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Darby Saxbe Profile picture
@darbysaxbe
Feb 4 • 8 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
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🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science. Image
More keywords Image
More keywords Image
More Image
Decision tree that has been sent to Program Officers at NSF Image
These keywords could show up in the text of ANY grant involving human participants. If you say you're going to study men and women, you get flagged. If you say you're going to control for socioeconomic status - totally standard practice - you get flagged. Disability? Flagged.
The word "systemic" is on the banned list, so if I study systemic inflammation & health, flagged. If I study political science, flagged. If I study trauma, flagged. Keep in mind that the largest mental health provider in the country is the Veteran's Administration, but we're now
Policing research on trauma. If I study anxiety via threat-biased attention, the word "biased" gets me flagged. You can't design a study of humans without using at least one of these terms, which means that biomedical, brain, social science research is now on ice in the USA

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More from @darbysaxbe

Darby Saxbe Profile picture
Jan 29
A personal story about how the potential grant funding freeze might affect science. Right now, I'm in my fourth year of a 5-year NIH grant and my last year of funding is supposed to start February 1st. I'm supporting a postdoc, two graduate students, and two lab managers
on this grant, and am collecting time sensitive longitudinal data from families and kids. I recruited this sample when the parents were pregnant and am now assessing the kids' brain and behavior development when they turn 7.
My study design is based on kids in my sample being a certain age in order for me to collect the data, so even a temporary pause in funding disrupts the whole study. NIH has already given me the last four years of funding, so 80% of the budget has been spent,
Read 8 tweets
Darby Saxbe Profile picture
Jan 28
I need people to understand how difficult it is to get an NIH grant. You spend months writing a proposal, following strict guidelines that include a detailed multiyear budget, bios of everyone on your team, plans for participant safety & ethical conduct. Then you send it off -1/n
And if you didn't make any mistakes, it goes on to peer review. Three outside researchers with deep expertise in your research area write critiques covering multiple facets of your research (whether your topic is important, your methods are sound, your team is qualified)
And score your proposal based on their critiques. If you are lucky and your proposal scores in the top half of all proposals received by the NIH in that cycle, then you get discussed in a study section meeting by a few dozen peer reviews who pick apart every possible limitation
Read 12 tweets
Darby Saxbe Profile picture
Jan 12, 2023
This blew up way more than I expected! It's been fun to see people's enthusiasm, but there's also been criticism of the fact that we did this on a weekend. I want to address this head-on, because frankly I agree: we should NOT normalize toxic overwork in academia! Some context:
The whole lab voted on when to schedule this (I originally pitched a Friday!). Students preferred Sunday so they would not have to schedule around classes & clinical work. We picked the last day of our 3.5 week winter break so we'd feel well-rested after some time off.
I made it clear that PiaD was optional & non-evaluative; people should participate only if they really wanted to be there. You could argue that this was still coercive because people want to please their mentor & don't want to miss opportunities, which raises an important point:
Read 6 tweets
Darby Saxbe Profile picture
Jan 11, 2023
This weekend, my lab tried a new experiment: we wrote a paper in one day! Inspired by @JnfrLTackett, we blocked out a whole Sunday, & in <8 hours, we cranked out a surprisingly decent full-length draft. Plus, we had fun, ate a lot of snacks, & fit in a Starbucks run. Here's how! Image
Planning ahead is key. We spent a lab meeting last semester deciding what findings we wanted to cover in the PiaD, & selecting the first author (aka point person for the day): @lizzieaviv, because she'd already worked with some of the constructs we wanted to include in the paper.
We based the rest of the author order on seniority within the lab, with a coin flip to decide where to place our two 2nd-year students. Lizzie and I met a few days before our PiaD to finalize an outline for the paper and map out a rough hour-by-hour schedule.
Read 13 tweets

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