U.S. scientists’ lives and careers are being upended. Here are five of their stories

Equity in jeopardy

Adana Llanos knows it takes years to build trust, but only seconds to break it. That’s especially true when doing research with people of color: Historical abuses and pervasive racism in health care systems make many hesitant to participate in studies today. The Columbia University epidemiologist has spent nearly 2 decades forging relationships with community partners, laying groundwork that enables her to study nuanced issues such as how neighborhood environments contribute to breast cancer severity in racially diverse populations. “This isn’t just [research] that I decided to do last year,” she says.

But that hard-won trust may now be at risk. On 14 March, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) abruptly terminated two of Llanos’s three grants. One was for a study of how societal factors affect whether a woman receives the best care for cervical cancer and present barriers to treatment; it had enrolled about 200 of its intended 960 participants. Llanos is looking for alternative funding to restart recruitment, and to compensate the members of the community who served as advisers for the work so far. But even if the NIH money were restored, she says, the researchers could miss critical time points to follow up with the women already enrolled. Her other project, the breast cancer study, is similarly on hold.

The terminations were among $400 million in federal funding that President Donald Trump’s administration pulled from Columbia, claiming it has not done enough to combat antisemitism on its campus. All of Columbia’s NIH funds are frozen while the university negotiates with the government, but approximately 400 grants—including Llanos’s two—were permanently canceled.

Llanos says she wasn’t entirely surprised, given Trump’s animosity toward diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. But she questions whether the administration understands the difference between the workforce diversity programs normally associated with DEI and research into health disparities. By studying how health care disparities contribute to cancer deaths, she says, “we’re improving public health for the entire population of the U.S.”

It’s really hard to just pivot and do something else.

• Adana Llanos

Many of the termination letters sent to investigators studying health equity call the research “artificial and non-scientific” and “harm[ing] the health of Americans.” To Llanos, that language is demeaning. “I feel like it’s kind of a personal sort of attack against me, against the work that I’m doing, and against the progress that I would like to make,” says Llanos, who is Black. Scientists of color only make up 30% of NIH research grant recipients.

Llanos says she’s determined to continue the research. “For those of us that are really committed to making strides towards equity, it’s really hard to just pivot and do something else.” But if she can’t find funding soon, she may need to lay off at least two of her lab employees. And the broken promises to collaborators and community partners—though involuntary—may irreparably damage her team’s ability to work with them in the future. “It’ll be hard to get those things back to the way they were,” she says. —Sara Reardon

Goodbye, research dreams

As a Ph.D. student studying infectious fungal diseases, Katrina Jackson went to all the right conferences, published in all the right journals, and networked with all the right scientists to set herself up for an academic research career. Even the pathogen she chose to study as a postdoc—Coccidioides, which causes the lung disease Valley fever—was a deliberate choice. In 2022, for the first time, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) allocated $4.5 million for research into the rarely studied fungus, which kills thousands of people in the United States each year.

“I thought it would be a really good field to join,” Jackson says. Little is known about why infections can become so severe in some people, which strains are most dangerous to humans, and how the immune system fights the fungus. Work on vaccines is just beginning. “I would have questions for an entire career.” But that path is closing for her.

Just 9 months into her postdoc Jackson learned she would be laid off, alongside three others in the same lab, led by Bridget Barker at Northern Arizona University. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, NIH hasn’t approved future years of funding for the team’s multiyear grant, meaning the money for Jackson’s position will run out in July.

The holdup may reflect turmoil at NIH, which laid off hundreds of its own staff and delayed the meetings in which scientists normally review research proposals. Or perhaps it’s a sign the agency is considering terminating the grant entirely, as it has done to many other projects involving infectious diseases and vaccine development. If the money does come through, Barker says, she’d like Jackson to stay for 2 to 4 more years. Coccidioides is difficult to grow and dangerous to handle, Barker says, and training new people to work with it safely in high-security labs takes time.

It’s like I have to choose between my life and my career.

• Katrina Jackson

But the uncertainty is too much to gamble on, Jackson says—especially given reports that President Donald Trump’s 2026 budget proposal could slash NIH’s budget by 40%. “I’ll just be in the same boat again next year,” she says. So now she’s looking for a new postdoc position in Europe or Canada, which will mean leaving her friends, aging family members, and professional networks behind for at least a few years. “It’s like I have to choose between my life and my career,” she says.

Assuming she finds a position overseas, she probably won’t be able to continue to study Coccidioides, which is only endemic in the Americas, or build her career around Valley fever. “It feels like all of these dreams and hopes I’ve had are getting ripped away from me,” she says. “I’ll make it work, but it’s not what I’ve been working towards.” —Sara Reardon

Data blackout

Political scientist Andrew Flores may soon lose a major source of the data that have fueled his research for much of the past decade. In 2016 he and other LGBTQ advocates persuaded the Department of Justice (DOJ) to include questions about gender identity on its annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The questions allowed Flores, an associate professor at American University, to show that sexual and gender minorities are five times more likely to be victims of violent crimes than the overall U.S. population, and nine times more likely to be targeted for violent hate crimes.

But in March, DOJ announced plans to remove all questions about gender identity from the survey. If that happens, Flores and his colleagues will lose data they rely on to document how the LGBTQ community experiences crime.

Flores says he’s always been interested in politics. But it wasn’t until graduate school that he melded that interest with what he calls “the science part” of political science. He began to study public attitudes toward the LGBTQ community and then shifted to broader questions about sexual orientation and gender identity, including crime victimization.

