By: Lynn Bonner And Brandon Kingdollar
NC Newsline
Justin Fraser, an honors student at NC A&T State University and an aspiring doctor, gained research experience at Duke University, working in a laboratory investigating a therapy for Parkinson’s Disease.
Fraser was also connected to a neurologist at Duke, kindling his interest in neuroscience.
The Summer Scholars Program in Genomic Science and Medicine at Duke University that gave Fraser those opportunities lost what was left of a $540,000 National Institutes of Health grant this year, one of dozens of academic programs at private and public universities across the country to lose federal funding for efforts to help increase diversity in medicine and biological sciences.
In addition to working in labs, participants in the Duke scholars program created poster presentations of the lab work and explained their research to audiences, familiar exercises for scientists attending professional conferences.
Duke’s program focused on college students who had completed their first or second year, Fraser said, and offered him an opportunity that’s now been closed for others.
“Freshmen and sophomores won’t be able to get their own foot in the door,” he said.
About 5% of doctors in the United States are Black, according to 2023 data from the Association of American Medical Colleges, while about 14.4 % of the U.S. population identified as Black that year, according to the Pew Research Center.
In 2024, 6.6% of the doctorates in STEM awarded to Americans or naturalized citizens were earned by Black researchers.
While more than 19% of the population was Hispanic/Latino in 2023, about 6.5% of the medical doctors were Latino. Latino scientists earned 10% of the research doctoral degrees awarded that year in science, technology, engineering and math.
As it targets diversity and equity, the Trump administration has ended funding for projects that encourage a diverse STEM workforce, research by early-career scientists, and research about health disparities, HIV, mental health, and nutrition.
Programs at Duke, Stanford University, Hampton University, Washington University, and others lost federal money for programs aimed at increasing diversity in genomic research, according to a list of canceled grants obtained by U.S. Rep. Deborah Ross (D-Raleigh).
U-RISE was among the formerly federally funded programs supporting undergraduates who aspired to earn advanced degrees in biomedical research. The acronym stands for Undergraduate Research Training Initiative for Student Enhancement.
UNC-Pembroke, the state’s Historically American Indian University, was one of the UNC campuses that had its U-RISE grant canceled.
U-RISE operated at UNC-Pembroke for about 18 years before the grant money was abruptly cut off this spring, said Robert Poage, a biology professor.
In the last year of funding, UNC-Pembroke matched eight students with faculty researchers, according to an online description. Its goals were to increase the number of students that applied for and entered STEM doctoral programs, provide them with a “rigorous research experience,” and prepare them to be successful scientists.
In summers, students worked in labs off campus at institutions such as Yale University, Stanford, East Carolina University, and UNC-Chapel Hill, Poage said. Students had an opportunity to do research with UNC-Pembroke faculty for two years.
The grant paid for student travel to conferences, lab supplies, and other expenses, he said. U-RISE also put together a like-minded group of students who went through training together and supported one another.
Faculty members were excited to work with students and were glad to have the extra money that came along with them, Poage said.
“My concern is that without this grant, some faculty-member research may falter,” he said. “Students who might otherwise get a head start in research will have to get it with a bare bones budget and little support.”
The federal government gave the school a few weeks to shut down the program.
The cancellation letter was vague, he said, and didn’t say precisely why the money was being cut off.
“It was really poorly done,” Poage said. “It completely lacked transparency.”
Students received monthly stipends from the grant. “Students had to figure out how to pay their rent for the last month of classes,” he said.
Efforts to increase diversity in biomedical sciences provides students with mentors, lab experience and a chance to form friendships with other students who share their goals.
Students also learn what makes for a compelling research question and how to present their research in an engaging way, said Julie Posselt, a professor of Education at the University of Southern California who has published books on graduate education and equity in science.
“The mere existence of opportunities changes people’s aspirations,” she said.
“The long term effects will also be felt by the average American in terms of the access to new health care techniques, access to new technologies, improvements to systems that affect all of us,” she said.
Grants aimed at increasing the presence of marginalized groups in STEM were the first to be targeted, said Ebony McGee, an expert on diversity in STEM education. The elimination of funds aimed at marginalized communities in STEM will be a factor in deciding who continues in research careers, said McGee, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University.
She knows of graduate students who would have quit their programs if not for the coaching they received.
“It gave them a way to continue to be motivated in those racialized spaces and places,” she said.
Generation of science lost
The canceled funding has not only stifled on-going research, it has pulled up the ladder for up-and-coming scientists, faculty and students at North Carolina universities told NC Newsline.
