Samantha Liu chronicles how terminated diversity grants upended the lives of early-career researchers.
Ashley Wang reports on the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative’s research setbacks in the wake of funding cuts.
Kelly Kong follows international Chinese students as they navigate Trump’s visa restriction campaign.
Tina Li examines the instability driving researchers from academia to industry.
Dear readers,
On an overcast May afternoon, Maurie McInnis emailed the Yale community denouncing the federal administration’s proposed endowment tax. Less than an hour later, Trump revoked Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students.
It didn’t stop. Our phones buzzed all summer with breaking news notifications and calls from each other. ICE took our neighbors. The Trump administration laid off federal employees en masse. Political censorship tested the right to free speech.
On our own campus, we wanted to keep track of the changes that seemed to happen too fast to process. Writers for The New Journal investigated the impacts of Trump’s higher education policies at Yale. They spoke to scientists from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ public health researchers, and Chinese international students.
On top of character-driven journalism, we realized we needed a more systematic and accessible way to track the scope of disruption. With that, we began putting together our inaugural data visualization interactive.
Over the past three months, we were struck by the silence—students, faculty, and administrators were afraid to speak freely. The widespread instinct that silence meant protection felt new.
No one can predict what will happen to our campus in the coming months or years, but we can record the change.
With purpose,
The Managing Board
Chloe, Calista, Mia, Tina
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A Chance to Do Their Work
The NIH cut funding for early career researchers from diverse backgrounds. Now, former recipients find they can’t reapply for funding unless they abandon their research and propose new projects. By
Samantha Liu
Chinese international students are the foremost targets of Trump’s student visa restrictions. Now, their place at Yale and their ability to speak freely seem more precarious.
Kelly Kong
Junior researchers’ chances of sustaining the rest of their PhD degree seemed to evaporate overnight—simply due to their affiliation with the Yale LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative. By Ashley
Wang
STEM researchers entered academia to push the frontiers of knowledge, but recent federal cuts force them to reconsider their dreams. By
Tina Li
The President and the Painting
Reading between the lines of Maurie McInnis’s commencement speech—and the painting that accompanied it.
By Adele Haeg
In May, twenty thousand spectators watched as Maurie McInnis stepped up to the podium to deliver her first commencement speech as President of Yale.
But McInnis did not mention any of this context in her speech.
She projected an image of a painting from the Revolutionary War on a screen next to her: The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill by the American “patriot-artist” John Trumbull.
“British forces have breached American lines,” McInnis narrated from her rostrum. “The fate of a young nation hangs in the balance.”
That was May. In March, the Trump administration had canceled $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University. In April, the administration froze Harvard’s federal funding, and Harvard sued. By May, universities everywhere were nervous.
As the Trump administration has ramped up its attacks on higher education, McInnis has stayed quiet. Not silent: in April, she and 200 other university presidents signed a letter against the administration’s “intrusion” into higher education policy, and in May, she emailed students railing against the endowment tax proposed in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” But months into Trump’s second term, she has avoided saying anything potentially provocative, or anything whatsoever.
Yale has mostly been spared so far. No one knows exactly why, although there has been speculation. “McInnis’ Trump strategy: quiet in public, busy in Washington,” reads a January Yale Daily News headline. She’s certainly no Alan Garber, the Harvard president who has made several public statements opposing the Trump administration’s policies, citing the university’s “moral imperative” to speak up.
University presidents elsewhere,
especially at Princeton and Wesleyan, have also been outspoken.
There was no require ment for McInnis to make a statement about politics in her speech, and she didn’t, not directly at least.
But her choice of painting—a scene from the Revolutionary War—and her dis cussion of “partisan antipathy” and “American ideals” points to pres ent-day political polarization in the United States.
“When I began my academic journey at Yale as a graduate student, I never imagined that I would become an academic leader,” McInnis wrote in an email to me. Before assuming her first admin istrative role as Associate Dean of the College at the University of Virginia in 2010, she had spent twelve years teaching there as an art history professor.
But McInnis is not just an art his torian anymore. As president of Yale, she is not an observer of the battle but a participant in it.
McInnis sent me an email about the painting and her background in art history in response to a request for comment about the speech.
