Following President Donald Trump’s executive order to end diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, many neuroscience scholars worried about the future of their funding. Now those fears are starting to materialize.
Over the past two weeks, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has canceled a slew of institutional and individual grants awarded by the Division of Training and Workforce Development at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), among many other federal grants. The rationale for the cancellations is unclear in most cases, but many of the axed grants support scientists from underrepresented communities.
Directors of these training programs have received notice that their program is canceled or will not be awarded next year, several of them told The Transmitter, and in other cases grantees received termination letters. For instance, last Wednesday, Néstor Carballeira, professor of chemistry at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras Campus, received a letter from the NIH that terminates funding for the Undergraduate Research Training Initiative for Student Enhancement (U-RISE) program that he ran at the university.
“This award no longer effectuates agency priorities,” reads the letter, dated 2 April and seen by The Transmitter. Carballeira expects to receive another letter soon regarding G-RISE, a similar program for graduate students, because he already received an email saying that it will also be canceled. The cancellations eliminate about $7 million dollars the university would have used over the next four years to support research and leaves 43 current students without funds, Carballeira estimates.
Other axed institutional training grants include the Maximizing Access to Research Careers (MARC) program, which funded undergraduate researchers; the Post-Baccalaureate Research Education Program (PREP); the Bridges to the Doctorate program, which trained masters students; the Initiative for Maximizing Student Development (IMSD), which supported graduate students; and the Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award (IRACDA), which aided postdoctoral researchers in their development. The NIH has also ended the Maximizing Opportunities for Scientific and Academic Independent Careers (MOSAIC) program, which funded individual scientists as they transitioned from postdoctoral to faculty positions, according to a 4 April post by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.
One of the training programs, at the University of Texas at San Antonio, served students and researchers from diverse backgrounds for more than 40 years, producing high-caliber scientists, says Edwin Barea-Rodriguez, professor of biology at the institution. These programs have been “transformational.”
Kenneth Gibbs, director of the Training and Workforce Development Division at the NIH, declined The Transmitter’s request for comment.
Without the programs, the scientific workforce will weaken, says Jonathan Levitt, professor of biology at the City College of New York, who ran a U-RISE program there, which was canceled last week. “You’re basically closing off a trajectory for a whole sector of the American population to go on to become our next generation of STEM workers in academia, in industry, in everything,” he says. “The country is losing a lot of talent.”
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area-Rodriguez says he expected the cancellations because of the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity initiatives and because he had not been updated on his program’s status recently. Barea-Rodriguez and other program directors—including Kyle Frantz, professor of neuroscience at Georgia State University, who ran a MARC program there, and Loren Runnels, professor of pharmacology at Rutgers University and director of an IMSD program—say they received an email last Wednesday from Gibbs that said the programs had been terminated but did not provide a reason.But three other program directors, including Carballeira, have already received official termination letters stating that their grants were canceled because of their DEI component. “The language was quite offensive,” says Barea-Rodriguez, who says he viewed a letter his colleagues shared.
“Research programs based primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness,” Carballeira’s letter states. “Worse, so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’) studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans. Therefore, it is the policy of NIH not to prioritize such research programs,” the letter continues.
“They clearly don’t know what the point of diversity, equity and inclusion are. They don’t understand what the definition of discrimination is,” says one U-RISE program director who received the same letter and who asked to remain anonymous because her university has asked faculty to not talk to the media. “There’s a lot of things that aren’t true in the letter.”
In addition to targeting a group of students already coming from marginalized backgrounds, the administration is “stopping science as well,” she adds.
Barea-Rodriguez says that he and other program directors have concluded that likely all of the MARC, U-RISE, G-RISE, PREP, Bridges to the Doctorate, IMSD and IRACDA programs were canceled nationwide. The websites for the programs are no longer available. According to the previous grant announcements and the Internet Archive, the descriptions for each of them mentioned DEI.
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esearchers at all stages of the pipeline—from undergraduate student to faculty—will be affected, Frantz says. Training programs such as MARC and U-RISE provide financial means for undergraduate students to be able to focus on research instead of having to get a job elsewhere to support their studies. They also provide funds for students to travel to conferences and to disseminate their institution’s research, and to contribute to the research culture through the development of programs and workshops for students and researchers beyond the program cohort—all of which will be halted, Frantz adds.Meanwhile, IMSD and IRACDA provide important professional development opportunities to early-career researchers, and MOSAIC helps students in the critical transition period into faculty positions, when many people leave science, says Mary Munson, president of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) and professor of biochemistry and molecular biotechnology at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, who received notice that the ASCB award to help MOSAIC scholars would no longer be funded (Munson commented in her capacity as president of the ASCB).
Program directors and grantees are scrambling to continue supporting their students. Some grantees told The Transmitter that they are allowed to spend funds until the grant finish date, but others say they were instructed to cease any spending immediately. Finding a funding source large enough to fill the void of federal funding will be almost impossible, Levitt says. “There’s just nothing at the scale of federal funding.”
Many of the program directors insist that they will try to continue mentoring students and providing as much community support as possible. “These are relationships that are just so valuable and important to us that we’re not going to stop doing them,” Munson says. Frantz says she hopes that her program “will find other ways to support trainees—we have to.”
But Levitt is not as optimistic. By providing mentoring and community, at least “we can prepare them,” he says. Still, “the financial loss is enormous.”
