I'm heartbroken to report a devastating loss of a great friend and young scientist.

telliamedrevisited.wordpress.com/2026/04/09/a...

Congratulations, Maitreya!

I don't understand why groups design plasmids, publish protocol papers centered on their use, and then not deposit them to Addgene.

Open, reproducible science should be our North Star, not an afterthought (or worse, never considered at all).

I would also like to thank the reviewers for their thoughtful, positive, and constructive feedback!

Evolution under vancomycin selection drives divergent collateral sensitivity patterns in Staphylococcus aureus | PNAS Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia is typically treated empirically with vancomycin, with therapy later tailored based on susceptibility results. How...

It was a pleasure working with this talented, multidisciplinary team: Dena Crozier, Arda Durmaz, Jason Gray, Justin Creary, Amira Stocks, @jeffmaltas.bsky.social, Robert Bonomo, Zachary Burke, and Jacob Scott.

👉 Paper link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
5/5

The big idea: antibiotic stewardship isn’t just about “what works now,” but also about anticipating where evolution is going next.

4/5

To make sense of this stochasticity, we introduced the Collateral Response Score, a probabilistic framework for forecasting how prior treatment history shapes future drug options.

3/5

The answer: evolution doesn’t just increase vancomycin resistance — it reshapes the bacterium’s response to the very drugs we’d normally switch to next. Some lineages become collaterally sensitive, while others become collaterally resistant, depending on the evolutionary path they take.

2/5

Thrilled to share our paper that just came out in PNAS!

We asked a deceptively simple question: What happens when S. aureus adapts to vancomycin, a critical first-line antibiotic?

1/5

Faculty Professor Associate - Full-Time | Vaughn Cooper We are recruiting Faculty microbiologists in three (3) different, complementary, and collaborative areas at the University of Pittsburgh associated with the School of Medicine. 1) Fundamental researc...

🚨 Microbiologists! We are recruiting Assistant / Associate Professors in 3 collaborative areas of our U. Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
1) MMG (my dept): fundamental research in med micro
2) Peds ID / I4Kids institute
3) Center for Vaccine Research
🔗 to all 3 w/info: www.linkedin.com/posts/vaughn...

Student-led experimental evolution reveals novel biofilm regulatory networks underlying adaptations to multiple niches We established a research-education partnership known as EvolvingSTEM that provides secondary school students the opportunity to conduct authentic research experiments centered on microbial evolution....

Sharing the most significant work from my group, led by the @evolvingstem.bsky.social team.

Come for the discoveries of how Pseudomonas adapts in biofilms, stay for the story of how they were discovered by thousands of young scientists in grades 9-12. 🧪🧫🧬🧵

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Another day of reminding everyone of Carl Sagan’s eerily accurate warning about the dangers of not being able to ask skeptical scientific questions to those in power or authority.

You and millions of other people rely on the NPR Network for trustworthy journalism.

NPR’s editorial integrity and independence are non-negotiable. It’s a promise we make to you – a promise we will fight to keep. Now, we need your support.

Donate today: n.pr/3EYClNR

NIH's work saves lives—& Trump is gutting it.

Straight from D.C. I headed to Seattle Children's to hear from researchers & patients alike about the importance of NIH funding—it's not just about lines in a budget, it's about lifesaving discoveries.

We ALL need to speak up to save it.

Bezos plans to sell ~$4.8 billion of Amazon stock. That's only 2.5% of his holdings in the company.

That sale roughly equals the proposed ~50% cut to NSF.

IOW, with modest endowment-level growth of Amazon, Bezos could fund the entire NSF shortfall into perpetuity.

www.cnbc.com/2025/05/02/j...

Given today's onslaught on HHS, I'm resharing my OpEd in @elife.bsky.social.
You are not alone, and you do have an important voice!
Many colleagues remain unaware that the foundation of US biomedical research is crumbling under attack. Tell them!
Full text 🔗 elifesciences.org/articles/106...

About fifty years ago, NASA strapped a message in a bottle to a rocket and flung it into the deep dark
It wasn’t supposed to go this far, but it did. Long past its mission, it’s still out there so far away now that a simple hello takes a day to reach it, and another day to hear if it says hello back

We're standing up for science in Columbus, OH

Flyer for stand up for science--more information available at www.standupforscience2025.org

TODAY IS THE DAY! 🧪☀️⬇️

Join us at the Lincoln Memorial or your local site to Stand Up for Science!

Happy birthday to the LTEE! 🎉

Happy 37th birthday to the LTEE!
the-ltee.org/history/

Happy 37th birthday to @relenski.bsky.social long term evolution experiment. Here's a beautiful summary: the-ltee.org/history/

Hey! I'm a disabled microbiologist and evolutionary biologist who is missing fingers on both hands. I've been doing research at the bench for over a decade.

It's definitely possible 🙂

a cartoon cat is standing in a hallway looking at something . ALT: a cartoon cat is standing in a hallway looking at something .

How my Monday is going so far: I wanted to speed up permutation test code. So, I parallelized it and looped it 10,000 times but forgot that the original code was already being looped. What should've been 30,000 total permutations turned into (30,000)^2 = 900 million.

Classic.

Under fascism, no one is safe.

Universities stayed quiet as the admin targeted DEI & foreign aid, censored research, etc.

Now, they face devastating cuts to indirect cost rates, threatening research & operations.

Silence won’t protect institutions. It won’t protect people; it never does.

I’ve been seething and grieving since yesterday’s Friday Night Massacre of NIH overheads, a seeming bit of bureaucratic trivial that will in fact destroy the US university system if unchecked. But I want to get away from budgets and rate breakdowns and F&A percentages for a moment.

Humor me?

NIH cuts billions of dollars in biomedical funding, effective immediately The move halts a large slice of money for most universities and research institutions virtually overnight, imperiling vital research in everything from cancer to heart disease.

Another assault on US competitiveness at a time when biomedicine is roaring with innovation, an own-goal in a high-stakes international tournament. Of course the real losers are American people needing medicines and cures.

www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

Many of us, and especially early-career scientists, are facing huge challenges now.

However, one of the joys of science is to delve into thinking about research. In that spirit, I offer this blog post on starting a microbial evolution experiment.

telliamedrevisited.wordpress.com/2025/02/08/h...

Interpretation for the non-scientists: When faculty get NIH grants, the University gets some extra cash to make sure the research is supported. NIH just cut that $$ by a LOT. That means Unis are less likely to support research. Most research in the US is done at Unis, so... it's bad 🧪