“I loved my time in the art history classroom, and very much miss the regular interaction with students standing in front of works of art,” she wrote. “I was always drawn to art history because of the insights it provides into our shared humanity.”
McInnis said she saw the painting while strolling through the Yale University Art Gallery. The work hangs in the gallery, across from Trumbull’s portrait of George Washington. McInnis chose to feature the painting in her speech, she said, because next year marked the 250th anniversary of American Independence.
layout by Vivian wang
“Of course,” she wrote in the email, “today’s partisan divides do not parallel what they were experiencing in 1775.”
In her speech, she celebrated charac-
of Small, emphasizing the importance of our “shared humanity,” a phrase she repeated throughout her speech and her email.
The men in the painting have “these sort of deep interconnections,” Yale history professor Mark Peterson said, “even though they’re now on opposite sides of the conflict,” like Major John Small and his friend General Joseph Warren, who stand in the center of the painting.
The two men had fought for the British in the French and Indian War. Small remained loyal to the British. Warren eventually became one of America’s Founding Fathers.
In the painting, Small saves Warren from another Brit’s bayonet to the reproach of his fellow redcoats.
“One man preserves the dignity of a dying foe with an unexpected gesture of compassion amid chaos,” McInnis said
Though McInnis avoided comparing America in 1775 to 2025, she read the painting as an allegory for what partisanship should look like today.
“When you entered Yale,” McInnis told her audience, “partisan rancor had reached historic levels.”
But by the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, the colonists no longer saw the Crown as another party with a king they did not favor. Instead, they viewed it as a Parliamentary body attempting to restrict their rights.
There is more to the painting than a message about “our shared humanity.” McInnis might have compared the
means by “chaos.”
battle for the independence of Yale as an academic institution. The lines have been drawn; the “fate of a young nation” is at stake. Her strategy—silence— has been effective. As far as we know, Yale hasn’t had to concede as much to the Trump administration as other universities have.
McInnis is no Warren, no Small. Perhaps she is the barefoot man in the foreground of the painting, cradling Warren as he dies. Without a coat, a flag, or a weapon, he’s nameless and not affiliated with any cause. No one knows who he is, but Trumbull immortalizes him anyway. ∎
Adele Haeg is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College and an associate editor of The New Journal.
Federal Research Grants: Tracking the Change
It's been hard to keep track of the headlines about federal research cuts: the executive orders and judicial tussles, the many acronyms and large sums of money. With a team of journalists, designers, and data analysts, The New Journal set out to clarify the effects of the last nine months. W here does Yale’s federal research funding stand?
Impacted Yale Federal Research Grants
In total, Yale lost $31.6 million as of August 12, 2025, according to the Yale Office of Public Affairs and Communications (OPAC). Eighty-six research grants have been impacted.
Federal agencies awarded these grants in one of three ways: directly to a Yale faculty member, to a team including a Yale faculty member, or to another institution which granted funding to Yale.
Nine schools and centers across Yale have lost federal research funding, with the Schools of Medicine and Public Health sustaining the largest losses.
Impacted Grant Count, by Agency Sponsor
86 Impacted grants in total
National Institute of Public Health
Congress created the National Institute of Health in 1930. Since then, the organization has grown to encompass numerous specialized institutes. Discoveries such as the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and HIV's connection to AIDS were supported by NIH grants. Today, the NIH operates within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Impacted Grant Count, by Yale Recipients
This is likely because the majority of Yale’s federally-funded research grants are supported by the National Institutes of Health.
U.S. Department of War
The U.S. Department of War (formerly the U.S. Department of Defense) offers grants for a range of defense-related areas, including military technology and health concerns such as toxic exposure and skin cancer.
U.S. Agency for International Development
The U.S. Agency for International Development partners with universities to support global agricultural innovation and food security. Other grants support educational programs and research on democracy around the world.
This marked an all-time high for the university and placed Yale in the top 0.2 percent of NIH grantees, or eighth in the country, according to Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research. In the 2024 fiscal year, Yale received $663 million in research grants from the NIH.
Yale international and federal research funding in 2024, in millions
According to Tina Posterli, OPAC. This graph does not include corporate, foundation, and state sponsorship.
