Michelle L Fearon, Ph.D.

I'm so excited finally get this paper out! Here we show that habitat quality impacts changes in pollinator viral prevalence through two co-occurring pathways: habitat can have mixed direct effects on pathogen prevalence AND high-quality habitat drives the dilution effect

Please RT! I am looking for a new postdoc in eco/evo starting January 2025. I am geographically restricted to the southwest part of the country due to family reasons, but am willing to consider opportunities elsewhere. CV: drive.google.com/file/d/1jOxCnM…

DEI is important to me. As one of the few Chicanos in the USA with a PhD in Eco/Evo, below is a sample DEI statement I used last year for job apps. It is important to me to put myself out there, but also show younger folks like me what we can achieve. drive.google.com/file/d/1GJnJye…

Project 2025 shifts taxes from the wealthy to the middle class— a family of 4 earning $100K would suffer a $2,600 tax hike, while a family earning $5 million would get a $325,000 tax cut. cc: @Brendan_Duke

An assassination attempt by a mentally ill person using an AR-15 is a terrible reason to vote for the man who made it easier for mentally ill persons to obtain AR-15s.

I’m so excited to share that I’ll be flying to space with @blueorigin 💙🪶 I’ll become one of the first ~100 women in space and the first female astronaut from West Virginia.

Please RT!! Job alert 🚨🚨in my lab, expected pay is $26-36/hr. Interested in proteins, brains, and immunohistochemistry? iDISCO and probing neural circuits? Interested in machine learning and using DeepLabCut to quantify tadpole behavior? Then this job is for you 😌🐸🐸

Our lab group is looking to recruit a PhD student this year - we want to explore Michigan and changing winters. We have an incredible group and department. Interested? docs.google.com/forms/d/19NcRB…

Covering the deathwatch around whether Biden survives as a candidate, while ignoring the fact that this is truly an existential election, less about Biden and Trump, and more about whether our democracy survives , is simply not what mainstream press, much less everybody else, should make as their singular focal point. Don’t ignore it but please, please get a grip and make your focus what really matters. End

Just finished reviewing several hundred applications for a very selective PhD program (3% acceptance rate). I’d like to share a few tips on how to write a strong research statement and avoid common mistakes. First, the sad reality: we receive many statements that seem to be written by ChatGPT. Using ChatGPT to refine your writing is fine, but overrelying on it is a recipe for failure, because ChatGPT produces just average outputs. If you’re applying for a selective program, you don’t want to be average, you want to stand out. So: Tip 1: Be unique, show what unique contribution you can bring. Many candidates focus solely on how a PhD would advance their career. This is a mistake. You don’t have to talk only about your interests but also about ours. The trick is to align your interests with those of the institution. You have to argue why you would be an added value for the institution. Tip 2: Show how you would benefit from the program AND how the institution would benefit from you. Many applicants write impersonal statements that could be (and probably are) submitted to many institutions. This is another common mistake. If you want to work with us, show us why. Name specific faculty members you wish to collaborate with and reach out to them before applying. But don’t send impersonal emails to dozens of professors: we appreciate genuine interest from prospective students, but we don’t like to be spammed. Tip 3: Explicitly name potential supervisors and contact them beforehand. But don’t spam Many candidates write super long and detailed research projects, while others write just a few vague lines about their research interests. Neither is optimal. Your project is likely to change a lot during your PhD, so there’s no point in writing a detailed research project. On the other hand, we’d like to see that you have an idea of the open problems in the field and that you have a strategy to address them. Tip 4: Focus on one important research question and give us an idea of how you plan to address it. I hope this is useful. Feel free to ask questions. Good luck with your application!

@TrumanLab My impression was that in 2020 and 2021 the job market was so tough that people took whatever tenure track job they could get, but it wasn't necessarily where they wanted to end up. Now they are trying to move to their more desired universities/locations.

A trend I’ve noticed over the past few years on faculty search committees: an increasing number of established assistant profs applying for new assistant prof positions. Has anyone else noticed this and do you have thoughts why this may be?

The only perspective on AI that matters

Do you have a recharging hobby that you intentionally make time for, and it's solely for your enjoyment, unrelated to work or other responsibilities? What is it?

With another semester ending, here's your annual reminder that teaching evaluations systemically disadvantage women. Even when controlling for grades and other factors, students (esp. males) consistently give female professors lower scores. This can have serious ramifications.🧵

@vlamers @michaelmina_lab @RandiMHernandez @CDCgov @CDCDirector @NEJM I came here to say this too. Pretty sure it's required to be open access, all of our CDC papers are open access. It's very weird that it isn't.

To @CDCgov Id love to read this article by @CDCDirector in @NEJM but alas it is out of reach to all but the wealthiest institutions When the CDC Director writes an important article, I would hope it would be in a format that is made available to all tax payers. nejm.org/doi/full/10.10…

When I teach professionals, I sometimes put them in groups to discuss and take notes. I specifically name that women are overwhelmingly called upon to serve as recorders, so I ask that every group assign a man to do this. The reactions are *wild*. Regularly, one man makes a 1/x

Talk about everyone wants a revolution but no one wants to do the dishes. Feminist men, a word: learn to do all those things and DO them. Take the notes. Organize the group gift. Keep track of birthdays. Take the lunch order and call it in. DO a feminism, don’t just say it.

@bhjuarez 🤯🤯🤯

The new President of Stanford got their BS degrees at Stanford in 1994, then became a faculty member at Stanford only 6 years later. How quickly the landscape has changed

@emilykmay I can relate to this so much! Both sets of grandparents and my family had grand pianos in our homes. My grandmothers, my mom, and sister all play. It took me a while to realize that this was not a common thing for people to have but I loved it. We play and sing at the piano 😊

my grandmother has had a grand piano in her living room for my entire life. my brother has an upright piano in his. i don't know a single other person with a piano in their house. am i imagining that it used to be sort of normal to just have a piano chilling in your living room?