reconstruct symbiosis in planktic foraminifera! Check out our latest paper: bg.copernicus.org/articles/22/...
Cool science coming out of the RBCM and UVic SEOS @seos-uvic.bsky.social @uvicscience.bsky.social www.cbc.ca/news/science...
Same. Which is a... uh... strange position to be in?
Hard to believe it is coming to this. A US travel warning to all university researchers in Canada... the vast majority of whom have ongoing collaborations with people in the US, have field work in the US, and/or attend meetings in the US to share their work. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
This is a very cool paper and should be read. Id say that even if I weren't an author! Especially to come out of an undergrad thesis!
Interestingly, other than the major reduction in calcareous genera at the end of the Permian, changes in the relative diversity of calcareous and agglutinated tests were not closely tied to ocean chemistry changes. We didn't expect that!
Happy #ForamFriday, here's a fresh new paper from former UT undergrad Katherine Faulkner published this week in Proceedings B, about how the number of calcareous and agglutinated foram genera has changed over the Phanerozoic, and what that means: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
