Dan Larremore
@danlarremore.bsky.social
Prof | CU Boulder BioFrontiers Institute + Computer Science | Santa Fe Institute | LarremoreLab.github.io Founder | CevianLabs.io
"We're all worried," as what it means to do research (in my field, Theoretical CS) seems to be shifting, and shifting fast. What to do? Senior researchers must lead by example, knowing that not everything will pan out. What I'm suggesting below may not work everywhere, but here's my own advice: 1/
I'm excited to share a preprint that's been years in the making: the idea took shape during the COVID pandemic. Anecdotally, people would sometimes spread COVID at work but not at home, and vice versa. Why? One explanation would be if infectiousness is fleeting...
How bursty infectiousness shapes epidemic dynamics
An epidemic’s expected course is determined by the magnitude and timing of a typical person’s infectiousness — captured, in turn, by the basic reproduction number and the generation-time distribution....
medrxiv.org
Applications are open for SFI's 2027 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships. SFI is looking for recent Ph.D. graduates with strong quantitative and computational skills who want to pursue independent, transdisciplinary research. Deadline: September 30, 2026 Apply: santafe.edu/sfifellowship
After just a month of seeing loads of AI-generated slide decks, I yearn for a crystal clear, ugly, Beamer wall-of-bulletted-lists with equations and terrible graphics.
New mentoring strategy: If a student comes into your office without a breakthrough, try gently reminding them to "do a breakthrough."
We're hiring! Open area search for assistant professor of sociology at UC Berkeley. Come be our colleague! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05416
Assistant Professor - Open Field - Sociology
University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!
aprecruit.berkeley.edu
📅 Save the date! The Metascience 2027 conference will be held in Montreal on June 14–16, 2027. Metascience 2027 is a global gathering for knowledge sharing, community building, and opportunities to define research and intervention priorities to improve science.
Save the Date: Metascience 2027 Set for Montreal
The Tanenbaum Open Science Institute and Center for Open Science (COS) are bringing the Metascience 2027 conference to Montreal on June 14–16, 2027.
cos.io
If you look beyond the number of cases and deaths things look bad too: More than 80% of new cases are not known contacts, so transmission chains are being missed. Two thirds of Ebola deaths happen in the community without ever receiving care in a health facility.
A new trial is launching to test a drug for Bundibugyo virus: an antiviral that might stop its spread. www.cidrap.umn.edu/ebola/gilead...
Gilead launches Ebola antiviral trial in DR Congo as cases near 2,000
The antiviral would be given as post-exposure prevention.
cidrap.umn.edu
If students are simply uninterested in the core bargain of a class like this, it’s hard to know what to do. You teach the material because you think it’s important they know it; they don’t give a shit, but want the credential; and the university wants their money. Your main option is “pretend”.
Andrew Heiss@andrew.heiss.phd · 4w agowoof ≈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.
Throughout your scientific career, you will read hundreds of dense manuscripts. 📚 As the literature stack piles up, remembering exactly where you saw a specific methodology or finding can be tough. Here is how I use a relational database to keep track of it all (and et al.). 👇
Annual gripe that @github.com "education" verification process remains complete garbage. This year they want to know why I'm not on campus during the summer, and require location (and a picture of why you're at that location...? unclear...). And the process still fails.
In June of 2026 GOLIKEHELLMACHINE, a underground thought leader, called LinkedIn "alternate reality social media". He's right--Linkedein increasingly doesn't resemble the reality most people are living in. The question is, why? Here's the thing that no one warns you about:
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE@golikehellmachine.com · 4w agoi open linkedin approximately every three months or so and every time i do, the posting there gets so much weirder than it was three months prior. alternate reality social media.
PhD position (Melbourne, Australia) Mechanistic modelling of the epidemic dynamics of vector-borne zoonotic diseases in Australia with Oliver Eales, Freya Shearer, Marya Potorek at University of Melbourne More details: http://iddjobs.org/jobs/2561
Claude loves separating authors on academic talk slides with \cdot, like Sam Zhang ⋅ Katie Spoon ⋅ Hunter Wapman
Dan Larremore@danlarremore.bsky.social · last mo.Slides at an academic conference in the age of AI… Claude has an incredibly obvious style, which is better than average but undifferentiated! needs bigger fonts. 🫣
Slides at an academic conference in the age of AI… Claude has an incredibly obvious style, which is better than average but undifferentiated! needs bigger fonts. 🫣
“When we write grants, we aim to create suspense. When we write papers, surprise.” Kevin Gross at #ICSSI2026
We treat respiratory infections like the cold and flu as minor nuisances. The evidence increasingly suggests they’re anything but. I'm excited to be an advisor for Intercept, a $500M bet to make them a thing of the past. interceptfund.substack.com/p/e9438538-4...
Intercept
Intercept is a $500M philanthropic initiative that will catalyze the development and deployment of the technologies needed to radically reduce the burden of respiratory infections, and eventually elim...
interceptfund.substack.com
We regret that our event on Extreme Heat: Improving governance and strengthening action around the world has been cancelled due to the red extreme heat warning issued by the UK Met Office. Our apologies to everyone who was planning to attend the event.
In what may be one of Earth’s craziest forms of mimicry, researchers in 2023 reported a species of rove beetle that grows a termite puppet on its back to fool real termites into feeding it. Learn more during #InsectWeek: https://scim.ag/4mM2aS9
Bonus: I did some research once and decided the program I managed was likely the longest continuous disease surveillance program in the country, going back at least 50 years (now more). Of respiratory disease in basic trainees! That's how fundamental it is.
Off the top of my head, I can think of a half dozen instances when respiratory disease prophylaxis (adenovirus, flu, Bicillin) was stopped and outbreaks hit right on cue. Lost training and readiness, hospitalizations, sometimes even deaths. Preventable.
I used to do respiratory disease surveillance as an epidemiologist for the Army. Trainees at Basic come from all over the country, bringing local germs with them. They live, train and sleep in close quarters, under huge physical strain. Training camps are famous as outbreak hotspots. 1/2
If you're an institution looking to bump up your US News ranking, I just want to point out that every school I've been affiliated with (SDSU, NYU, Harvard, Stanford) has gone up in ranking. I'm not saying it's causal — but you could hire me and find out.
RFK Jr. says that HPV vaccine is “dangerous and defective”. A new study from England shows that HPV vaccines have reduced deaths from cervical cancer to ZERO for women aged 20-24. Significant reductions in older age groups were observed as well, though the latter have lower vaccination coverage.
Cervical cancer mortality trends following HPV vaccination in England, 2001–24: an analysis of population-based mortality data
Our findings provide the first robust national-level evidence, albeit observational, that high HPV vaccination coverage is associated with a substantial reduction in cervical cancer deaths. This is sh...
thelancet.com