I used a table—an early invention representing humans' understating of mathematics and physics—to support all sorts of federally funded research that added to our understanding of the effects of toxic agricultural chemicals on embryonic development.

I’m an oceanographer who studies the deep sea - I share my knowledge and passion with the public to make the world a better place. youtu.be/1pHPibEtBz8?...

I had research funding from USDA and EPA, but in the long run it was the funding from USAID and Fulbright that allowed me to train young environmental scientists in Indonesia and Malaysia.

I'm in the middle of work on a tiny USDA grant growing hemp for textiles, with a focus on adapting historic agronomic & processing techniques to rebuild natural fiber infrastructure in rural communities. Waiting to hear on funding for a grant related to perennial flax breeding & its fiber potential.

That sounds fascinating.

While asst to the Dean of St Thomas Uni's school of Science Tech & Engineering, helped Dr. Jeffery Plunkett with his spinal cord research program using zebrafish. www.stu.edu/news/hands-o... His pubs: www.researchgate.net/profile/Jeff... I also managed STU's faculty grants ofc funded by NIH.

I helped landowners collect estuarine community data in tidal creeks affected by a manmade obsolete navigational channel. NOAA flow-through funds supported us for 4 years! USACE used our data and are closing the cuts to restore the salt marshes

DTRA - Developed a handheld device for detecting and identifying trace levels of explosives, chemical threats and opioids. There are now over 2000 of the 2nd-generation product, also developed in part with federal funding, in use around the world.

I work with a brain awareness outreach, teaching neuroscience to K-12 kids.

Maybe we adults could us some here! 😉

Friggin absolutely. Lol.

I love this thread!

Me tooooo! Made a couple of posts!

Worked in the development of novel detectors for radiotherapy (cancer) treatments

The next 10 years of particle, high-energy, & astrophysics. bsky.app/profile/natu... Now, who knows what will come of this. bsky.app/profile/natu...

I love this design!! I have a sticker of this on my water bottle! They were giving them out at seminars to update us on the P5 report

Thank you! I was concerned ಠ_ಠ for a second about why it was on stickers somewhere (sadly art gets stolen like that all the time) so thanks for the rest of the info there! xD

Fascinating collection! BTW, it would be interesting if you asked the same on Mastodon.

My scholarship, funded by CDC, allows dozens of public health lab employees to pursue a doctorate degree. The degree qualifies them for board certification as laboratory directors. 13 directors graduated and counting.

I studied the parameters of a chemical reaction to attach cancer drugs to the surface of cancer cells but not healthy cells. The first generation I worked on was too slow to be effective, but the study led to developing the next generation of the reaction and it is now being used in clinical trials.

EPA funds current research studying the crayfish to serve as biomonitoring organism for 6PPD-Q pollution (tiretox.org). NSF funds current indigenous post-bac training program focusing on biological resilience and tribal nation building (www.ramp-biorise.org).

NASA supported my PhD. work that led to new insights about how trees can use capillary barriers to create water reserves in their soils (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...).

We desperately need with all the droughts

I created the first statistical framework for using your own data to figure out your own causes and effects—for truly personalized digital health and medicine. All thanks to an NIH T32 grant! tinyurl.com/daza2018

Verbatim copy with most legible notation: statsof1.org/2018_daza_la...

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I have written letters for scores of undergraduate Biology students over the last 20 years who took part in cost-effective NSF-REU training programs all over the US. Many of them are now doctors, researchers, teachers, and/or science-aware members of the public!

Maybe not science, but I fed an entire indigenous community and started a trend for diabetes friendly foods by cooking them with the local kids and offering meals to go. It was so popular they decided to continue with another program while I continued working with the kids on other projects.

That's brilliant. I live with my partner in a First Nations community in Northern Ontario. Diabetes is such an epidemic (60% of our population here) I can only imagine the difference your programming is making in the health and wellbeing of that community.

It really is. Education is so important. We worked with the kids to practice coping skills for stress in hopes that they will reach for those instead of self medicating. Most of them have grandparents who are boarding school survivors. And the kids shared all they learned with their elders. 💕

Yes, that's the way it is here too. Most of the grandparents/parents are residential school survivors (in Canada, the last residential school didn't close until 1996) and there's a lot of recent as well as generational trauma.

They were open down here until the late 70’s. Working with the kids exposed me to the results of that time, the trauma & the pain. It’s rare for the elders to speak on their experience, it was so painful. Most folks have no idea. It’s going to take many generations to heal these wounds.

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Sending beneficial nematodes to the International Space Station "The first biocontrol experiment in space".

What that is so cool! I only read the abstract but I have so many questions. Why did they die when coming back to Earth? Are the ones born in LEO weaker and can’t survive the effects of gravity on the surface? Damn this farce of a government. Thieves robbing humanity of a better tomorrow.

I don’t really know what this means but it sounds amazing and tricky and so clever.

Thank you so much for starting this thread. So much goes unrecognized or never even hits the news cycles. But it’s so critical we all understand these investments matter the world over.

I work every day for the benefit of the PEOPLE - this AND future generations 'cause I love ya! 😘😘😘😘😘😘

Early in my career I worked for analytical labs. I participated in drinking water projects on Lakota Reservations, USGS watershed mapping and multiple Superfund sites. I can probably come up with more if I think about it for a while.

I got my first official research job/internship researching crops. I learned a lot and met lots of wonderful people. It’s not much but it helped me be more confident in myself and my ability to help people.

We unveiled one of the fastest adaptive radiations documented to date: the phenotypically bizarre and ecologically fascinating ant nest beetles (Paussus). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Our team streamlined the watch/warning/advisory process used by the National Weather Service and my sub team has been working on a way to update tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings with greater frequency.

This is very cool. Moving from a large metro on the Gulf Coast to a very rural area on the Ohio/Indiana border was eye opening for me in how important the NWS is — it’s basically my only source for weather info specific to my area. In Houston we had a wealth of info to choose from. Here, it’s NWS.

Thank you from Tornado Alley!

Worked on flu vaccine trials sponsored by the DOD, (because they realized that a sick defense force is no defense force).

Artist on Mount Desert Island, Maine, documenting storm floods and marking projected sea level rise. Some funding from NASA via Gulf of Maine Research Institute @gmri.bsky.social, and my collaborator works at Schoodic Institute at Acadia NP. King tide levels are already at the projections for 2050.

Photos taken at the Bar Harbor Oceanarium in 2024.

Funding from the NEH in 2009 and 2012 supported Summer Seminars in London, which allowed researchers to investigate both textual & bioarchaeological/genetic evidence for #histmed. Work that came out of it has transformed the narrative of the Black Death, the most severe pandemic in human history! 🧪

Here's the description of the Seminar: www.academia.edu/39668964/

And here's one of the products of the Seminar, a paper that, 4 years after publication, still ranks as the top essay in the American Historical Review, the top history journal in the U.S. academic.oup.com/ahr/article/.... (Check @altmetric.com for stats.) #histmed #MedievalSky 🧪

And here's another long-term payoff from the 2009 NEH Seminar. Historian of Hawai'i, Kerri Inglis, was a participant & made me aware the Pacific Islands experience as part of any global history of leprosy. So I've kept my eye out for new work ever since: constantinusafricanus.com/2025/01/26/l... 🧪

That paper blew my mind when I came across it a few months ago. Amazing work!

Thanks!

Very interesting article, but here is an early statement that bears repeating in the current context: "[Yersinia pestis] . . . was not posited until it was discovered . . ., thanks [in part] to a laboratory infrastructure that supported such RESEARCH AS A PUBLIC GOOD." [Emphasis added].

wow, thank you..that's a wonderful read, so far, it's really my kind of page turner.

I love this! So cool to use biology to complement history!

I wrote the protocol for a NASA space shuttle experiment and repeatedly tested the protocol. Developing frog embryos were thought to rely on gravity to form their dorsal-ventral axis. The Space Shuttle experiment sent developing frog embryos into space to see if low gravity altered axis formation.

youtu.be/lgV_chyGw9k?...

Haha! We had tee shirts made that said "Frogs in Space!"

Don't leave us hanging, what did you find? 🐸

Zip. Nada. The tadpoles were fine!

The future is looking brighter for space frogs, thank you!

Negative results matter. 😀 And I had fun. NASA even had me come repeat the experiment at their lab at Moffett Field in Mountain View, CA. I had to go through security every day to get in.

Studied how dying retinal neurons kill other neurons via channels between cells. Studied how light-sensitive photoreceptor cells function in 3D retinal organoids grown in a dish from patient’s stem cells. Comparing photoreceptor function between healthy patients and those with blinding diseases.

From an extremely myopic person w stretched retinas, thank you thank you.

Archeology along the Coleville River Alaska 1977.

Saved lives and improved health with the results. Thank you scientists.

I characterized the geochemistry, morphology and transport mechanisms of an Icelandic sand sheet called “Dyngjusandur” for my Masters Thesis with a grant from NASA as an analog to the Stimson Formation in Gale Crater, Mars. Part of a broader paleo climate study of Mars. iro.uiowa.edu/esploro/outp...

Super interesting!! I’m doing some mineralogy undergraduate research myself on Jezero Crater analogues at Lake Natron, Tanzania

Sounds like fun and interesting work!! Good luck!

I was just undergrad lab help, but I worked with the USDA and Forest Service to research ways to control the spread of emerald ash borers, and helped another group track their expansion. Like most similar science, the work had merit for both the environment and the economy.

And beauty of our neighborhoods

Bluesky Linkedin

www.linkedin.com/posts/nation... www.linkedin.com/posts/nation... Both of these projects will have a massive return on investment for the US economy and push the US forward for science.

MIT Urban Studies PHD: funded AI for urban design; we concluded we could not model the spectrum of human experience; a range of subconscious memories that bubble to the surface in a creative design. #Proust’sMadeleine

My NSF S-STEM has supported 3 cohorts of rural, academically talented, low-income community college students to pursue STEM majors. Some took 3rd place in the national community college innovation challenge. One got a Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship. These students will do great science!

