Ken Field, PhD

The Ebola outbreak in the DRC has now crossed 10,000 cases and is getting close to 5,000 deaths. It is a staggeringly large outbreak and it continues to grow rapidly, with 96 new cases in the last 24 hours alone. #IDsky 🧪 insp.cd/sitrep-n164-...

🦇 Wishing everyone at #NASBR a fab meeting! We are sadly missing it this year, but if you know a student who loves bats and is curious about the genetics of speech and language, my lab has a funded PhD open until 16 Nov. Please share! www.findaphd.com/phds/project... @bat1kgenomes.bsky.social

Nice coverage of #NASBR 🦇 meeting.

Kenya has announced a second Ebola case, a family member of the first case, who was already under quarantine.

Hard to find the words tonight. Helen was an amazing journalist, smart, hard-working, clear-eyed. She was also a kind, generous person and a good friend. Sad beyond words.

In all seriousness, the NIH is proposing to change how research grants get reviewed and thus how funding gets distributed. The scientific community deserves to have their voice heard and this is your chance. Comment here: grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Earlier this year the scientific community successfully fought back on dramatic changes in Federal funding proposed by the Trump Administration.Now another RFI is proposing substantial changes that would damage peer review. This letter from SDB President Helen McNeill lays out the issue clearly 1/n

"Information from Russia has been incomplete, confusing, and contradictory." My colleague @martinenserink.bsky.social on what we know so far about the possible plague death in Russia and the implications. 🧪

🧵 1/ The Ebola outbreak in the DRC, with >8,000 confirmed cases and nearly 4,000 deaths, remains uncontrolled. There are treatment units but not enough health care workers to staff them. Those who are there face risk of infection, exhaustion, and trauma, some while not even being paid.

If you missed today's @rinpharma.bsky.social workshop, here are a few of my favourite "quick fixes" for some common #ggplot2 issues 📊 1. Use {ggview} to preview plots at the same size and resolution as you want to save them with ggsave() to avoid the annoying resizing #RStats #DataViz

I swear I'm not subtweeting anyone specific but if foundations and professional organizations want to support early career investigators in These Troubling Times they should change their grant submission process to accept grants written in NIH format with *no required modifications*

I just emailed the leadership at Pitt (my current employer), Stanford (my Alma Mater), and Johns Hopkins (my former employers) using this tool. It's easy. Let them hear our voices.

I'm all for the base R pipe. #rstats

Want to predict Lyme disease risk? Count the acorns, not the deer Findings from a 30-plus-year study challenge long-held assumptions about the factors that drive this tickborne disease. Read more: https://bit.ly/4wA4zmU 📷: DenisGiles / flickr

𝗪𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗯𝗲 𝗮𝗻 𝘂𝗽𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲-𝟮𝟳 𝗖𝗢𝗩𝗜𝗗-𝟭𝟵 𝘃𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗲? Yes. On 5/28/26 the FDA recommended a new formulation targeting the JN.1-lineage XFG variant 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗶𝘁 𝗯𝗲 𝗮𝘃𝗮𝗶𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲? Available now at walgreens. 1-2 mo for other locations.

💉 Where can you find accurate information on vaccines❓ ✅ American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP): downloads.aap.org/AAP/PDF/AAP-... ✅ Medical societies: cmss.org/programs-and... ✅ CIDRAP for in-depth evidence review: vaxintegrity.cidrap.umn.edu/evidence-rev...

Another very disturbing outcome of the war on science.

(1/4) TW: Some of today’s topics are heavy, but it’s a heavy day. Let’s talk about trauma from the events that happened last year. The lasting impacts of showing up to work every day with bullet holes still visible from our desks for nearly a year has taken its toll.

We do not seem to have learnt anything from the COVID-19 pandemic. We are still complacent instead of proactive. Prevention is still not a priority, in particular not low income areas... And Bundibugyo is a species, not a strain... 🧪 #MedSky #PoliSky #EconSky

Here is some of that good news you've been looking for.