Flores says he’s often asked whether his research is driven by his identity as a gay Latino man. “Maybe the questions I ask are influenced by who I am,” he says. “But the way I do my data analyses isn’t corrupted or affected by those things. At the end of the day, I’m an empirical researcher, someone who’s just trying to describe the world around me.”

His ability to do that is now at risk. “We’re already very worried about the integrity of federal data sets,” he says, noting that a survey on health-related risk behaviors by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention temporarily went offline after President Donald Trump took office. But, he says, “A bigger concern is what will happen going forward,” including with the NCVS.

We’re already very worried about the integrity of federal data sets.

• Andrew Flores

In addition to facing a looming loss of data, he and other researchers are alarmed that Trump has shrunk the federal workforce that manages those surveys and eliminated outside scientific panels that advise agencies on ways to improve their instruments.

One response may be to take matters into their own hands. “A group of us have been looking at maybe doing our own surveys, collecting the key data that are no longer being collected by the federal government,” Flores says.

To do so, they would need funding from private foundations and other groups interested in the issue. But even if the funds materialize, he worries data collected without the imprimatur of the government would not carry the same weight with policymakers or the public. “Federal surveys are still the gold standard.” —Jeffrey Mervis

Ph.D. interrupted

Barbara Benowitz was excited to finally begin what she hoped would be a long career in academic research. After finishing her bachelor’s in psychology at Gettysburg College, she had spent several years gaining hands-on research experience—first as a post baccalaureate fellow at the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, where she investigated the brain mechanisms underlying pain, then as a research technician at the University of Washington studying drug addiction. Last year, when she was accepted to a neuroscience Ph.D. program at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), she was ready to hit the ground running.

Benowitz was midway through her second of three rotations—temporary stints for students to experience various lab environments and research directions before they settle on their home lab for the remainder of their doctoral training—when President Donald Trump took office in January. “A lot of us expected things to go downhill,” Benowitz recalls, “but we didn’t know how.” As the administration began to slash funding for science, leaders at MUSC remained hopeful, with the dean reassuring Benowitz and her fellow students they wouldn’t be affected. But when Benowitz finished her third rotation and began to apply to officially join a lab, she learned that, thanks to delayed and canceled grants, none had the funds to take on new students—leaving Benowitz and many others with no path forward to continue their graduate training. “I have no place to go,” Benowitz says.

The university is currently offering Benowitz the chance to do a fourth rotation, which might help her find a home. But because funding cuts have affected so many labs, there’s no guarantee this option will pan out either. Some newer principal investigators, who have startup funds that aren’t as tied up in federal grants as those of their more established colleagues, have suddenly found themselves overwhelmed by applications. “We’re all fighting for one, maybe two spots,” Benowitz says. “It’s kind of like a vicious cycle of uncertainty for everyone.”

I don’t think I can do a career where there’s no future.

• Barbara Benowitz

The Trump administration’s cuts have also hit Benowitz beyond her own professional path. Her father—who worked at NIH as a science writer and editor for more than a decade—recently learned his entire department is being disbanded. He was close to retirement, but now instead is scrambling to find a new job, which could mean packing up and moving to a different state. “That just puts a lot of strain on my family,” Benowitz says.

As for her own plans, Benowitz would love to remain in academia. But the experiences of the past months have shaken her confidence in the future of academic science—and left her pondering a transition to industry. “I don’t think I can do a career where there’s no future.” —Phie Jacobs

Fed up with whiplash

Baffling. Jarring. Draining. That’s how entomologist Brian Lovett describes the experience of being abruptly fired from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in February, unexpectedly rehired 10 days later, and then faced with looming layoffs again. It all led him to reluctantly take an offer of deferred resignation last month. The turmoil and callous treatment make him fear for the future of federally supported science. Government scientists, he says, “are canaries in the coal mine for American research.”

Lovett’s introduction to USDA came as a Ph.D. student, when he learned about the agency’s decades-old collection of insect-killing fungi. The fungi promised an environmentally friendly way to control agricultural pests, and they also raised intriguing questions about evolution and ecology. Lovett was hooked. He went on to an academic postdoc, but when a principal investigator position opened up at the USDA research unit that keeps and works with the fungus collection, “I jumped at it,” Lovett recalls.

Not long after President Donald Trump took office this year, he recalls a mounting sense of foreboding at the unit. On 14 February, he received an email firing him; he was still a probationary employee, and therefore less protected than longer serving federal employees. He couldn’t return to the lab to speak to his group or help them shut down the experiments.

Lovett found new supervisors for his staff and started to hunt for jobs immediately. But 10 days later, he learned he had been reinstated. The email from USDA human resources had gone to his government email, which he could no longer access, but his supervisor forwarded him the message. Eventually some 5000 USDA employees got their jobs back, some after the federal Merit Systems Protection Board paused the firings and others after a court ruling weeks later.

[Government scientists] are canaries in the coal mine for American research.

• Brian Lovett

But it wasn’t the old job. Like federal employees across the government, Lovett was told by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to email a list of five accomplishments every week. He worked to get job extensions for lab members whose jobs might be in jeopardy, including a postdoc who told him, “I don’t know if I’ll be here next week,” as she handed over sequencing files and scripts so her work could continue if she was abruptly let go. He expected he, too, would be a target again, in the inevitable next round.

Deferred resignation, which included pay until 30 September, seemed preferable. He will remain on leave until his termination, giving him time to look for other jobs in research—although he suspects that with so many federal scientists laid off, competition will be fierce. A role in the policy world or advocacy is appealing, he says. “I think we’re in a moment where people need to act.” —Erik Stokstad