We had an NSF S-STEM that supported 3 cohorts of students in the same way-two of them just presented at the AAAS meeting in Chicago. Both were offered MS assistantships. These programs are so valuable b/c the student can concentrate on school, not money.

Absolutely! My program also had a student present in Chicago. Two got Internships at UCSF and Berkeley. Another team just started with a great idea on the innovation challenge. S-STEM is so valuable to the students but also to society.

Oh wow i forgot about my NSF S-STEM grant from 20 years ago that funded cohorts of first-generation students to attend our college- the students were from rural or urban communities and they learned so much from one another (as well as learning to do science!)

So cool! Such an impactful program! 👍😊💕

Not posting the preprint link because it’s just about to be published, but I developed a gene therapy variant (that CURES an otherwise fatal disease) for children who were previously ineligible due to preexisting antibodies!

That is amazing! Can I ask which journal it will be in? I worked on gene therapy in ADA-SCID a decade ago. I love reading new articles

nature comms 🤭🤭🤭

So excited for you! May the money gods shower you with labs and goods to keep it going.

LETS GOOO

❤️❤️❤️

I restored a river in a neighborhood over 2.5 years spending 5 million dollars after a flood in 2013. It was entirely on private land and funded through the Emergency Watershed Protection program under the NRCS. I and a team of professionals, helped reduce flood risk for 30 homes for years.

We the People Care about People People of all different shapes and sizes People of all different struggles People who make mistakes People who are imperfectly human People who care about others but do not always know how to show it or express it We the People are about the people

Speaking of River Restoration www.rrnw.org/symposium-we...

Which neighborhood?

Hanging out with the construction crew figuring out how the GPS works and how it matches the electronic CAD files

Oh, I have done that a many of times during long stint as a wetland delineator 🤣 What’s your hardware? Trimbles?

I used Leica when I conducted surveys on the Rio Grande for silvery minnow work. We used Leica and a cell network with an ADCP on the San Joaquin I haven't done much GPS surveying, unfortunately, in the last 5 years. I like designing from data I collect.

Sorry I don't remember. This was 2017 so 8 years ago?

Lefthand Creek, Streamcrest neighborhood

In 2003, I helped create a tablet-based, multimedia HIV risk-reduction application. It had measurable (but not significant) effects on reducing risky behavior and robust, significant effects on increasing medication compliance for folks who were HIV+.

I’m no scientist, but I’m guessing that those reductions in risky behavior might just be significant to the people directly affected. Thank you for your work!

Developed a system that opens and closes deep trawl fishing nets to release animals that would otherwise be killed as bycatch Also proof of concept for a sound-activated lineless fishing system Machine vision systems monitoring fishing catches in real time on boats in the gulf of AK and off PR

Automatic identification of species and weight/volume of catch in real time, as well as a stark introduction to the limits of this kind of "AI"

Saving our sea life. Excellent work that will preserve the future for generations ahead. Thank you.

I developed a means to use existing communications and weather equipment aboard ships to automatically collect weather observations in areas where there are few or no observations, with the goal of improving forecasts of dangerous weather.

Currently on an NSF-funded spacecraft project that’s building two satellites that will fly in formation, one with optics and one with a detector, to take close up pictures of the solar corona and answer questions about why it’s so hot. All the grad students won’t have funding if this continues.

Lordy...

Described 30+ species of parasitic wasps, produced an updated phylogeny for them, trained as a diplopod systematist producing the first ordinal level phylogeny of familial relationships. I've impacted students for the past 17 years teaching; my 1st research student has been on shark week 5/6 times.

This is why I support #Handcuffs4Traitors Help round up a shakedown from Trump/Vance, to Doge, to J6, to Fox, to RFK Jr, to Bezos, to Cabinet members, to judges, to human traffickers, to congress members who co-conspired to aid Putin in the takeover of America.

Collected fresh lava rocks at sea, measured their chemistry to figure out how they formed deep underground. Wrote code to calculate how magma forms on Earth. Determined with collaborators that the Indochina tectonic plate is breaking into many microplates that are grinding against each other.

Those were NSF. DoD covered half of my graduate training, mainly the part investigating origins of volcanic gases from Nicaraguan volcanoes.

NSF funded those research expenses, too, but my tuition and stipend to live on came from DoD.

One of my favorite classes ever was about how cells move, individually or in groups. Gave me insights into developmental biology, cancer, etc.

NSF graduate research fellowship allowed me to get the Ph.D. that has led to a still-in-process career of amazing science things. Thank you, NSF.

We got a federal grant to bring ABA services (recommended therapy for Autism Spectrum Disorder) to underserved communities in the state.

We used mice created with NIH funding to enable this next step. jaguargenetherapy.com/press-releas...

Amazing.

Not something I did, but my kid’s learning astronomy so I’m learning astronomy and good heavens there’s been amazing progress since I last studied it in the 80s. NASA and NSF - the James Webb alone- have taught us mind-blowing things.