It's been two and a half months since the Ebola outbreak in the DRC was declared and it is now the biggest the country has ever experienced and the second largest the world has ever seen. Dozens of cases continue to be reported each day across three separate provinces. 🧪 insp.cd/sitrep-n077-...

The White House has finalized changes to F, J & I student visa terms. Beginning Sept 15 2026, visas will generally be limited to four years, replacing the current Duration of Status policy. https://www.ascb.org/science-policy/white-house-finalizes-changes-to-international-student-visa-terms/

Finally posted an ad for the postdoc position on my new NSF-funded project—come help build a new method to study plants' responses to environmental variation in space and over time, and figure out interesting ways to use it! Apply by 23 August to ensure consideration. Details: buff.ly/qTvaqvD

What ever happened to free speech ? A US citizen when asked to turn over his phone at a US airport by customs agents who then demanded access. He gave them a code that scrubbed all data from the phone. He's now being charged with a felony. arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026...

So... I am mentioned in Dr. Fauci's (now public) diary. 1/9

Come join a great department at a PUI!

Ebola outbreak in the DRC: 2973 confirmed cases (+68) incl. 1309 deaths (+40) The outbreak has now touched 48 health zones across 5 provinces insp.cd/sitrep-n070-...

US research excels because generations of scientists have been free to pursue difficult questions, challenge conventional wisdom, and publish findings without political interference. The Trump admin wants to change that. @afthighered.bsky.social Full statement: www.aaup.org/news/aaup-af...

Insane new research. Scientists gave asthma patients free electric stoves to replace their gas stoves, then checked to see if symptoms improved. Not only did symptoms improve, ditching gas was *better than medicine.* Details in today's newsletter: www.climatecoloredgoggles.com/p/electric-s...

The recorded death toll from the Ebola outbreak in the DRC is about to cross 1,000 cases. In reality there have likely been a lot more deaths already. Many new cases appear to have no link to known cases, suggesting much of the spread is still happening in the dark.

Interesting paper on #TCR repertoire variation in wild-caught mice. While not controlled for genetics or exposure history, it gives important insights into the extent of variation in a natural setting. academic.oup.com/discovimmuno...

just got an email from my (former) chair that the university has acted & the state has approved the formal closure of my department. this was done without any faculty input on the decision or the process, & has ended a vibrant, growing (!), humanities department that won teaching and research awards

What is the word for that feeling when you return the rental car with the low fuel light on, having prepaid for gas?

woof ≈80% of assignments this summer term have essentially been just raw chatgpt/claude output, including assignments that required designing stuff in illustrator/affinity/canva. The battle is lost for asynchronous online courses.

Ebola outbreak in DRC still outpacing response A WHO official warns the outbreak could be 2 to 4 times larger than the number of confirmed cases, which are now around 1,800. Read more: https://bit.ly/4wARha6 📷: WHO/Josua Mulala Raymond

This is how you can do paired testing in #tidyplots 🍒 #rstats #dataviz #phd

$11 billion. That’s how much the Trump admin spent to pay retiring employees not to work through the Deferred Resignation Program (aka, fork in the road), according to a report from @publiccitizen.bsky.social. Many agencies are now frantically trying to rehire. www.citizen.org/article/11-b...

Should be an interesting read for bat 🦇 researchers…

Released 40 years ago today. Still the greatest day off.

The new situation report on Ebola in the DRC records 676 confirmed cases including 136 deaths. That's 41 new confirmed cases in the past 24 hours, most of them from Ituri province and 12 from North Kivu. Worth noting that outbreak is still expanding into new health zones. 🧪 insp.cd/sitrep-n27-m...

TFW you finally relocate the 1906 type locality of one of your focal species and now you know what it’s really supposed to look like. #iamabotanist

Just published new data on the clinical presentation of disease and genomic characterization of the 2026 Bundibugyo virus index case in Uganda. I love to see the rapid dissemination of science www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Cross-protection against Bundibugyo by Ebola and Sudan vaccines https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.10.731377v1

This video by @acapellascience.bsky.social has a cult following in #DevBio circles. It is just to perfect and the kind of content that is so important with science under attack www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydqR...