Hailey Robertson
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haileyrobertson.bsky.social
Hailey Robertson
@haileyrobertson.bsky.social
phd student @yalesph | nsf graduate research fellow | viruses 🦠, vectors 🦟, and climate change 🌎 | usc alum ✌🏻| kansan 🌻 | (she/her)
Pinned
A bit different from my usual writing, but excited (despite the circumstances) to share my op-ed in the Topeka Capital-Journal! I discuss recent NSF funding cuts and what they mean for Kansans, both now and in the future.

🌻 www.cjonline.com/story/opinio...
Topeka scientist says NSF funds critical to infectious disease forecasting | Opinion
Planned budget cuts for 2026 would deepen damage to STEM education, jobs, and public access to taxpayer-funded data.
www.cjonline.com
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
I'm excited to announce that the first chapter of dissertation is published in @commsbio.nature.com !!! and i feel super fortunate that it could be published during bat week 💗🦇 www.nature.com/articles/s42... @danjbecker.bsky.social @colincarlson.bsky.social @/amandavicentesantos
October 30, 2025 at 4:37 PM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
🚨 We're about to start reviewing applications, but there's still time to reach out for our postdoc position on climate change impact attribution! If you have experience with attribution science or climate epidemiology, and want to help us launch the Global Burden of Climate Change Study, reach out!
September 25, 2025 at 7:02 PM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
🚨 NEW: Climate change is already causing 30,000 deaths per year - a global annual economic loss of $100-350B USD - but the true damage is probably 10x higher. Out TODAY in Nature Climate Change: the first systematic look at the science of "health impact attribution" 🔓 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
September 17, 2025 at 11:57 AM
Earlier this year, I wrote an op-ed about the importance of NSF/NIH funding for Kansans.

I am THRILLED to see a candidate for my home state who names science cuts for what they are (bad + illegal!) and promises to step up to the plate on that issue, and many others (Medicare/Medicaid, USAID, etc!)
Announcing something exciting!

We can flip the Kansas First, and eliminate the GOP majority in Congress.

Can you imagine a better or more important time to do it?

colinforkansas.com
Home - Colin for Kansas
Colin for The Big First District
colinforkansas.com
September 17, 2025 at 9:13 PM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
New preprint! 🥳🎉 We looked at viral coinfection patterns at the largest scale ever in wildlife. We found a strong association among CoVs, PMVs, and influenza A, and higher coinfection rates in wildlife trade; plus, evidence that bats accumulate persistent infections. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
September 10, 2025 at 12:36 PM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
They're right.

RFK Jr. is a serious threat to public health and our lives. He is undermining vaccines, boosting dangerous conspiracy theories, and decimating lifesaving research.

Resign or be fired. He needs to go.
More than 1,000 HHS workers demand RFK Jr. resign in new letter
"Kennedy's actions are compromising the health of this nation," the Wednesday letter reads.
www.axios.com
September 3, 2025 at 7:18 PM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
How has climate change shaped your lifetime of heat?

Younger people today are experiencing more extremely hot days during their childhood compared to previous generations.

Check out the new interactive tool by @climatecentral.org: climatecentral.observablehq.cloud/generational...
September 3, 2025 at 7:59 PM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
“I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.”
That’s from the resignation of CDC’s Demetre Daskalakis @drdemetre.bsky.social (on X)
🧪
August 28, 2025 at 12:27 AM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
I'm delighted today to announce we're launching the Global Burden of Climate Change Study, an international team effort to standardize estimates of present day death, disability, and illness due to climate change. @chelseaeharvey.bsky.social with the scoop: subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eene...
E&E News: People are dying from climate change. But how many?
A team of researchers hopes to provide the long-elusive answer, thanks to the growing field of attribution science.
subscriber.politicopro.com
August 22, 2025 at 5:25 PM
party parrot timeline cleanse with the best figure you’ll see today
If you ever wondered what the ten most common dance moves are in the world of parrot discos, wonder no more. There's an entire paper devoted to bopping cockatoos, and it's as fabulous as you'd expect. 🪶🦜💃

🚨 News flash, headbanging made the cut!

🧪 🌍

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
August 21, 2025 at 3:11 PM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
🧪 New study: Learning about economic impact of NIH funding motivates action to oppose funding cuts.

Evidence from two preregistered, randomized experiments with >5,000 U.S. adults.

