funder

After spending a summer reading George Orwell in between looking after her teenage children, the Australian author and former human rights lawyer Anna Funder observed how few references the Nineteen Eighty-Four author made to the women in his life. She was especially dismayed by the absence of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, Orwell’s first wife, who joined her husband on research trips and who died while undergoing surgery aged 39. And so in the genre-bending Wifedom – which has been shortlisted for the Gordon Burn prize ­– Funder…

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is taking a novel approach to the chronic problem of underrepresentation in U.S. academic science: lavishly fund a relatively small number of young scientists and then sit back and let their “happy labs” produce a more diverse workforce. Today, HHMI announced it will award $8.6 million over the next decade to each of 150 life scientists in tenure-track positions. The unprecedented amount of funding for early-career researchers is expected…