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T. Ryan Gregory

31 Dec 21, 5 tweets, 1 min read

I taught or co-taught 5 courses (total of 1,800 students) during the pandemic, including the development of a new DE evolution course and the massively multidisciplinary pandemics course (which we ran 3 times), all on a 20% teaching DOE as chair.

1/

I could have done no teaching at all, but I believe firmly in leading from the front, so I assigned myself a course in F20 so I'd know what everyone was going through. The pandemics course I took part in because it was awesome.

2/

I have one semester left in my term as chair (ending a year early because of senior admin). Yet I already feel survivor's guilt at not teaching in W22.

3/

I also feel sad and guilty about not continuing with all the great things we have been working on as a department in EDI, Indigenous issues, educational innovations, accessibility, and positive culture. The people in my department deserve the real credit for this, of course.

4/

But I just can't handle the moral injury anymore and I know it's only going to get worse.

5/5

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More from @TRyanGregory

T. Ryan Gregory

@TRyanGregory

1 Jan

Evolution 101. 🧵

Mutations occur as chance errors in replication. They're just mistakes in copying. Most have no effect. Some are detrimental to the organism (or virus), a few may happen to be beneficial -- this depends on the environment.

Three main evolutionary processes determine what happens to genetic variation once it arises (and these are independent of the process that generates new variation, namely mutation): genetic drift, natural selection, and gene flow.

We call different versions of a gene "alleles" and we can talk about the proportion of those versions in a population as "allele frequencies". Genetic drift is a random change in allele frequencies that occurs by chance.

Read 42 tweets

T. Ryan Gregory

@TRyanGregory

13 Nov 21

Leaders: Are you doing everything you can to help, given this situation? Are you actually making any of this worse (even if only indirectly by adding or failing to mitigate other stressors)? 🧵

The COVID pandemic has harmed researcher productivity – and mental health

Surveys show that women, parents of young children and people of colour are most affected by pandemic-related disruptions and need more support.

nature.com/articles/d4158…

‘I hope you die’: how the COVID pandemic unleashed attacks on scientists

Dozens of researchers tell Nature they have received death threats, or threats of physical or sexual violence.

nature.com/articles/d4158…

Read 8 tweets

T. Ryan Gregory

@TRyanGregory

8 Nov 21

A few thoughts on planning for the upcoming winter semester. 🧵

We're in a comfy little pocket here in Ontario right now, with low case numbers in most regions. But we've lost sight of the fact that the virus is surging around the world, including elsewhere in Canada.

1/

Restrictions are being lifted in Ontario. Unsurprisingly, cases are rising again here. The Rt value is above 1 again.

Kids <12 are still not vaccinated. We will probably need boosters over the winter as immunity wanes.

Faculty and staff are utterly exhausted.

2/

I understand the reason to get everyone back to campus in the W22 semester: $$$. I wish we could be more honest about that. We've been losing ancillary fees (food, parking, athletics) and real and potential enrollment dips continue to cause concern about revenue.

3/

Read 15 tweets

T. Ryan Gregory

@TRyanGregory

16 Sep 21

One of the students in my evolution course asked a great question about whether vaccination will make it more likely that resistant variants will evolve. Here was my answer. 🧵

Super short version:

No, vaccines don't cause variants. (And antibiotics don't cause resistance). That's not how mutation and natural selection work.

2/n

Longer version:

To answer this question, we need to consider that there are two different and independent processes at work. Then we can talk about the circumstances that make for a higher risk of new variants evolving.

3/n

Read 21 tweets