Dr. Raven Baxter publishes a Comment in Nature Microbiology

I have news I've been holding close, and I'm so happy to finally share it. My first piece in Nature Microbiology is out, a Comment I was invited to write on science communication.

If you've followed my work for a while, you know I trained as a molecular biologist long before I ever picked up a camera or a microphone. This piece brings those two halves of me together, and I still can't quite believe where it ended up.

It's called Dysbiosis and succession in the scientific infobiome, and the idea behind it is one I think about all the time. Microbiologists have a rich language for describing communities of tiny living things. A healthy gut microbiome is balanced, diverse, and resilient. When it falls out of balance we call that dysbiosis, and it can make a whole system sick. When a community slowly recovers and matures, we call that succession.

In the piece I borrow that language for something we usually describe in much fuzzier terms, the information environment around science. Picture it as an infobiome, a living ecosystem of what people read, share, and believe about science. When that ecosystem is out of balance, more facts alone won't fix it, the same way you can't cure dysbiosis by dropping in one more bacterium. Health comes from balance, diversity, and the patient work of tending a community back to resilience.

Science communication is part of the ecosystem that science lives in, and it deserves the same care and rigor we give the research itself.

Seeing my name in a journal like this one means more to me than I can put into words. To everyone who has ever watched a video, shared a post, or told me that science felt like theirs again, this one is for you.

You can read it on Nature (DOI 10.1038/s41564-026-02366-8) and download the PDF here.