Three researchers who served as scientific advisers to the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) were removed from their positions this week, The Transmitter has learned. At least one adviser to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) was also terminated this week. The researchers each received a letter this week from Matthew Memoli, acting director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), dated 21 March.
“Members of this committee serve at the pleasure of the Director of the National Institutes of Health. As such, your appointment has been terminated effective immediately,” the letter states. The letter does not provide a reason for the dismissal, and Memoli did not respond to The Transmitter’s email requests for comment. Nina F. Schor, deputy director for intramural research at the NIH, also did not respond to requests for comment.
Each institute and center at the NIH maintains a board of scientific counselors that reviews the research programs of internal NIH investigators. The board members are not NIH employees but receive a small stipend for their work and are considered special government employees during their five-year term. Board members at other institutes have also been removed but as of yesterday had not yet received any official communication from the NIH, STAT reported.
The three terminated NIMH board members are Jacob Michaelson, professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa, Tracy Bale, professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado, and Carolyn Rodriguez, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University. All three have been removed from a list of board members on the NIMH website. Michaelson and Bale confirmed their terminations with The Transmitter; Rodriguez did not respond to requests for comment by phone or email, but her termination was confirmed by NIMH board chair Jennifer Groh, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University.
The nine other NIMH board members have not been terminated, according to Groh, who spoke to The Transmitter in her personal capacity and not as a representative of Duke University.
“This is unusual and unprecedented,” Bale says. “It devalues the process by which expertise is approved and selected” for these boards.
Earlier this month, three senior scientists at the NIMH were slated to lose their jobs, but Memoli extended all three appointments after nine NIMH board members, including Michaelson, wrote a letter to Memoli and others on the scientists’ behalf, The Transmitter reported. At first, Michaelson says he thought his termination might be retribution for the letter, but Bale and Rodriguez, the other board members terminated yesterday, did not sign the 4 March letter to Memoli.
Stephanie Borgland, who served on the NIDA’s board of scientific counselors, received her termination letter today. Borgland, professor of physiology and pharmacology at the University of Calgary, was scheduled to serve on the board through June 2028. The Transmitter reached out to the 14 other NIDA board members; five say they have not received a termination letter, and the others did not respond.
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bout 83 percent of the NIH budget funds extramural research at academic and medical research centers; 11 percent funds research within the institutes. The intramural programs are intended to support high-risk, high-reward research that could lead to breakthroughs that would not be possible outside the NIH, Michaelson says. The boards evaluate whether internal investigators’ work meets this standard and advise the directors of the intramural programs on how to distribute funding among the labs.Michaelson says he first learned of his potential termination two weeks ago, when he heard that a list of board members selected for removal was circulating at the NIH. His termination letter arrived yesterday. It was “the most terse letter I have ever seen in my life,” he says, and “it offered no explanation whatsoever” for the removal.
“I was on a list. The other people [who] were fired were on some kind of a list—we were on an email somewhere; we’re in a spreadsheet somewhere. And something—some criterion, some chain of rules—got some people onto that list and didn’t get other people onto that list,” Michaelson says. “Why are some scientists being singled out for removal from a key part of the scientific process? Because that’s what it is.”
Michaelson’s term on the board began in October 2023 and was slated to run through June 2028. “Jake [Michaelson] has been a terrific and thoughtful contributor, and I’m very sorry we are going to be deprived of his expertise going forward,” Groh told The Transmitter. “I’m also troubled that we don’t know why he and other members of similar NIH intramural review boards are being prematurely dismissed,” she added.
The advisory board removals are the latest in a series of disruptions to the NIH’s intramural research programs. Over the past two months, the Trump administration has banned NIH employees from traveling to meetings or speaking publicly about their work, fired and rehired some probationary employees and blocked contract renewals for senior scientists.
The NIH and its intramural research programs are “the crown jewel of modern science,” Michaelson says, and “it feels like it’s being sacked and vandalized.”
