Daniel Becker

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

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.

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets The US Congress rejected sweeping cuts to science agencies. But the NIH, the NSF and NASA have had their spending slowed.

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers.

The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

The Senate may choose to vote together on the DHS and LHHS bills. Thus, a filibuster on DHS may mean no funding for NIH. What my colleagues are saying:

“Shut it down, public health will understand. I’ll work without pay again.”
- anonymous NIHer

see box 2 of the paper These studies illustrate how proteomics can enhance wildlife disease diagnostics and conservation monitoring. The application of CSF proteomics in diagnosing #neurodegenerative diseases (Neely et al. 2015) and the validation of urine proteomics as a non-invasive diagnostic tool for renal disease (Neely et al. 2018) demonstrate the broad translational potential of this approach...

ICB
"The ability to detect & monitor #disease at the molecular level can bridge critical knowledge gaps in wildlife health management, ultimately strengthening #conservation efforts.
see box 2 from
" #Proteomics Approaches to #Ecoimmunology..."
Amanda Vicente-Santos et al
doi.org/10.1093/icb/...

Fig. 1 Applications of proteomics in wildlife immunology. The left panel shows the main drivers of intra- and interspecific variance in immune phenotypes and their influence on larger-scale processes (adapted from Schoenle et al. 2018). Yellow boxes indicate drivers that can be studied using proteomics. The right panel shows three main categories of application of proteomics in ecoimmunology and example questions that have been addressed in the literature. The symbols (+, ●, *) match the drivers from the left panel. The animal silhouettes illustrate particular studies as examples of the wide range of species studied, where (a) Otčenášková et al. 2023, (b) Li et al. 2024, (c) Geng et al. 2015, (d) Kershaw et al. 2024, (e: Chaousis et al. 2021, (f) Gillis-Germitsch et al. 2021, (g) Neely et al. 2018, (h) Mangiaterra et al. 2022, (i) Raposo de Magalhães et al. 2020, (j) Vicente-Santos et al. 2023, (k) Ruengket et al. 2023, (l) Kuleš et al. 2024, (m) Kuleš et al. 2021.

ICB
#Proteomics Approaches to #Ecoimmunology:
New Insights into #Wildlife #Immunity and #Disease
by
Amanda Vicente-Santos ,
Natalia Sandoval-Herrera ,
Gábor Á Czirják ,
Benjamin A Neely ,
Daniel J Becker
doi.org/10.1093/icb/...

We’re Hiring! — Verena The Verena Institute is looking for a full stack developer or full stack development team (hereafter, the “Supplier”) to assist with the maintenance, documentation, and development of the Pathogen H...

We're looking for a full-stack developer! Help us build the best open data platforms for pandemic prediction in the world.

Probably a short-term contract, but if you're looking for a full-time gig, let's talk. Inquire within: www.viralemergence.org/blog/were-hi...

We’re Hiring! — Verena The Verena Institute is looking for a full stack developer or full stack development team (hereafter, the “Supplier”) to assist with the maintenance, documentation, and development of the Pathogen H...

We're looking for a full-stack developer! Help us build the best open data platforms for pandemic prediction in the world.

Probably a short-term contract, but if you're looking for a full-time gig, let's talk. Inquire within: www.viralemergence.org/blog/were-hi...

Do you have data on wildlife pathogens? The days to publish them on PHAROS before it was cool are counted.

@danjbecker.bsky.social is tirelessly advocating for the adoption of better data curation/archival practices: Proc. B is now the 2nd journal to list PHAROS as an archive for these data.

🧪🌎

we're excited to share that Proceedings B has also come on board for listing PHAROS as a recommended repository for open wildlife pathogen and parasite testing data! thanks to @royalsociety.org for the support. @viralemergence.org
royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/pages/f...

General_Instructions Instructions for Authors Authors who publish their papers under our open access model or who are NIH-funded will have their paper automatically depos

Exciting news to start 2026: for the first time ever, the PHAROS repository for wildlife disease surveillance is a journal-recommended home for your archived data!

Thanks to Integrative and Comparative Biology for taking the leap with us 🦠🔢➡️🌎💻💫 academic.oup.com/icb/pages/Ge...

Wildlife disease data, especially negative data, are one of the last types of data that ecologists just... don't share. We built a place for them to archive it - and now, journals are encouraging people to use it! Big congrats to @danjbecker.bsky.social on this push ❤️

Deconstructing host quality offers insight into disease ecology Disease risk varies among ecological communities because species differ in their host quality, that is, their contribution to parasite fitness. We propose a four-component framework of host quality that harmonizes terminology across plant and animal domains. Using this framework, we demonstrate how the host defense strategies of resistance and tolerance relate to distinct components of host quality. Easily extendable to multi-parasite systems, the framework also helps to identify new ways of examining the continuum between specialist and generalist parasites. Ultimately, breaking down and formalizing the components of host quality helps with synthesizing disease ecology across domains and unlocking relationships between biodiversity and disease risk.

Online now: Deconstructing host quality offers insight into disease ecology

We are excited to invite abstract submissions for talks and posters for the 2026 Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases meeting at Virginia Tech (June 2-4). Abstract submissions should be made by February 3, 2026 for consideration, using the google form here: cpe.vt.edu/eeid2026/abs...

Paramyxoviruses in Old World fruit bats (Pteropodidae): An open database and synthesis of sampling effort, viral positivity, and coevolution Author summary Paramyxoviruses are a family of viruses that include the human measles and mumps viruses as well as emerging zoonoses like Hendra and Nipah henipaviruses. These henipaviruses spill over...

