So happy to be at @eeid2026.bsky.social! It was a great opening night. The Walsman lab will be hiring a postdoc this fall. If you want to chat about eco-evolutionary disease models and working in China, find me here or at walsmanjason@gmail.com.

Linking within-host dynamics to between-host dynamics for microparasites can be really difficult, e.g., Partial Differential Equations are hard to work with. Ruijiao elegantly derived a simplified Ordinary Differential Equation model that is much easier to work with! doi.org/10.1111/1365...

Integrating infection intensity and aggregation into the dynamics of pathogens with within‐host replication

We bridge micro- and macroparasite theory with a model tracking pathogen load heterogeneity. By incorporating load-dependent mortality and within-host pathogen growth, we show how pathogen load aggre...

doi.org

How do you feel about LLMs being trained on your publications and other copyrighted work? I know how I feel. This and cases like it are going to determine a lot about how we move forward with AI, especially given the lack of federal regulation. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Elsevier vs Meta: first science publisher sues over scraped research papers

Science publishing giant Elsevier has joined a class-action lawsuit against Meta that alleges the reproduction of copyrighted works in developing the Llama AI model.

nature.com

Come work with me at Penn State on the dynamics of pathogen elimination. We're hiring up to two positions to support our work on measles/rubella and foot and mouth disease elimination @ciddpsu.bsky.social

Postdoctoral Scholar - Ferrari lab

APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS: CURRENT PENN STATE EMPLOYEE (faculty, staff, technical service, or student), please login to Workday to complete the internal application process. Please do not apply here, a...

psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com

Such cool work! Some things I really like about it: 1. A purpose-built AI tool, not something trying to be a super-intelligent generalist. 2. Human vision and direction, AI grunt work that can be strictly verified. 3. Aiding, not replacing, human creativity. spectrum.ieee.org/ai-proof-ver...

AI and Humans Verify Fields Medal Proof for the First Time

How did AI help solve a 24-dimensional puzzle in just two weeks? Dive into the world of sphere packing and find out.

spectrum.ieee.org

The internet contains a staggering 10^14 gigabytes of data, and rising exponentially. Meanwhile, the biosphere contains at least 10^29 gigabytes of data. (Links to sources in comment)

AI tools advance individual careers but contract the focus of science as a whole. I think that strong individual incentive means AI tools in science will continue to grow in use. The questions remain how we want to adapt by shaping incentives, standards, etc. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Artificial intelligence tools expand scientists’ impact but contract science’s focus - Nature

Artificial intelligence boosts individual scientists’ output, citations and career progression, but collectively narrows research diversity and reduces collaboration, concentrating work in data-rich a...

nature.com

We collect pathogen load data all the time to tell what proportion of hosts are infected and also how infected they are. Our new theory shows that trends in the variance of pathogen load can reveal underlying mechanisms, e.g., what kind of resistance frogs are evolving. doi.org/10.1098/rsif...

Looking for a postdoc to work with existing SNP data from parasites of guppies across Trinidad. How do river structure, host specialisation, and host behaviour structure parasite population genetic structure and evolutionary potential? Join me in Stockholm! Email me :D su.varbi.com/what:job/job...

Postdoktor i parasiters populationsgenetik

Zoologiska institutionen är en av de äldsta institutionerna vid Stockholms universitet och har en lång historia av grundläggande och tillämpad djurforskning, från leddjur till stora däggdjur. I

su.varbi.com

I'm thrilled to say that I have accepted an assistant professor position at Duke Kunshan University. I will be moving to Kunshan, China this summer and recruiting a postdoc soon thereafter (Chinese language proficiency beneficial but not required).

Hooray! Kind of... mostly... Hooray? I'll adopt Cherie Briggs' advice that anything besides "We reject this paper forever" is a win.

1/ Anyone else feeling a little low? 🙋‍♀️ The public health news cycle has been heavy lately, but something that’s helped me is intentionally stopping to notice where progress is happening to remind ourselves what sustained investment and science can actually do.Here are a few bright spots👇

Couldn't agree more that “Solutions to sustainable development goals require close Sino-US cooperation". I'm curious to see how these partnerships contribute to that over the coming years. newsletters.qs.com/how-are-us-a...