Institutions with Most NIH Funding in 2024
Data Source: Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research Note that
“At Yale in 2024 alone, NIH funding supported over 2,200 clinical trials in cancer, mental health, and heart disease, among other conditions; and care for 38,000 patients, including adults with Alzheimer’s and patients of all ages with cancer and other illnesses.”
–Tina
Posterli, OPAC
Twenty-nine of Yale’s previously terminated awards have been reinstated as a result of legal actions by sponsoring agencies and other organizations, according to OPAC. Some reinstatements are still pending and subject to possible reversal on appeal.
“It is important to note that while some awards at Yale have been reinstated, the suspensions disrupted research timelines, impacted resources, and delayed projects in ways that researchers are still navigating.”
–Tina Posterli, OPAC
What does a loss of $31.6 million mean for our university? This amount is 3.5 percent of what Yale received from federal agencies in 2024.
Yale has lost substantially less funding than other Ivy League schools.
Read the full interactive online
Credits
Reporters
Mia Rose Kohn
Sabrina Thaler
Tina Li
Calista Oetama
Web Developers
Samhita Kumar
Leslie Kim
But the consequences of research funding cuts on campus are visible and career-altering. The New Journal followed researchers at Yale whose labs have lost NIH funding. Here are their stories.
Data Analysts
Lena Qian Leslie Kim
Designer
Eunice
Graph based on Grant Witness, a self-reported data-base that lists fewer terminated grants than the number provided by the Yale Office of Public affairs
The NIH cut funding for early career researchers from diverse backgrounds. Now, former recipients find they can’t re-apply for funding unless they abandon their research and propose new projects.
By June 2024, Rafael Perez felt like he was on the brink of something big. He had been awarded the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) K99 fellowship, a highly prestigious grant for early-career scientists. Receiving the award—nearly a million dollars over five years—is strongly correlated with getting a faculty position, as well as the coveted chance to start one’s own lab.
And for Perez, who is an associate research scientist at Yale, the K99 also served as a badge of honor. He had grown up in the Dominican Republic, where PhD programs were scant, and research “wasn’t anything to anyone,” as he put it. Perez’s arc through science traced an improbable American Dream: moving to the United States as a teenager, spending fifteen years vying for a seat at the lab bench and carving out a place for himself in academia studying opioid use disorder. Receiving the K99 was a signal to Perez and everyone else that, after years of hard work, he had what it took to be a successful scientist.
In the first year of his award, Perez used his funding to travel to a conference in Tuscany and present his findings on addiction. He brought his wife, also a researcher, and their 6-month-old son. In a luxury Renaissance hotel, overlooking the Lucca countryside, Perez shook hands with prominent scientists from across the world.They congratulated him on his K99; they told him they were thrilled about his future ahead. At one point, Perez watched a scientist from a Nobel Prize-winning lab hold his son. He remembered thinking, at last, Wow, I’ve made it
But on April 17, 2025, just nine months after he had received his K99, his grant was abruptly terminated. His remaining funds—meant to last him four more years—were gone. As he recalled, his principal investigator told him, “You’ve got three months to find a new job.”
Perez had originally applied under a sub-track of the K99 meant to enhance diversity in the science workforce. Eligible applicants include individuals from racial, gender, disability, and income backgrounds considered underrepresented in biomedical research, as per data from institutes such as the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Census Bureau. Though its judging criteria is roughly identical to the standard route, the diversity track was designed to provide extra support and networking opportunities for its awardees, helping them navigate the landscape of science academia. It sought to increase access and retention of minority researchers in science academia, a field often criticized for being dominated by a small, privileged elite.
But Perez soon learned that the K99’s grant program for diverse applicants was being defunded. And moreover, all award recipients that had applied through the diversity track—no matter how strong their projects’ scientific merit, or how high they could’ve scored in the application process compared to the broader K99 pool—would lose the rest of their funding.
Perez recalled a conversation with one of his colleagues, a researcher with spinal cord injury who also lost his K99. “Maybe it was my mistake for
getting my hopes up that someone like me could actually run a lab,” he remembered hearing.
“It really messes with you and your ability to feel like you belong in science,” Perez said.
NIH GRANT TERMINATIONS ARE HISTORICALLY
unprecedented. In any given year, fewer than twenty NIH grants are terminated, almost all on grounds of severe charges like fraud and misconduct. But in the first five months of 2025 alone, nearly three thousand NIH grants have been terminated, totaling $4.52 billion across more than one hundred universities.
When President Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, many scientists foresaw that most DEI programs across universities would be axed. While this has taken the form of a mass defunding of health equity studies—including studies on HIV, trans healthcare, and racial health disparities—the NIH has also quietly ended grants and training programs that historically funded researchers from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The wave of terminations in April that impacted Perez was a new escalation, not only shuttering opportunities for scientists from diverse communities, but also rescinding grants that had already been awarded and disbursed to them.
Besides Perez, other Yale researchers who suddenly lost their awards include Serrena Singh, a first-generation Caribbean-Indian college graduate studying liver diseases, who works at an Amazon warehouse on weekends for extra money; Thi Vu, a public health researcher interested in caregiving among older adults with dementia; Andin Fosam, a Black former student-athlete investigating pathways to muscle mass loss and weight loss in kidney cancer; and A Ram, a PhD student with a chronic illness interested in improving Connecticut’s alert system for opioid overdoses. (“A” is their full first name.)
In total, Yale has lost an estimated $51.6 million in funding across forty NIH projects; of these, about fifteen belonged to grant programs specifically meant to support disadvantaged researchers.
“I thought that I was safe because it’d already been approved,” said Mata’uitafa Faiai, a PhD
candidate in chronic epidemiology, who had lost her F 31 fellowship—a competitive training grant for pre-doctoral researchers—totaling ninety-eight thousand dollars over two years.
The terminations are more alarming given that all fellowship cancellations occurred without a reevaluation of each proposals’ scientific impact. In its notices, the NIH claimed these projects—on topics such as tissue scarring, nuclear envelope transport, and kidney cancer—were “nonscientific,” “antithetical to inquiry,” and failed to “expand our knowledge of living systems,” solely because recipients had indicated they came from diverse communities.
That was just such an egregious example where the goal was clearly not leveling the playing field, but rather taking people who identify as diverse—after encouraging them to do so—and throwing them off the playing field,” said Carolyn Fredericks, an assistant professor of neurology.
The fallout has further strained the tenuous relationship many young scientists, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, already have with academia. “I spend all my time thinking, are you going to get your grant taken away? Is it going to come back? Are you going to get money?” Perez said. “Where am I going to get money?”
Ram, a PhD student who lost their F 31 diversity fellowship totaling $96,668 over two years, put it bluntly. “I mean, if you can’t get funding, then you’re fucked.”
WHEN HIS FAMILY MOVED TO Pennsylvania from the Dominican Republic, 17-year-old Perez would walk from his parents’ bodega to the public library. Still learning English, he couldn’t read all the books, but he loved to thumb through the graphic novels and manga. He thought he would become a comic book artist someday, or maybe a graphic designer.
Later in his undergraduate years, as an art major, Perez found himself riveted by a human psychology course. He asked incessant questions in the class. At the end of the semester, the professor noticed his enthusiasm and offered to let him check out their lab’s research. “I didn’t even understand what that meant,”
Perez remembered. “I was like, Oh, is that some sort of club where you sit around and look at papers?” At the time, he could hardly fathom himself doing biology—he just didn’t know of any scientists in his life, much less scientists who looked like him.
But if research was once a far-off concept, over a decade later—after switching his undergraduate major from art to psychology to biology, after completing a six-year PhD in pharmacology, after receiving a position as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale, after publishing three papers with one more on the way—he has made a full-time career out of it.
Now in his mid-thirties, Perez has spent the past five years probing mouse brains at the Picciotti Lab at Yale, searching for the underlying mechanisms of addiction. He studies how the brain responds to environmental cues during opioid use, a process he explains with barely-concealed excitement. He also has a propensity for referencing other experiments as he speaks, some of which sound like an offbeat children’s book (“if you give an animal cocaine…” he states, probably alluding to a 2021 study where he did exactly that). Scientists, to Perez, are just “a bunch of dorks”—“I knew once I realized that, ‘Hey, these are my people,’” he said with a self-deprecating smile.
