On a quiet afternoon in Cullman you can walk east from the sunken railroad tracks and find a neighborhood that still hints at a very different origin story from most Southern towns. A state marker calls it “Die Deutsche Kolonie Von Nord Alabama.” Modest frame houses and larger Victorian homes line a grid of streets that were once the heart of a planned German colony.

On a narrow shelf of land below the Allegheny Mountains, the railroad made a city out of what had begun as a construction camp. When the Pennsylvania Railroad chose Altoona as the place to base its mountain crossing between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, it did more than lay track.

A river town that once watched steamboats and stagecoaches come and go found itself, in November 1861, at the center of a small Civil War battle with long shadows. The raid on Guyandotte and the burning that followed lasted only a few hours, but they left scars in the streetscape, in the local archive, and in the way neighbors remembered each other for generations.

Parallel proposals target training data and model access to reduce biosecurity risk

Städte und Gemeinden sind die Orte, in denen die Aufnahme und Integration von Geflüchteten in der Praxis stattfindet. Welche Ressourcen sind wichtig, um diese Aufgabe erfolgreich zu gestalten, und inwiefern unterscheiden sich Integrationserfahrungen auf lokaler Ebene?

The stagnation in global malaria mortality reduction has forced a re-evaluation of the tools and strategies currently deployed in high-burden countries. While biological challenges such as insecticide resistance and parasite mutations are well-documented, a critical bottleneck remains the capacity of the human workforce to implement technical strategies with precision.

The comprehensive policy review by Halima Mwenesi and colleagues “Rethinking human resources and capacity building needs for malaria control and elimination in Africa” argues that the stagnation in global malaria progress is fundamentally a human resources crisis rather than solely a biological or technical failure.

The study by Ayodele Jegede and colleagues “Evaluation of a capacity building intervention on malaria treatment for under-fives in rural health facilities in Niger State, Nigeria” provides a rigorous evaluation of a standard “cascade training” intervention.

With my collaborators, I am increasingly performing qualitative research. I find qualitative research projects a useful way to improve my understanding of behaviors that I want to explore with other methods in the future. For example, some years ago I performed qualitative interviews with researchers who believed their own research had no value whatsoever.

When I first started writing this post, I started writing up why scientific communication is important, but because I started explaining what needs improving, and what are underlying causes why change is not happening, it got dark pretty quickly. So, I deleted that essay again. Instead, let’s just enjoy the awesome and long list of solutions we have for scientific discourse.

Chapter 3 of the National Academies report on AIxBio: Biosecurity implications for what AI can and can't do in biology today.