Similar change for liberals and conservatives. Preprint from @asinclair.bsky.social et al:

osf.io/preprints/ps...
August 20, 2025 at 8:22 PM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
Unsurprising but horrifying. Wherever there are people forced into crowded living conditions, there will be tuberculosis. Wherever people are dehumanized, there will be tuberculosis. prospect.org/health/2025-...
Tuberculosis Spawning in Crowded, Dirty ICE Detention Centers
Doctors and medical researchers expect more outbreaks of infectious disease as the Trump administration crams thousands more people into miserable conditions.
prospect.org
August 19, 2025 at 5:27 PM
If this sounds like you, come work with us (or send cool people our way!) Can confirm the group and research is cool and fun™️
We may have a one-year postdoctoral position opening! We're looking for someone with experience in attribution science OR very strong skills in climate epidemiology to come help us launch a Global Burden of Climate Change Study. Remote possible for the right person; aim to raise $ for a second year.
August 19, 2025 at 8:58 PM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
NEW 🚨 The violence is the point. Elected Dems must call for widespread resignations (RFK, Bhattacharya, Prasad) in response to the CDC shooting. Public health must demand this of them, and the public must demand that of us. With @publichealthguy1.bsky.social in STAT: www.statnews.com/2025/08/15/c...
The CDC shooting was public health’s Jan. 6
“In RFK Jr.’s America, it will never be safe to practice public health or medicine," write an epidemiologist and a former CDC staffer.
www.statnews.com
August 15, 2025 at 3:58 PM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
It’s my pleasure to share our new preprint, which I had the opportunity to lead, and which has been in the making since 2022.

In this work, we used climate data, phylogeography, and antigenic profiling to uncover the dynamics of DENV spread in Colombia.
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
Genomic epidemiology of dengue virus 2 and 3 reveals repeated introductions and exportations of several lineages in Colombia.
Dengue fever, a major mosquito–borne viral disease, is transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes and poses a significant global health burden. Despite extensive research, the spatiotemporal dynamics of dengue v...
www.medrxiv.org
August 13, 2025 at 4:49 AM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
I'll say it a thousand times -- any account of the past that only celebrates the good parts of a nation without reckoning with the bad is not what we call "history"

It is propaganda, pure and simple.
You can't teach U.S. history without "divisive" narratives. Slavery wasn't "unifying." The Japanese incarceration wasn't "unifying." The anti-immigrant Operation Wetback (real name) wasn't "unifying."
It's history's job to tell the truth, not cover up past racism to pave the way for future racism.
White House Announces Comprehensive Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions
www.nytimes.com
August 12, 2025 at 10:29 PM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
RFK Jr. needs to resign. On top of endangering millions of lives through his demonization and rollback of vaccines, the hatred he has spread for federal workers in his own agency led to the CDC shooting on Friday and the death of a police officer.

Here's the letter I wrote to my senators:
August 11, 2025 at 3:11 PM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
he might as well have said “they deserved it”
August 12, 2025 at 4:22 PM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
Bakeries cannot be forced to sell cakes to gay couples. But farmers market vendors can be forced to sell pierogis to pedophiles.

by Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas
August 12, 2025 at 6:15 PM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
CDC employees told me the shooting at CDC was much worse than initial police reports suggested. More than 40 bullets hit buildings. “It’s a miracle more people weren’t hit,” said one staffer who was locked down in a building for hours last evening.
Feel like this needs a spotlight: employees were told that the shooting at CDC, which left an officer dead and buildings riddled with bullets, was targeted at agency, @lenasun.bsky.social, @laurenweberhp.bsky.social and @tobiaraji.bsky.social report

Years of anti-CDC rhetoric has consequences
August 9, 2025 at 11:49 PM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
New EO mandates *codification* of a process allowing termination of AWARDED grants at any time “for convenience, including when the award no longer advances agency priorities or the national interest.”

I can’t fathom the number of ways this will hurt trainees, ECRs, and TT faculty.💔
August 8, 2025 at 8:09 PM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
Excellent thread.

If you're American, you are literally safer from violence and theft than your parents or grandparents were. But almost no one realizes that.
1. This week, the FBI released its comprehensive crime report for 2024, which revealed that both VIOLENT CRIME and PROPERTY CRIME reached their LOWEST LEVELS SINCE THE 1960s

This a massive story. But you might not have heard about it, even if you follow the news closely.

Here's why.
Why you might not know that 2024 was America's safest year since the 1960s
An overwhelming majority of Americans, 64 percent, believe that crime increased across the country in 2024, according to a Gallup survey conducted late last year.
popular.info
August 7, 2025 at 3:38 PM
taking my cat on her daily walk around the courtyard to the delight of the neighborhood children. you might think this is whimsy and cute, however
July 31, 2025 at 8:23 PM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
ProPublica spoke to about 150 people who had lived in homeless encampments when cities cleared them out in “sweeps.”

We distributed notecards so people could tell us about the toll in their own words.

➡️ This is what they wrote: projects.propublica.org/impact-of-ho...
July 26, 2025 at 3:15 AM
Reposted by Hailey Robertson
🦠🌿🐦🧪 How can biodiversity monitoring help global efforts in disease surveillance?

With ✨ fantastic ✨ colleagues from @viralemergence.org and the @geobon.org working group on One Health, we try to identify three key lessons for the future.

🧵 A short thread!

academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...
Biodiversity science and biosurveillance are fellow travelers
The failure to meet the Aichi targets to alleviate global biodiversity decline (Nature 2020) was a wake-up call to the biodiversity monitoring community (T
academic.oup.com
June 30, 2025 at 1:07 PM