Underneath Perez’s affability remains a thoughtful intensity for science. His path in academia as a Dominican immigrant has not always been easy; to this day, Perez still battles bouts of imposter syndrome and the knowledge that he does not look like “the stereotypical scientist on a faculty website.” But in the past decade, he has not wavered in his dream to direct his own lab to find treatments for substance use disorders.
In 2024, Perez set his sights on the K99, the coveted NIH award that supported postdoctoral scientists as they transitioned to full-time faculty positions. At the time of his application, the K99 had both the standard track and a track for “Maximizing Opportunities for Scientific and Academic Independent Careers” (MOSAIC). Given that acceptance rates for both tracks were similar, Perez was told that he’d have a good shot at either. But a few colleagues encouraged him to take the MOSAIC route. Though the application process was nearly identical, the MOSAIC grant came with networking
and leadership training opportunities, as well as a slightly higher stipend, according to Perez.
With his peers’ encouragement, Perez applied for MOSAIC. His proposal sought to investigate how the brain regulates the spinal cord to produce opioid tolerance. While opioids are useful for pain management, the body’s tolerance for them can rapidly reverse in new settings. By exploring how the body interacts with opioids across different environments, Perez’s project could help inform safer pain treatments that minimize the risk of addiction and overdose.
After half a year and two rounds of review—first by a panel of non-federal scientists, then by the advisory council at the National Institutes of Drug Abuse (NIDA)—Perez’s application was accepted for funding.
It felt like his big break. “Every scientist has a story of the first big grant they were awarded,” explained Melinda Irwin, associate dean of research at the School of Public Health. Even decades later, most successful researchers can trace their start back to one grant, a lucky proposal that was approved for funding and became the basis of their research career.
For Perez, this should’ve been his K99. The NIDA thought so too: “This is an outstanding MOSAIC K99/ R00 application from a promising candidate with a rich scientific background and commitment to substance use research,” his grant reviewers had written in February 2024, at a meeting of twenty-four professors and NIH officers from across the country. “The candidate has chosen a fascinating question to address.”
But in April, the NIDA sent an email explaining that the MOSAIC training program had been halted “due to changes in NIH /HHS priorities.” Shortly after, Perez would receive the formal notice of his individual award’s termination. The notice opened:
“It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research programs related to Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)... 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, no additional funding will be awarded for this project, and all future years have been removed.”
Dean Yimlamai, an associate professor of pediatrics, often hears the misconception that grants set aside for underrepresented candidates are “easier” to obtain. But in Perez’s year, MOSAIC funding was only awarded to researchers whose proposals scored above the seventy-fifth percentile. The cut-off for the regular pool was the seventieth percentile, meaning the diversity grants were more competitive that year. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, because there’s a diversity supplement, we just give it to whoever fits the skin color,’” Yimlamai said.
For the K99, both the MOSAIC and standard tracks use identical judging systems, scoring applications across five separate categories: candidate strength, career development goals, research plan, mentor, and institutional environment. Under MOSAIC, the applicant’s background might influence how their “candidate strength” is judged—one member of Perez’s review panel noted his “outstanding previous commitment to diversity,” for instance—but it would have nothing to do with how the “research plan” category gets scored.
Yet after the sweeping cuts at the NIH, all award recipients who applied through the diversity streams lost their funding. Still, several scientists I spoke to had scored high enough in review panels to nearly guarantee they would have been funded by the regular route. Faiai, whose project investigated diabetes among American Samoan youth, had received a perfect score in review rounds. Jared Akers, a fourth-year PhD student studying human genome evolution, also noted that he “probably scored higher than other fellowships that didn’t get terminated.”
tracks, the NIH only convenes three times a year to review grant submissions. From there, it is typically a yearlong process of additional review panels and advisory council meetings before a scientist can actually receive their funding. Today, even that timeline is no longer dependable. Still reeling from mass layoffs and the January federal funding freeze, the NIH has become backlogged with grant applications, slowing down its review process indefinitely. Scientists who have reapplied for grants today have no sense of when they might hear back. This limbo can be impractical, or even untenable, for early-stage researchers without the funds to support themselves in the interim.