That telescope 🔭 is so fantastic! Showing us so much... Seems unbelievable

Working as a senior investigator on an RO1, I discovered that the STING protein is a proviral host factor for the A and C species of rhinoviruses... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

With an F32 grant in hand, I discovered a novel mechanism for picornaviruses that changed the dogma of RNA virus replication... rnajournal.cshlp.org/content/4/12...

booksandstuff.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/index3.html

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NSF: Demonstrated the social determinants of vulnerability to dying from heatwaves in a period of climate change and demographic aging. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

In high school, I learned the chart of which salts are soluble. In grad school, I created a way to *calculate* that chart from first principles using quantum mechanics.

Wow!! How cool is that!!

Routinely reduced pesticides by more than 50% using laser-guided agricultural sprayers. Intelligent Spray Systems research has been commercialized and continues to expand to new crops/system improvements, including retrofits.

Did it help prevent cancer danger?

We did not assess that. As a general rule, less pesticide load would be less exposure and associated risks. There was a significant decrease in pesticide drift.

True enough. I somehow think that Bobby Jr on the confirmation killing floor might have condemned you for not making it zero. Or, maybe that was from his worm...

You rockstar. Thank You. From all the birds, bees, and people too.

Model formation of stars like the Sun and planets like the Earth to understand where we come from.

I've been working on a grant funded by IMLS (not pure science) that is helping develop new tools and systems involving GIS and data flows to innovate how we track new plant acquisitions which may help inform plant conservation activities in the future.

I built a volcano out of paper mache the first time I took 6th grade science. This is actually really important. Because it's one of only 3 assignments I did that year.

Took a group of undergraduates for a field research experience in the Republic of Georgia when it was still reeling from the Soviet breakup. So, they got to travel around eastern Georgia doing bird surveys. Some highlights include 2 being detained by the police and threatened with jail.

They were released when they produced the business card of a senior military official colleague-yes exactly for that purpose. They go to see a European wolf in the wild. Live in old train cars on the farm-yes, including fleas and bedbugs. Georgian hospitality when they gad little themselves.

Georgian wine and toasting rituals. Yes, arriving at 6am on the farm after flying fromUSA, their professor warned them he could not offend our hosts. Nine drinking glasses, a bottle of vodka, 2 Georgians and a lightweight American. Bottle empty. Likely some interaction with local mafia.

Since there was no electricity, I asked our host for some way to charge laptops. Next morning brand new Honda generator showed up. In a place where you get gasoline for the car out of the back of a pickup. Final story, professor gets bit by local farm dog. Quick patch up and no big deal.

Local boss had car ready to go in the morning. Insists we go to hospital. Arrive in nearest city to what looks like Abandoned Russian block building. We go inside and all the staff are smoking, playing cards, by small wood heater. Escorted to chief surgeons office. He speaks no English.

Discussion ensues in Russian and Georgian. I am looking around. Notice bust of Stalin on his desk. Damn. English translation results in learning that area is having huge rabies outbreak including human deaths. Another damn. I ask some questions about vaccine and syringes.

Translated to Russian. He starts laughing. I am thinking I am a dead man. Translation to English. Old horse serum vaccine comes in sealed ampules. Have not seen those since I was a kid. Turns out they get German one use syringes. He tells me that they will open in front of me.

I am there in middle of financial disaster among very well trained professionals. Next 3 days I get 17 shots. Yes, every large muscle in my body and one rundown the back of my hand to the bite on my finger. Happily both the dog and I survived. Thanks. I have not told that story for a long time.

Work was funded by the National Academy of Science. Only reason I got it was Bush 2 was sucking up to Georgians to get oil pipeline across the country. One of very few Americans working there then. Sometimes better to be lucky than good.

Write a book... Invaluable experiences.. Opens the minds... With travel and learning.. Will have a life time of impact

WOW. This is an EPIC tale!

I love this. Thank you. We communicate with devices that only work because matter can be in two places at once. We never know where scientific discoveries will lead us other than closer to an understanding of our world. That alone justifies the money spent and the effort given.

wildlife bridges!! I've done conservation management on these great structures and it was wonderful to see how quickly the positive impact they had on humans and the nature surrounding them was.

Wildlife bridges are amazing. I love reading about them and their impacts.

This is fantastic!

S Ca is building those!

happy to see so many people excited about science still 🥹 thanks for the messages guys 🩷

Wildlife bridges should be everywhere! Thank you for your work.

That is amazing! Thank you!

Tough assignment - in this limited space, describe the single biggest benefit you have found for wildlife bridges. Go!

Researched discourse in humanities classrooms, turned it around and launched a learning tool to help visualize texts and facilitate discussions. It drove engagement with texts and made for more focused classroom conversations. Thanks to NSF and other grant funding. 🙏🏻

Early 80’s I got Fed grant money for an an incipient digitization project on slave ship manifests. The scanner was enormous and super expensive. And slow. We used floppy disks.

Is it published somewhere?

Sadly, I doubt it. Not in any journal lit.

