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mayajuman.bsky.social
Maya Juman
@mayajuman.bsky.social
75 followers 98 following 1 posts
PhD student at Cambridge interested in fruit bat ecology, pathogen discovery, and museum collections | she/her 🦇 | mayajuman.github.io
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mayajuman.bsky.social
Maya Juman @mayajuman.bsky.social · 17d
Super excited to finally share this! #CollectionsAreEssential
colincarlson.bsky.social
Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 17d
🦇🦠 New preprint - in a long-term effort led by the amazing @mayajuman.bsky.social, we've shown that the ML tools developed by @viralemergence.org let us efficiently screen museum collections for pathogens with pandemic potential

🎉🔓 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Museum collections and machine learning guide discovery of novel coronaviruses and paramyxoviruses
Natural history museum collections are valuable but underutilized resources for viral discovery, offering opportunities to test hypotheses about viral occurrence across space, time, and taxonomic grou...
www.biorxiv.org
7 15
Reposted by Maya Juman
viralemergence.org
Verena @viralemergence.org · Jun 2
An update from the team on the uncertain future of our program and the impact of NSF budget cuts. Please share and reach out 🦠
Some difficult news from the team: In NSF's FY25-26 Budget Request to Congress, we learned that our program will take a whopping 50% cut - meaning that in September, we'll be $1.25m short of an operating budget that currently supports a cohort of seven PhD students, four postdocs, and three full-time staff. Verena is one of the largest and last pandemic prevention-focused programs in the United States: since 2020, we've supported the training of over 60 postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates. Our researchers have established unique laboratory resources for studying animal immune systems, and discovered new antiviral immune adaptations in bats; developed risk assessment algorithms for wildlife and livestock viruses, and diagnostic algorithms for viruses like dengue, Ebola, and Zika; and quantified the effects of climate change, deforestation, and factory farming on spillover risk. Everything we develop is 100% open source, and our data has supported the research of nearly 150 external researchers in 21 countries to date. We have three months to make up our budget shortfall. Every dollar spent on Verena supports not just our team, but the community of researchers who use our data, code, and resources. You can help us by sharing this post, and reaching out if you're able to support a unique and vulnerable program. Or just head over to viralemergence.org, and take a look at what we do. 🦟 🦇 🦠
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