We created a database of all published paramyxovirus detection attempts in pteropodid bats! Lots of sampling gaps and avenues for future study ⬇️ Excited to share this PhD chapter with @danjbecker.bsky.social and @viralemergence.org, out last month in @plos.org 🦇🦠🔓

journals.plos.org/plosntds/art...

Fig. 1 from the article: Hypothesized bidirectional pathways connecting the gut microbiome and diet in wild birds.

Fig. 2 from the article: Proposed methodology of DNA extraction, PCR, and amplicon sequencing to characterize aspects of avian diet and gut microbiome from the same fecal sample. Researchers can also use the same DNA extract for microbial metagenomics, and they can perform an RNA extraction on the same fecal sample for transcriptomics analysis.

NEW PAPER: how bird diets and gut microbiomes shape each other: synthesizing how diet drives microbiome shifts, how microbes may steer diet choices, and outlining key questions and methods for studying diet–microbiome links.

➡️ vist.ly/4gjuw

#ornithology #birds 🪶

Viral diversity and zoonotic risk in endangered species A growing body of evidence links zoonotic disease risk, including pandemic threats, to biodiversity loss and other upstream anthropogenic impacts on ecosystem health. However, there is little current...

NEW! 🦠🦧 We revisited a perplexing paradox: do wildlife really pose less of a risk to human health as they become more endangered? Turns out, it's sampling bias all the way down: conservation risks correlate with disease surveillance blindspots. 🔓 esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

My journal article with @danjbecker.bsky.social , @colincarlson.bsky.social and @viralemergence.org is featured on the @commsbio.nature.com homepage this week!! www.nature.com/commsbio/ check it out to see a cool bat picture by Brock Fenton!! 🦇💗🦇💗

Gestation length both shapes and is shaped by other life history traits in terrestrial eutherian mammals Abstract. The length of gestation in eutherian mammals, which is key to their reproductive success, is closely connected to other life history traits, body

Gestation length both shapes and is shaped by other life history traits in terrestrial eutherian mammals
doi.org/10.1093/evle...

Now in @evolletters.bsky.social by Thodoris Danis et al.

Viral epidemic potential is not uniformly distributed across the bat phylogeny - Communications Biology Phylogenetic and machine learning analyses reveal that bats (order: Chiroptera) are not a group with uniform viral epidemic potential: virulence, transmissibility, and death burden cluster within dist...

2025. Viral epidemic potential is not uniformly distributed across the bat phylogeny www.nature.com/articles/s42...

I'm excited to announce that the first chapter of dissertation is published in @commsbio.nature.com !!! and i feel super fortunate that it could be published during bat week 💗🦇 www.nature.com/articles/s42... @danjbecker.bsky.social @colincarlson.bsky.social @/amandavicentesantos

don't forget the breeding juncos!

a nice summary of new work led by @carolinecummings.bsky.social and in collaboration with @colincarlson.bsky.social and @viralemergence.org on the distribution of zoonotic risk across bat species.

Hope you can join us for three full days (June 2-4th, 2026) of great science in a beautiful setting!

close-up image of bat (Molossus nigricans) head area. Credit: Brock Fenton and Sherri Fenton.

just in time for #batweek --Phylogenetic and ML analyses show that viral epidemic potential is not uniform among bats: virulence, transmissibility, and death burden cluster within distinct clades.🦇@carolinecummings.bsky.social @colincarlson.bsky.social @viralemergence.org go.sn.pub/acnbg1

Super excited to finally share this! #CollectionsAreEssential

Museum collections and machine learning guide discovery of novel coronaviruses and paramyxoviruses Natural history museum collections are valuable but underutilized resources for viral discovery, offering opportunities to test hypotheses about viral occurrence across space, time, and taxonomic grou...

🦇🦠 New preprint - in a long-term effort led by the amazing @mayajuman.bsky.social, we've shown that the ML tools developed by @viralemergence.org let us efficiently screen museum collections for pathogens with pandemic potential

🎉🔓 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

"Health losses attributed to anthropogenic climate change," a brief communication in the journal Nature Climate Change. There's a map showing regions of the world, and pie charts of relevant studies as they apply to different health impacts like "heat-related deaths" and "maternal and child health"

🚨 NEW: Climate change is already causing 30,000 deaths per year - a global annual economic loss of $100-350B USD - but the true damage is probably 10x higher. Out TODAY in Nature Climate Change: the first systematic look at the science of "health impact attribution" 🔓 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Opinion | One Way the Earthbound Can Take Flight

A few words about purple martins—how to help them, how to help all migratory birds, how to help birds that don’t migrate—in this week’s essay. Gift link via @nytopinion: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...

Be sure to check out what a few of the ICB co authors of

Understanding #climate change threats to vertebrate #wildlife by studying #ecoimmunology across #biological scales

doi.org/10.1093/icb/...

are up to

Fagre

www.annafagre.com

Becker & Simonis

beckerlab.weebly.com

Figure 1. Coinfection and immune compromise in African lions (Panthera leo) under climate stress and increased abundance of hematophagous arthropods. Extreme drought conditions followed by heavy rainfall triggered the starvation and heavy tick infestation in herbivores, such as Cape buffalo (Syncerus cafferi). As African lions preyed on the herbivores, the ixodid ticks likely switched hosts and began feeding on the lions. Underlying immunosuppression, fueled by climatic conditions and ongoing canine distemper virus (CDV) circulation, exacerbated the clinical impacts of tick-acquired babesiosis

ICB
Understand more about how #climate change threatens #organismal health and #ecological stability in a myriad of ways -
read :
Understanding #climatechange threats to #vertebrate #wildlife by studying #ecoimmunology across biological scales
Fagre et al
doi.org/10.1093/icb/...