This thread looks like 🇺🇸 federal funding. But NZ research funded my internship and then PhD at a regenerative medicine startup leading to the discovery of a truncated protein involved in stem cell recruitment. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Following everyone who replied to this thread! Thanks

Hood Canal Bridge openings from open sources January 2025

2024 Hood Canal Bridge and Submarine events

Revised this AM

As a OP resident-this is valuable work for commerce and residential impacts

I've modelled how hydrothermal systems in volcanoes make them more susceptible to flank collapse and dated the most recent explosive eruptions for a hazard assessment in a major wine-growing region. Oh yeah, and helped keep people safe and informed during two major volcanic eruptions. 🌋

Work on this daily:

During my PhD, which was mainly funded by the Danish research foundation, I was lucky enough to be part of collaborative efforts studying microbial mats in Yellowstone National Park, Mt. So all my publications from back then have US federal funding mentioned in ack. With ♥️ from Denmark

Federal scientists and public funds helped restore thousands of miles of Maine rivers, enabling the return of MILLIONS of migratory fish, including endangered Atlantic salmon.

Now people can once again witness a river full of fish, and catch (and eat) some of them.

and none of it would have been possible without the Clean Water Act. In less than a decade, Maine's Penobscot River went from sour sewage to an EPA success story.

I’m not a scientist but my dad was a systems engineer in the Environmental Science Services Administration (precursor to NOAA) in the 1960s! He built systems aboard the research vessel ‘Oceanographer’ to collect global weather data and then did the same for the National Weather Service. 🌊 🇺🇸

I learned a lot about why people worry and the shapes that worry can take in the real world. I shared my findings with a global audience. I used that knowledge to start developing interventions that might help. I wrote a grant that would let me get started. It got a fantastic score.

I know there are plenty of us now that would love to know those interventions

edic.bsc.gwu.edu/dcct-study privileged to have been a PI in one of the most important clinical trials in the world

I got a little tiny Pell grant in college and I proved that cannabis is combustible.

Thanks to the NIH funding (R01) we have shown that repetitive stress accelerates aging of central nervous system. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Feel free to retweet! #NIHfunding #AcceleratingProgress #aging

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Developed insulin.

Led the development of this tool and published it completely open access. We taught many researchers how to do it themselves. It has been used by people all around the world for many different kinds of genomics research on wide variety of species. There is no way I could calculate a $ value on this.

As a high school student, I interned in a federal lab doing 2D protein separation to look for commonalities in cancer tissue

As a high school student! Amazing accomplishment!

Benefit of growing up in the DC area, but I also did a summer internship at Cornell Veterinary School doing parasitology research - sadly, college-level chemistry ended up ruling out a science career for me, even though I was great at lab work

I’m so sorry to hear — I have a kid whose story is similar, except substitute biology. They’re navigating a new path now since it impacted their plan. My heart goes out to you! every time we discuss.

Uhh I have no idea how that url got in there, user error I’m sure.

The automatic completion demons come for us all, eventually

My best friend has been doing serious research into ovarian function and how it is impacted by obesity. Also how fat cells store certain compounds and the release rates during weightloss. And then how those compounds affect ovaries. Its really important work imo!

Yes, for women 🚺! Thank you!

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Used DOE funds to host 3 pre-service high school science teachers at my lab. They contributed to real research and were co-authors on papers. They now teach science in public schools around CA with real experience working as scientists.

www.pbs.org/video/scitec...

Emily, this is so cool! I just learned so much.

It was a fun project!

I am a member of a large international team responsible for studying material brought to Earth directly from an asteroid. I built a specialized instrument that is currently at NASA’s extraterrestrial materials curation facility in Houston.

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My daughter is heading to grad school in the fall for a PhD in integrative neuroscience. Her focus is research in neurodegenerative diseases. She just received a message from the university that they are ‘unsure about grant funding and will keep students posted’. 🤬

And magats think such things a waste or unnecessary until they, family members.. Kids, grandkids are impacted... To late then after no research

Lordy..

That's so terrible, I'm sorry. 😞

I've taught in a middle school class to students with a full belly. The mundane is amazing and exciting and necessary enough.

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I got my degree with student loans - let’s not forget that student loans are part of this “pause”

One guesses education is something to be shunned in the New Order...

The statement that he loves the uneducated was just a joke! The educated coastal elites are so touchy.

We’re currently sampling paddlefish with funds from federal sportfish restoration dollars to ensure sustainable fisheries. This investment supports the livelihoods of angling guides, commercial fishermen, and other small business owners.

First job out of college was working on NIH-funded research about brain damage to alcoholics. Turns out that alcoholics tend to have diets deficient in thiamine, which is important in maintaining brain cells. It can lead to tremors and balance problems.

Helped cure people of cancer and know that they were in remission.

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Researched traditional architecture and engineering 3D-CAD practices and developed an open-source XML schema and green building energy simulation web service to launch the Building Information Modeling era

Also, for Jamaica back in the late’90s I got to study and characterize their rapidly developing markets for appliances, air conditioning, and refrigeration equipment and recommend demand-side programs to help keep the electricity grid working

Ok. Years ago, early 90s, I was hired as a contract programmer by an oceanographer at Oregon State University. Principle investigator on many projects in the Antarctic, he and his crew would go on months-long cruises gathering data on seawater temps, salinity and suchlike - using Kaypro...

