Theresa Cheng

@tcheng.bsky.social

Developmental scientist and educator at Stanford. Interested in learning, brain development, adolescence, care, and mutual aid. Based in Los Angeles

I don’t know if he intended it to be this way, but Brian Goldstone wrote a book that every education policy person and every educator needs to read. This is why: 1) This is a book about children. They are there in nearly every scene, and every setback in their families’ quest for a home is…

There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

Working and Homeless in America (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

bookshop.org

Some science cuts in Trump's proposed FY27 budget ❌ NIH: -$5B, including all of NIEHS, NIMHD, FIC & NCCIH. ❌ EPA: -4.6B ❌ NSF: -3.8B ❌ NASA Science: -3.4 Billion ❌ NOAA: -1.8B, including the entire Oceanic and Atmospheric Research budget ($605M) ❌ AHRQ: All of it. -$296M, 100% And there's more.

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted. What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards. Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

Graph of award probability of R35 and R01 from NIH factbook as a function of review rank percentile. As is apparent, 2025 is a significant departure, with lower award probabilities at all scores <40 and significant departures from norm, where even being in the top 10% is no longer a nearly certain indicator of success.

Data source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302

I am not alarmist. I'm writing what needs to be said. Higher ed is on the brink of collapse and so much could be lost. College, alongside the military, is a second family for many adults. It is where people fall in love, pick sports teams, meet lifelong friends, and form a professional identity. A 🧵

🚨 A new rule would let career scientists like NSF/NIH program officers be replaced by political appointees Already 14,000+ public comments, deadline is Friday 📣 Comments can be short. Courts consider them—and scientists with NSF/NIH experience are especially impactful Speak up! shorturl.at/WKuBj

Update: My contract won't be cancelled due to an internal fund. This is a personal relief after weeks of uncertainty! Still thinking about: how answering deep questions in basic science often takes years, and how much we are losing now in talent, infrastructure, and intellectual freedom

Theresa Cheng@tcheng.bsky.social · last yr.

Welp. I'm a postdoc whose NIH funding source has just been cancelled in a mass grant termination targeting Harvard. We've been using these funds to study how puberty affects the brain and adolescent mental health.

Welp. I'm a postdoc whose NIH funding source has just been cancelled in a mass grant termination targeting Harvard. We've been using these funds to study how puberty affects the brain and adolescent mental health.

Excited to share the DIMS Dashboard—a tool for displaying multimodal, extracted time series alongside the original video source! It’s designed to support and inspire a richer qualitative–quantitative research cycle. Huge thanks to my amazing collaborators and mentors who made this possible! 🙌

wimpouw@wimpouw.bsky.social · last yr.

Postprint: osf.io/987fm_v1 To appear in Proceedings of Cog Sci 2025 DIMS Dashboard for Exploring Dynamic Interactions and Multimodal Signals. The interdisciplinary @graceqmiao.bsky.social in the lead here! Developing a dynamic dashboard for a quali-quanti social neuroscience research cycle!