Recent policy changes, freezes, and proposals under the current adminstration have shaken research and academia, and these changes are palpable at Union, as students and faculty alike have experienced unprecedented disruptions and challenges.
Under the Trump adminstration, the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, and the National Science Foundation, or NSF, have experienced mass firings, funding freezes, and purges of data related to various social issues. These government agencies provide significant funding and support for research in the United States. The NIH, which is the largest single provider of biomedical research funding, had much of its $47 Billion budget frozen, experienced 1000-1200 layoffs, and announced significant cuts to support for indirect institutional costs. The NSF, which supports about 25% of basic science research in the US, also experienced a funding freeze, as well as a culling of at least 10% of its workforce.
Several Union College professors, who rely on grant funding from the NIH and NSF to conduct their research, experienced significant delays and uncertainty. Dr. Ellen Robertson, an associate professor of Chemistry at Union who conducts research on nanomaterials with an NSF grant, described a week of uncertainty as NSF grants were frozen and then mandated by a federal court to be continued. “I called Mercedes at the grant office, and said, ‘What’s going on? Can I spend my money or not spend my money?’ And she said, for now, hold off, we don’t know enough. So for a week, I just kind of held tight and waited. I’m operating as I normally do now, but it was a week of a lot of anxiety.”
Many researchers, including Robertson, have also expressed uncertainty about the future. “Where I can see disruptions moving forward might not be on the grants I currently have, but any future grants, because the government is firing a lot of people. If they’re firing program officers, who make recommendations on which grant proposals get funded, then what kind of stuff gets funded? That worries me.”
Student research is a significant part of many students’ education at Union, and federal freezes have affected students’ ability to continue their research. Dr. Stephanie Curley, an assistant professor of Biomedical engineering, conducts vaccine research with numerous students on a grant from the NSF. Bennett Beaulieu ‘25, a biomedical engineering student conducting research with Dr. Curley, described similar concerns and disappointments. “I’m only a couple weeks away from my thesis, but I’m not able to order a plasmid I need because it costs upwards of a thousand dollars without grant funding. There’s plenty of things that were thrown off by it. I think it causes people to lose motivation because if they’re going to put all this work in and the grant’s gonna get rescinded and they can’t continue their work, then why why do it is kind of the thought process.”
Bennett, who is applying for graduate school, also described trepidation regarding his future: “as far as my thought process goes, one of the first things that I asked the professors that I will potentially work with is, do they have funding secured currently? And some professors also have startup funding, which the school provides to them to get their labs started up. And so that that comes from federal funding, just because the the school receives federal funding in general. But that’s not directly tied to a grant. And so it’s a lot more secure.. So if a professor has something like that, I’m more inclined to go with them as opposed to a professor who either has funding directly from a grant or just doesn’t have funding yet and is waiting on the status of a grant.”
Disruptions in academia have occurred outside of just federal funding freezes and direct policy changes. Dr. Nicole Theodosiou, an associate professor of biology at Union, described the abrupt cancellation of a private grant funding a program at Union. “I am project director of a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, an esteemed private institution with an endowment of about $26 billion. we have a grant that was called the inclusive excellence grant, with two goals. The first was to provide professional development training for faculty, so that um we could create more inclusive learning environments in the classroom, and the second part was to work on reforming how we evaluate teaching and learning in the classroom. The grant was completely terminated on February 5th, with any trace of the grant scrubbed from the Howard Hughes website. What does it say when an institution like Howard Hughes acquiesces to policies that don’t directly affect them?”
Echoing a sentiment shared by scientists and academics across the country, Theodosiou said: “We’re gonna try to do this work the best we can going forward. It’s just been chaos.”