... transportable computers. My job was to plot the data log for each cruise, using longitude and latitude plus whichever data point value was being used. We didn't have a graphical workstation, so... I resorted to send maps and plot data to a printer in PostScript, generated from a program...

... I wrote in Turbo Pascal, I think. I got lucky and found a global map already written in PostScript, added my markup to that, and instructed the printer to print only the section of the map that fell within certain lat/lon limits. I thought it was pretty clever, and the PI was pleased.

Smiling

An NSF grant is why I “upgraded” my MS to a PhD (still in progress). We’re working on making assistive robotics that can support disabled users with creative tasks like painting, pottery, and building things in makerspaces — including making your own assistive tech.

@weinersmith.bsky.social and I ran a great session on parasitic manipulation at @sicb.bsky.social with NSF support. Included in the published volume was one paper co-authored by an undergraduate and another co-authored by a high school student. academic.oup.com/icb/issue/54/2

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In 1994, with travel support from the State Department, I flew to South Africa to help the new Mandela government rewrite their nation's constitution and #water laws to include the human right to water.

We might need that help here.. Lordy what's happening to us

Fun fact, a colleague with a law degree retired to fight for our right to water in the US because domestic and foreign corporations are buying up those rights.

Jesus Christ this is exhausting.

Yesss, but we're in crisis now in just 2 weeks.. 😕

The National Science Foundation funded my dissertation research on class and ethnic evolution in Israel.l

Two of my proud interns displaying their USDA work, a few years.

Beautiful!!

Took and analyzed the Spitzer space telescope data used in this beautiful image of the Orion Nebula (image created by Robert Hurt)

On a recently funded multiyear NSF grant, my colleagues and I work on Language Technologies (LT) for Crisis Preparedness and Response. We focus on developing or adapting resources and tools, e.g., Machine Translation, Speech Reco, etc., for use in disaster response, esp. for underserved communities.

Developed the only captive spawning population of giant grouper in the western hemisphere, deployed the world’s deepest-moored aquaculture installation, demonstrated that marine finfish can be grown sustainably on zero-fishmeal diets, refined dosing for FDA approval of non-toxic h2o2 parasiticide…

I made a mass plot of the first reconstructed K short mesons in the initial collisions at the CMS experiment at LHC.

Over my head, but great!

I helped create the first mule deer cell line persistently infected with chronic wasting disease; a tool to test for therapeutics and preventatives

I've never had funding, federal or otherwise, but here's the forest I regrew: bsky.app/profile/burd...

In the last few years I published three papers on nitrogen and iron transporters and how they relate to nitrogen fixation in nodules of Medicago truncatula. My work was supported by the NSF.

It’s actually nitrate and iron!

We have two scientists on the road collecting time-sensitive samples of bees and wax to help beekeepers resolve how they lost >$10M in honey bees this month

Thank you!

This month? In one month?

Hi, they were there the end of January and start of Feb, hoping to get Andrew/left back in board to finish the work

This is an older study from my EPA fellowship. I'm still very proud of it. It's probably the cleanest data set I've been involved with. bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Really appreciate all the replies about how federal funding has been applied. Such a wide range of amazing work!

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We figured out how to measure streamflow from timelapse images taken by an inexpensive, off-the-shelf trail camera, thus making hydrologic monitoring something pretty much any one can do, any where. usgs.gov/apps/ecoshed...

So cool! I want to put a camera on our creek.

My first NSF Bio funding was a $5005 DDIG that led to these 4 papers on cartilaginous fishes. NSF funding has been at the root of ALL my research. www.nature.com/articles/266... tinyurl.com/3w76r2yr tinyurl.com/4dz9tmxr tinyurl.com/2ash6s5u 🧪

A few of us submitted that year and I encouraged palindromatic budgets. Another for 10001 was awarded.

Solved a few protein crystal structures as a postdoc at UC Berkeley.

We figured out how C diff controls making spores #nih journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

I don’t science, but I help communicate it for my institution. research.ucdavis.edu/uc-davis-sci...

Earth at Night earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/896/e...

NSF funding allowed me to use X-rays to see fossils inside rocks...and then dissolve the rocks to see which fossils were recovered and which disintegrated.

Need to point out though - has been a real grind to get NIH grants.. (but we all know the fault doesn't lie with NIH, but with ... you know..)

Identified nice smelling odorants that activate the mosquito human sensing neurons (CO2, skin) and also for flies: planning stages for a startup to create low cost high resolution mosquito traps for scalable monitoring region/nationawide.

While studying volatile odorants, identified a new mechanism of action directly on HDACs and chromatin, slows some cancers, neurodgenerative, and alters plant growth/stress response. 2nd startup - epigenetic products to improve agriculture.

Studied the olfactory system in mosquitoes and identified thousands of novel repellents, started up a company, and one molecule is in EPA approval pipeline for a longer lasting and safer repellent for use to prevent bites, Dengue, Malaria. Pdts in works: Lyme ticks, home, garden and agriculture.

I've helped to publish studies that demonstrate that more people are acceptable kidney / liver donors than previously thought, which should expand donor pools. Also published studies showing no meaningful health risk after donation, which encourages more to donate.