For Perez, the message was clear. “This is a racist strategy to try to prevent people who don’t look like a certain kind of person from having a voice, and drive them out of science in the U.S. ”
The nih has long been aware that science has a diversity problem. Back in the 1990s, Cornell researcher Alice Pell coined the metaphor “leaky pipeline,” referring to how women and minorities are disproportionately driven out of biomedical research at each stage of the training process. In 2020, about two-thirds of research scientists were male, and two-thirds were white.
Explaining why funding for high-scoring grants was cut, including those which aligned with “agency priorities,” the NIH wrote in a statement to The New Journal: “The studies themselves have value, however unfortunately they were funded under an inappropriate and ideologically-driven—rather than scientifically driven—DEI program under the Biden Administration. In the future these types of programs that NIH his [sic] committed to fund to help people with all manner of diseases will be reviewed based on their scientific merit rather than on DEI criteria.”
The NIH did not comment on why they did not provide an opportunity for cancelled grants to be re-evaluated in contention with the regular pool. Though researchers can attempt to resubmit their proposals under the non-diversity
More than funding support, the NIH diversity grants aim to show researchers from historically marginalized populations that they can belong in science. The MOSAIC program, for instance, was added to the broader K99 program in 2019, citing a report that only 7 percent of K99 applicants were from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. The mentorship opportunities built into these grants can introduce young researchers to the network of unspoken rules—how to meet the right people, how to apply for the right grants—to set themselves up for success in STEM
For scientists who did not grow up with exposure to research, this kind of representation can be transformative. In his junior year of college, a year after Perez first stumbled upon his interest in human psychology, one of his school’s professors invited him to a research conference for minority communities. As he stood alongside professors “who look just like my aunts and uncles,” something finally crystallized. “That was the moment where I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I can do this.’”
The NIH’s traditional criteria for “underrepresented in science” also include racial or gender categories. Akers initially qualified for three of the NIH’s economic categories for underrepresented in science: being on food stamps,
receiving government funding for college, and coming from a rural area.
Akers was raised in a conservative Wisconsin town of “870 people in the woods.” “There’s no science in my town, no universities in my town,” he explained. He completed a year at his local community college after high school, then transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There, seeing the advanced level of other students—some of whom had even conducted research before college—Akers felt he had to catch up. He knew he couldn’t apply straight into PhD programs, so he spent two years working as a laboratory technician before he started his graduate training at Yale.
With the broad shuttering of the NIH diversity programs, Akers also lost his grant, which had funded him to study genes underlying how different human populations evolved adaptive traits. He pointed out how the administration’s blunt attacks on NIH funding (which a DOGE communications official once likened to “Liberal DEI Deans’ slush fund”) have limited opportunities for students from rural conservative towns.
Faiai, a graduate student researching diabetes risk among American Samoan youth, recalled growing up in Hawaii, where she “couldn’t even count a handful of Pacific Islanders with PhDs.” She felt a surge of pride the day she received her F31. “I was looking forward to saying, ‘I’m one of many.’”
In 2022, the NIH published an article about Faiai on its Director’s Blog. Today, the URL is defunct. The blog’s last post was on January 17, 2025, three days before President Trump was
sworn into office. The URL , like other sites the administration has stripped from the internet, was quietly disabled in May. If you attempt to open the article about Faiai’s research today— titled “Unlocking Potential in The Next Generation of Scientists”—an error message appears.
Per agency policy, there is a thirty-day window to appeal an NIH grant termination. After his grant was terminated, Perez submitted an appeal defending his project’s scientific merit, explaining the year’s worth of progress he had made on understanding opioid use tolerance. Two weeks later, he was notified that his appeal was rejected, with the same memo as before. The NIH still deemed his project “nonscientific” because it did not align with agency priorities. Other researchers who had submitted appeals received identical messages.
Searching for other funding streams, Perez found an opportunity to apply to a grant, designed to help scientists transition to different disciplines or topics, with a professor in a different Yale department. He wasn’t as familiar with the subject, but it didn’t matter to him: if he could submit it quickly enough, it might still be approved before his lab officially dropped him. The NIH website advises that applicants spend at least two months preparing for a fellowship application and two months writing it. For Perez, he had two weeks.