How are US and Chinese universities keeping partnerships alive amidst political tensions?

QS MidWeek Brief - September 17, 2025. China and the US are collaborating in some surprising ways. And, how is the MBA gender pay gap being addressed?

newsletters.qs.com

Thanks @judithmank.bsky.social for this thoughtful piece on GenAI in scientific writing! academic.oup.com/evlett/artic...

Editorial: Accountability, voice, and trust - responsible use of GenAI in scientific publishing

Over the last few years, the development and rapid advancement of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatG

academic.oup.com

🦇 Two PhD positions available on our new ARC Discovery Grant: "From Diversity to Disease: Viral Ecology, Evolution and Persistence in Bats" The project will investigate how viral diversity evolves and persists, with a particular focus on recently discovered henipaviruses in Australian flying foxes.

The CDC updated its vaccine page to claim "vaccines do not cause autism" is "not evidence-based" and studies were "ignored." This is an outrage. Decades of research have found no link. This isn't science, it's RFK Jr. using the CDC as propaganda. Children will die because of this.

We measure ecological resilience in terms of a few variables at a time with widely differing choices of variables for different investigators, with conflicting outcomes. We need strategies to navigate diverse and conflicting resilience variables. Preprint: 10.22541/au.176219659.90163271/v1

#microsky #mevosky @spp2389.bsky.social A PhD position is available in my lab to work on: Emergence and self-organisation of bacterial metabolism in consortia of cross-feeding bacteria. Please RT Deadline: 12.11.25 More infos 👇 shorturl.at/rAKAT

Locally acquired Chikungunya virus infection on Long Island. Maybe time to dust off my many-times rejected Chik proposal... www.yahoo.com/news/article...

New York confirms 1st locally acquired case of chikungunya virus in 6 years in US

The mosquito-borne disease is most common in tropical and subtropical regions.

yahoo.com

I'm v excited to be recruiting a PhD student to work on badger behaviour and ecology! Starting date is March 2026; see the ad here, or message me for more details: www.gregalbery.me/s/March-2026...

We know that wildlife provisioning can promote or inhibit infectious disease spread, depending on things like food quality. What about pathogen evolution? Using math with a focus on birdfeeders and house finches, we found that high quality food selects for higher virulence! doi.org/10.1086/738726

What is the role of AI in ecology? A great piece by a collaborator of mine discusses this thoughtfully, particularly with respect to analyzing sensor data. doi.org/10.1111/2041...

Integrating AI models into ecological research workflows: The case of terrestrial bioacoustics

Data collected by autonomous sensors, including camera traps and acoustic recorders, have enormous potential to generate new scientific insights in ecology and related fields. Modern machine learn...

doi.org

New article out today. Read it here: open.substack.com/pub/kareemca...

When the same journal immediately loves paper A but rejects paper B without review and you know that paper B fits the journals goals better than A... A good reminder that so much depends on the editors/associate editors/reviewers that you get and their perception that day! Gotta just try again.

Stressed by a crisis for public perception of science and elated by my Indiana Pacers forcing a game 7, I have been thinking about what sports teach us all about the uses of data and expertise. (1/4)

A grant proposal, which I and others spent dozens of hours on, was returned without review today. This is because NSF will no longer be making awards through the Biological Integrations Institute solicitation. I am disappointed and furious at this latest ripple of the massive attack on science.

I think there are valid criticisms of science but I prefer it to the alternative of "just making stuff up"

Standing host genetic variation typically protects in case of disease invasion, right? Well... Exploring implications of my new paper with @sabarra.bsky.social , a thread (1/5). doi.org/10.1007/s002...

New paper: We know the minority of hosts hold the majority of macroparasites (aggregation). What about fungal pathogens? Turns out, they are MORE aggregated than macroparasites, lognormally distributed, and the distribution carries signatures of epidemic stage. doi.org/10.1098/rspb...