My mom received a kidney transplant about 30 years ago. Thank you for your work. She was on dialysis for years, and we worried she’d never find a match.

A couple projects I'm proud to have worked on, and work on still, www.informatics.jax.org and www.alliancegenome.org Curating and integrating data, developing tools to make it easier to access and reason over that data, then making the outcomes freely accessible to all.

I looked for massive black holes in over 60,000 dwarf galaxies on an NSF grant

Did you find any?

Over a thousand

🫨

There's one in the Oval Office right now.

Laughed out loud - thank you

I worked on a conservation project for the endangered Barrens Topminnow. I bred, raised, released, and monitored many generations of this pretty, little fish!

Maybe they can eat plastic 🤔.... We never know what can solve severe problems we have

T32 - mapped olfactory coding in live zebrafish embryos using GCaMP (a decade before Musk declared it revolutionary) IRTA - studied regeneration in cells analogous to those involved in hearing Research Fellow - put together NIH Intramural's first NIH-wide research ethics (RCR) training course

Went to grad school on a federal grant. Our research was on space-based applications of advanced composites and nanotechnology for laser communications.

Honestly, though, the cool thing it did was help me make the transition from Active Duty to the labor market. Without that opportunity, I would not have been prepared to take on the technical challenges I’ve faced in my civilian career.

You mean the military service?

My colleagues and I showed (18 years ago) that greenhouse gas-driven global warming would lead to stronger thunderstorms and severe storms in the US. I also showed how to use the few things we can observe about planets orbiting other stars to estimate which ones are most likely to be habitable.

Ah, now I see why Trump and his climate change denying oil industry backers have taken this insane step. I hope that you can all find a way to keep doing the good work.

As a research assistant, I helped to better understand visual cortex. NSF paid for my grad degree in human factors engineering where I looked at how to learn from computer systems. And, over the years, I’ve covered amazing breakthroughs in brain science, engineering, med - all possible bc of fed $.

📌 I want to return to this over and over, it gives me hope 💞

Education about pollution prevention for small auto shops: youtu.be/FrC-x-QZ0T0?...

I work in a midsize science museum. In 2023 we upgraded our historic planetarium to include a full-dome digital projection system. We're wrapping up a complete remodel of our live animal exhibit. It now tells a cohesive story and creates more natural habitats. Both funded by federal earmarks.

My son is studying Astrophysics and receives federal grants and loans for his undergraduate!!!

Yeah I’ve done a ton of awesome science via NSF funding (my grants, the grant that funded my PhD). However, the most amazing things are the undergraduate and graduate students, and postdocs that I advised/mentored via this financial support. The people we work with, learn from, and mentor matter.

And here’s a subset at #AGU2024

Thanks

My current NSF funding focuses on the linguistics of ‘ōlelo Hawaiʻi (the Hawaiian language), with the goal of making materials that will be helpful for the community in teaching, learning, and using the language more widely.

I love this.

Punctuated Equilibria

🤩🤩🤩

Well, this wins the thread for me

For me too. Fan-girling here as a trained evolutionary biologist. 😁

I discovered that micro-RNA act as fine-tuning knobs in both cancer and wound healing. I also helped send spacecraft to Europa and Mars while at NASA JPL. Federal funding kick-started my career, too. My first project helped improve the EPA's water contamination models.

Yesss, society needs to know these kinds of things.. We take so much for granted that works in our lives... Don't really know how our tax money solves problems, diseases, science, new products etc Maybe we need a new feed for it... I'd love to read it... Get informed..

Maybe for our representatives to even get informed by accomplishments It was a brilliant question!

I can teach you the results from that one in a single image. Before the study water contamination was assumed perfect mixing when two water streams intersected: 50-50. ...turns out they don't mix much at all and rather deflect. Important if you want to predict where contamination will go!

Can you provide links to your work regarding EPA water contamination? Thanks!

Sure! I did the imaging with a high speed camera and food dye. Pedro Gomez and Ryan Austin did the solute mixing simulations with MATLAB. My images are in an Environmental Microbiology book chapter on bioterrorism prevention and monitoring: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thank You for Inspiring. I needed that today. Back to it.

That's SO Awesome. Thank You. Wish I'd studied more science. (Oh well, I work on advocating that/how business help their suppliers stop polluting water for now!).

Working with colleagues Gilead, we developed oral drugs to treat filoviruses like Marburg virus and ebolaviruses www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Yeah!

I helped teach improv comedy to financial engineers so they could be better communicators.

Helped to develop video games that increased self efficacy and decreased new HIV infections & opioid use disorder in lower income middle and high school students.

Curious to know more about this

I was one of the first people to undergo laser eye surgery to treat strabismus, paid for by Medicaid. My surgery was not 100% successful, but since then millions have been cured of one of the most common birth defects humans have.

My team identified parts of the human brain, present in the same location in all of us, that are specialized for face recognition, place recognition, the perception of bodies, speech sounds, and music, and understanding of language and each others' thoughts.

fangirling you so hard right now, well done.

Nancy is being modest. She is a neuroscience pioneer and has contributed so much to the field.

