Dr. Raquel Fleskes

Our article from @ASABGproject on the oral microbial diversity in dental calculus from the Anson Street Ancestors is out now in Communications Biology! This project was developed out of community interest to understand diet and health of the Ancestors rdcu.be/dVnxZ

Anson Street African Burial Ground Project has gone international! We were able to travel to Portugal for the Society for Africanist Archaeology conference to present our community-led project in Charleston. 9 years of fighting for the Ancestors and still going strong!

Nobody wants to see reform of the entire NIH funding system - which is replete with inefficiency, corruption and stupidity - more than I do. But defunding grants based on keyword searches, and feigning ignorance of why overheads exist is not the way.

Moving to BlueSky - follow me at raquelfleskes.bsky.social 👋

Call to End Freeze on Federal Grants The White House's pause on federal grants threatens our nation’s scientific progress. This unprecedented freeze will impact students and trainees who rely on grants, funded investigators, and patients waiting for critical discoveries and treatments, in addition to having an economic impact for employees and employers at universities and organizations that are economic drivers in the U.S. Read SfN's full statement urging this Administration to lift the freeze to protect the health and security of our nation: bit.ly/4gq9i2I

By suspending all grant funding overnight is a huge waste of taxpayer money and a completely inefficient use of federal resources. Science and research make us competitive and even a short pause can lead to unconscionable delays in paying staff and running time-sensitive studies.

This is going to have devastating consequences for so many people. Getting rid of DEI will only increase the leaky pipeline. We all knew that Academia was built on crumbling foundations. I dont know if research can be sustained without federal funding support

In addition my partner, who is a funded USAID postdoctoral fellow, is being flown home from Liberia early, with orders to stop all field work

Latest from the NSF - they are pausing all payments from active grants. I was an SBE Postdoctoral Fellow whose salary was directly paid by the NSF - how are folks going to pay their rent???

The Institut Pasteur is leaving X. Due to serious issues observed since its acquisition by Elon Musk, the Institut Pasteur is suspending its activities on this platform starting today and invites its followers to join on other platforms. ➡️ linktr.ee/institutpasteur

Please RT – The Jensen and Pfeifer Labs at Arizona State University are searching for a joint postdoctoral researcher to study the evolutionary genomics of non-human primates, supported by NIH MIRA and NSF CAREER awards. More details on our lab webpage: spfeiferlab.org/positions/

In Top10 @ScienceMagazine 2024 breakthroughs of the year: Reconstructing ancient pedigrees + IBD segment sharing in aDNA! 😮😊 🎉 science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Researchers from @UPennAnth decipher diet and oral microbiome of 18th century African-descended individuals in Charleston, South Carolina (USA) as part of The Anson Street African Burial Ground Project @DNA_historical @tgschurr @sarahjane0060 nature.com/articles/s4200…

dear academics (mostly humanities): you can heal from whatever traumas drove you into academia in the first place by releasing “academic” as an identity and letting it just be a job. and whatever we thought it was is pretty much gone anyways.

I have been privileged to be working with the Descendants to help organize their voice in the fight to identify and rebury their Ancestors. Please spread the word about this project in efforts to raise awareness of the rights of descendants to lay their ancestors to rest!

Descendants of the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery are advocating for their rights to family members located in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Archaeological Research lab. Reburial is awarded, but legal issues continue to hinder the process jsonline.com/story/news/loc…

I'm recruiting a PhD student at Dartmouth College through the EEES graduate program this year! Application deadline is Dec 1. Please reach out if you are interested in #aDNA, population history, community engagement theory and methods development raquelfleskes.com/about-3

We were also interested to see if we could connect oral microbial diversity with pathology observed in the dentition of the Ancestors, but were unable to find any association - suggesting oral pathology and microbial diversity from dental calculus may not be directly correlated

When we were unable to authenticate any eukaryotic sequences to understand diet, we dove deeper and explored metabolic pathways, which suggested their diet was low in animal protein

Our article from @ASABGproject on the oral microbial diversity in dental calculus from the Anson Street Ancestors is out now in Communications Biology! This project was developed out of community interest to understand diet and health of the Ancestors rdcu.be/dVnxZ