“There’s going to be an entire decade or generation of science that is left behind because all of the DEI programs are cut, all of the — I mean, the NIH says there are not banned words, but there’s literal PDFs of banned words,” said Annelise Mennicke, a UNC Charlotte professor studying counseling for LGBTQ+ survivors of sexual violence.
The federal government stripped funding from Mennicke’s study, which aimed to assess how to improve counseling options for LGBTQ+ individuals. As a researcher who focuses on gender and sexuality, she feels the National Institutes of Health has essentially barred support for her field.
“If we’re not able to study LGBTQ+ health, then that entire group of people is left out of the conversation,” Mennicke said. “Their health will worsen, will be set back because we don’t understand basic mechanisms of their health, but also we’re not training scientists to do that kind of research.”
The NIH has slashed hundreds of millions in research grants to North Carolina institutions with a focus on projects that the administration deems related to gender and sexuality, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and vaccine research.
For students, that means an abrupt stop to research they were involved in and a loss of future opportunities to grow their scientific abilities.
“I know people whose salaries have either been, you know, cut in half just by losing the supplemental fellowship income or totally just losing their summer fellowship,” said Nyssa Tucker, president of the UNC graduate workers’ union. “People are having to totally pivot in their directions — so folks who have been pursuing that as their thesis, their doctoral work, are now faced with the quandary of saying, ‘Do I keep doing this?’”
Even where funding has been reinstated — Mennicke’s research money is once again flowing — graduate students may not return. “What can’t be reinstated is the negative impacts on the students,” Mennicke said. “This was undermining their belief in public health and in the value of the science that they were doing.”
Epidemiology and community health professor Jessamyn Moxie, Mennicke’s co-lead on the study, said two of the original student researchers on the project did not return. “Morale was just broken,” Mennicke said.
Those who did come back largely asked to be kept out of the loop on the status of funding.
“It was just so stressful for them to have that uncertainty. I think, in this era especially, you know, in the best of days, students being involved with research is a somewhat stressful activity for them,” Moxie said. “A lot of our team is LGBTQ, so you put the larger climate of uncertainty about rights and their safety that they’re already navigating, and this is their employment — across UNC Charlotte, generally, a lot of our students work in order to survive.”
“The students really I think just wanted to dial this down in this one area that they could choose to dial down the uncertainty for themselves,” Moxie added.
The future of the project is still uncertain. Mennicke said there had not been clear communication from the university on what the recent Supreme Court decision authorizing grant cancellations means for researchers at the school.
“Nobody really knows what the impacts of that Supreme Court case will be for individual researchers,” Mennicke said. “We’re still kind of waiting and seeing and acting as if we have — because we have the grant right now. So we’re just going to get on with the rigorously evaluated, peer-reviewed process that we went through to do the science that we believe in.”
Up in smoke
Students are also losing access to fellowship programs that helped them to connect with scientific peers and mentors, another avenue that has long fostered research careers. In April, the NIH canceled its MOSAIC program, aimed at helping postdoctoral researchers from diverse backgrounds transition into faculty careers.
Mark Peifer, a cell biology professor at UNC Chapel Hill, said it was shameful that the government was canceling research awards to talented scientists “for reasons that have nothing to do with science.”
“It’s targeted at something really important, right, which is helping people make that really critical transition between post-doctoral fellow and faculty,” Peifer said. “People were worried that they wouldn’t be able to get a job and so many of our most talented scientists were choosing to move into the private sector.”
These programs serve a dual purpose: They help propel burgeoning young scientists while also bringing outside funding to research projects at universities that may not have otherwise been possible.
The administration’s actions, Peifer added, have had a chilling effect on private fellowships aimed at diversity as well. He pointed to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which canceled its $60 million inclusive excellence program as well as pausing the Hanna Gray Fellowship for early-career researchers.
“What we’re learning is that this cohort building experience is really, really powerful at accelerating people’s development as scientific leaders, you know, because you’ve got people to talk to,” he said. “This is a phenomenal program.”
Moxie, the epidemiology and community health professor, expressed concern that the loss of opportunities would prevent young researchers from finding their lifelong passions. She said one of her formative research experiences was an ethnographic study on people living with HIV in Vietnam, which helped lead her into a career aimed at sexual health.
“Researchers feel like it is gatekept for many students. They don’t know how to break into something that feels bigger than them,” Moxie said. “I think that when that is the case, then when the opportunities are limited, many students, if they enter in one particular area, that may not be the thing that ignites them.”
Tucker, the student worker union president — herself a toxicology and environmental health researcher — said it feels like “these careers are just up in smoke.”
“It’s not only people’s careers, it’s their livelihood, but also the work is done to benefit everyone,” Tucker said. “We’re going to definitely see a drop in the number of people who can do research of any type here in Chapel Hill, but I mean, across the nation.”