That’s being modest?!? Wow!

Yes. Nancy is AMAZING.

True! It is wonderful to see Nancy chiming in here. She is a huge talent and a great science communicator to boot

Cool! I just found out a few years ago I'm face blind. It explained so much.

I made a small exhibit about the art of scientific illustration, what it is, how it's made, and everyday uses. All using a spare art case, a specimen, and art supplies. That, or the time I worked on the first-ever genetic research into a newly described species of animal that made taxonomists cry.

I am mesmerized by the gulf between those two examples

It sure is, isn't it? The oral history of Bryobia abyssiniae is fraught with scientists realizing it was nature's middle finger to dichotomous keys. They literally approached the entomologist and said "You can't publish your findings - I spent ten years writing this ID book!"

That is bonkers. Are my google skills good enough to deduce that this is some sort of mite? Now I wish there was a wiki page where I could read about this drama

Just oral history. Peter Fashing was studying primates in Etheopia. Noticed the plants they were eating were coated in spider-mites. His dad, Norm Fashing, did a physiological analysis and deduced it was a new species that had a phenotype that was one big middle finger to dichotomous keys. /1

This is so cool. Thank you for taking the time to respond. Now I will go research dichotomous keys. Also, isn’t it amazing that even through literal science humans can’t stop being jackasses of the highest disorder to one another out of self interest.

I'll do one better. Richard Highton (THE salamander guy) once read a friend's published paper and politely e-mailed him "Hey, I think there's a flaw in your findings," and was continually ghosted. So he published a rebuttal in the next journal issue. They're not friends anymore.

I do want to emphasize that Dr. Highton is an incredibly soft-spoken man who loves his field. He's just happy if somebody else also like salamanders - no ego (despite being a veritable legend).

Norm went to a conference and announced his findings. A small handful of taxonomists frantically asked him not to publish it because the books they spent ten years writing would be rendered invalid. Others told him they needed to at least do genetic analysis. I was on the first genetics team.

Is this work available to view online at all? I’m very interested!!

Sadly, the only pictures I have are from about 8 years back - I don't know if it's still up.

I investigated magnetic nanorods for localized cancer treatments so that cancer patients would not feel so ill or have to lose all their hair to receive good treatment. That work is (was?) still in process to make sure it would be affordable, effective, and safe.

Wow. I have zero idea what these things are (extremely tiny? Carry poison for cancer) & how they’re used but THANKS for being creative and compassionate for perfect strangers.

📌

I am the first woman with a bachelors and the only person with a masters and the only scientist in my family because of the Pell grant. I also assisted in conducting high elevation bees surveys in the sky island corridor near the US-Mexico boarder bc of a NSF grant.

I have a nursing degree because of Pell Grants!

Helped feed the world and protect the environment by using integrated pest management.

Collectively we have failed as a scientific community on sharing why basic scientific research is critical. No time like the present to start!

For my PhD in env health, my research quantifying the health co-benefits for climate and transport policy was funded by NIH, NASA, and NOAA grants. This research helped level the policy playing field by enabling more comprehensive cost benefit analysis. It was an honor to receive that fed support.

NASA’s Kepler Mission showed that there are more planets than stars in our galaxy and that there are billions of potentially habitable Earth-size planets.

So you're saying there is a slight chance that one of them has an organism more stupid than DJT?

P.S. I helped with that

oops, forgot 🔭🪐

Some pretty interesting and useful research here. Potentially some big payoffs too

Me browsing this thread: Yeah baby! That's what I'm talking about! Science!

Thanks for this. Feels good to focus on some positives today.

*considers posting a link to pubmed... 🙃* (And explaining, ofc, that *I* didn't do it, but...yeah.)

(Oh. And NASA....)

A small SARE grant in the early 2000s allowed me to pay for soil samples and seeds to test soil organic matter improvement using a 4 year, 8 stage rotation scheme.

Yes, our soil is depleted of nutrients..

I led a team of amazing early childhood educators to train the Rhode Island infant toddler workforce in developmentally-appropriate care of our state’s most vulnerable children.

I can tell what you remember by how your eyes move 👀

📌

NSF & IMLS grants funded our digital online library of 94,000 herbarium specimens now available to researchers worldwide.

I monitor active volcanoes and study lava flows to better understand how we can model them — this helps us plan better for emergency management decisions.

Call me crazy, but that seems rather… important.

As someone who lives on one volcano and drives to my office on another volcano regularly, I am wont to agree.

Neat! My guess is that your work might have helped Jimmy Buffet figure out what to do! youtu.be/4WZdoOzL0_4?...

Unsure, it might have been viewed as a quid pro quo situation for preferential evacuation out of Margaritaville.

My dissertation work was funded through an EPA fellowship program. I sincerely doubt i’d have gotten a PhD without it. here’s one paper that came out of that work. It’s on seeds not sea lions so don’t be disappointed 😄

Part of this consortium www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

So glad we have so many smart, educated individuals who can do this complicated kinds of work in these many posts Thanks everyone!

We are implementing a new model of care to make healthcare delivery in Rheumatology more efficient!