Meera Sundaram

Here is the "effective payline" for each institute, estimated (by Claude) as the percentile where one can expect 80% probability of funding from a logistic regression fit. The effective payline has gone from a historic ~12% to 6% in 2025.

Stand up for Science Stand up for Science

Philly Stand Up for Science rally is 11am at City Hall, this Saturday March 7 fight2win.standupforscience.net/Philadelphia...?

Excited to share our work at #DROS26!

I’ll be giving a talk today at 11 AM in the Patterning, Morphogenesis, and Organogenesis session.

Also come check out posters from our lab: Elizabeth (F 2-4 pm), Debbie (S 1:30-3:30 pm)

Congratulations to Irini Topalidou on her GSA Mentorship Award!

#celegans #womeninSTEM

@irinakitop.bsky.social

Congratulations to Judith Kimble on her Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal!

#celegans #womeninSTEM

Turkey Texas! Last Saturday in April.

After claiming last June he "completely and totally obliterated" Iran's nuclear program, President Trump launched yet another illegal, ill-conceived attack on Iran. (1/2)

These escalations only put American lives, at home and abroad, at greater risk and drag our country towards another endless war.
 
The House and Senate must each vote on a War Powers resolution immediately to stop Trump's reckless warmongering. (2/2)

DO NOT LET ANY MEMBER OF CONGRESS WALK AROUND THINKING THEIR CONSTITUENTS DON’T CARE

Trans folk are people who deserve to be able to live their lives

Jeffrey Epstein’s tissue samples ignited a furor in the Harvard lab of George Church Exclusive: Harvard geneticist George Church knew more about Jeffrey Epstein's activities than he has previously said, before accepting new donations from the sex offender.

At a Harvard lab in 2013, the Personal Genome Project had an odd request.

There was a push to fast-track one person's tissue sample for genome sequencing, ahead of some that had been waiting for years.

When the person's ID was revealed, uproar broke out:

Leader of Columbia Brain Institute Quits Over Friendship With Epstein

Breaking:

Richard Axel, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and professor, just announced that he was resigning as a co-director of a flagship neuroscience institute at Columbia University because of his friendship with Jeffery Epstein.
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/n...

Latest from @pujol-lab.bsky.social shows how a transient #aECM factor organizes furrow collagens in the #Celegans cuticle

Pre-cuticle DPY 6 acts as a blueprint for aECM periodic organization in C. elegans https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.21.707041v1

Congratulations to @bradylabupenn.bsky.social (@penncbio.bsky.social/ @rtaatpennmed.bsky.social), recipient of the 2026 @asbmb.bsky.social Ruth Kirschstein Maximizing Access in Science Award! tinyurl.com/2s83nn48

GIFT LINK to this very important news story:
share.inquirer.com/sIiF3w

If Dems were to take control of the House after midterms, what is your/their Priority List ? Is there any consensus on this?

‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, i...

Imagine taking a vacation abroad & being disappeared to a jail for 40+ days for no reason.

That’s what this Admin is doing to foreign tourists. It's outrageous & hurting our businesses. 

When will other nations start holding the Admin accountable for mistreating their citizens?

Quakertown parents, groups demand release of students in police clash Civil rights groups and parents gathered in front of the Quakertown Police Department Saturday demanding answers for the violent confrontation Friday.

INBOX: the police chief of Quakertown, Pa., led a group of plainclothes officers to disrupt a peaceful high school student sidewalk protest yesterday.

They threw an underage girl to the ground, choked her, and disconnected all calls to the detention center where she and others are currently held.

Alysa Liu: "THAT'S WHAT I'M FUCKING TALKING ABOUT" 🗣️

Gen Z, Alysa Liu, wins gold 🏅 for USA with a happy-go-lucky performance.

Somehow she tunes out the world burning. Isn't bothered by being on the most competitive stage in the world.

Simply loses herself in her love 🤍 of skating.

FLOW. ⛸️

Nematode eggshells: A new anatomical and terminological framework
This paper revisits decades of confusion in nematode eggshell anatomy, corrects errors in the literature, and proposes a practical hexalaminar framework with clearer terminology. 🧪
doi.org/10.1051/para...

Break to build: fracture as a unifying morphogenetic strategy Summary: This Review presents mechanical fracture as a unifying morphogenetic strategy and describes how developmental systems actively exploit mechanical fracture to drive morphogenesis, reproduction...

Our latest with @torres-sanchez.bsky.social journals.biologists.com/dev/article-...
Breaking isn’t always a bad thing! Think of birth, seed release...
We highlight how living tissue not only tolerates fractures but actively fracture to grow, shape, reproduce, or adapt – across species and scales.

Stoked to present our latest, superbly led by Chris et al & @torres-sanchez.bsky.social We tackled a fundamental problem – how tissues are patterned during development – found that geometry-constrained ECM fractures pattern the myocardium in the vertebrate heart 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Katz, Barker et al 2023 PLoS Genetics

Matrix delaminations precede formation of #Celegans cuticle ridges (alae)

A transient apical extracellular matrix relays cytoskeletal patterns to shape permanent acellular ridges on the surface of adult C. elegans Author summary Animal surfaces are often decorated with intricately shaped structures such as denticles, ridges, or scales that are composed of extracellular matrix materials. We don’t understand how ...

Another example of ECM fracture is the #Celegans #aECM journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...

Development builds... But it also breaks!

Planarians split to reproduce. Hydra tears open a mouth. Embryos fracture to make cavities.

Failure? No. Fracture is essential to development.

Our new review on fracture physics and its uses in development:

journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Graduate student union reaches tentative agreement with Penn, averting strike The agreement comes after more than a year of negotiations between the University and the union, which represents more than 3,700 graduate workers with teaching and research positions at Penn.

"Penn reached a historic tentative agreement with its graduate student union on Monday night, narrowly averting a strike that would have impacted teaching and research across the University."

📰 www.thedp.com/article/2026...

I don’t know who needs to hear Jesse Jackson leading the kids on Sesame Street in this beautiful call-and-response reminding them that every child is somebody, but here it is