In that time, he frantically emailed back-andforth with his professors and consulted Wikipedia to make sense of neurology concepts for his new
grant. But he was optimistic about the proposal, which allowed him to research how to improve opioid treatments for people born with spinal cord injury and chronic pain. As of September 2025, he has not yet heard back about his application.
In response to the funding uncertainties, both the Yale School of Medicine and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences extended bridge funding mechanisms, which serve as supplementary funding to faculty members who receive a premature grant termination notice. Perez was approved for bridge funding in June, just one month before his principal investigator would have been forced to let him go. Still, according to the School of Medicine website, bridge funding is only meant to be “short-term financial assistance” spanning “usually less than a year.” For Perez, it merely extended the timeline he had to figure something out: “I have twelve months to either acquire more funding or get a different job now.”
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences guidelines also specify that bridge funding will only be extended to projects which “must ‘bridge’ to future funding— there is an expectation that the funding helps secure data/results that make future funding more likely.” But this does not address what will happen to projects on health equity that the federal government deems “nonscientific.”
Because they are not university faculty, graduate students who received the F 31 are also ineligible for bridge funding. Their departments are obligated to fund them until they complete their PhD, per university policy, but the fate of their research projects is less clear. If their labs remain committed to their project, graduate students will be able to continue their work. If not, they will have to scrap their progress or reduce the scope of their work.
Moreover, to incentivize graduate students to secure grant funding, Yale provides a stipend bonus of $4,000 to students who receive an external fellowship. As a result, when Ram lost their F 31-diversity grant tracking opioid overdoses in Connecticut, Yale informed them they would also lose the $4,000 bonus for the upcoming year—which, given the approximate graduate student’s $52,000 salary, is “unfortunately a substantial amount,” Ram noted.
When Ram argued the unfairness of losing $4,000 over something they had no control over, the Office of Graduate Financial Aid did not budge. Since then, Ram has mostly surrendered to the circumstances. “I’ve never wanted an academic job,” they said, “and at this point, whatever job security I had [in academia] is no longer there anyway.”
Ram grew up with several chronic illnesses that compromised major aspects of their daily life. For a time, it was challenging to work for even an hour a day. Though they’ve adapted to a regimen of mostly preventative care, it remains “very easy” for them to be “disabled out of the workforce,” as Ram put it.
The termination of Ram’s grant and the bureaucratic stresses that followed only confirmed what they already thought of science research’s lack of forgiveness toward disadvantaged students. “It’s challenging
“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.”
having to self-advocate, and have to do your work, and manage your chronic illness, which is a full-time job in itself, to be honest,” Ram said. “But [in academia] you’re held to the same standard as someone who doesn’t have any additional baggage.”
Meanwhile, the fallout of dealing with a cancelled grant mirrors the very dynamics that push minority researchers out of academia in the first place. “I had to basically get a second degree in law to figure out what was going on,” Perez said, after offering an explanation of congressional appropriations and constitutional powers at play in NIH funding mechanisms. He is bitterly aware that many researchers from non-diverse backgrounds have been able to continue their research. “All I want to do is to do my job,” he added.
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.
This was the language of the grant termination from NIH sent to thousands of young scientists across the country who had been supported by the agency’s diversity grants. The same anti-DEI rhetoric has been adopted by the administration to justify its large-scale changes at the NIH and argue that health equity research diverts funding away from insights into illnesses and chronic diseases.
“Today, multiple offices focus on key priorities like women’s health, minority health and HIV/AIDS Too often this results in a lack of focus and uncoordinated resources,” wrote Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary, in a New York Post op-ed entitled “I’m fighting chronic disease, slashing unhealthy fat at HHS.”
But this logic is shaky. It is true that people from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to engage in diversity-related research that relates to their
own communities. One landmark study in Science Advances found that Black scientists are more likely to propose projects related to health disparities or ethnic minorities (the study also found that, in turn, these proposals are less likely to receive NIH funding).
The nationwide shuttering of grant programs for underrepresented researchers has disrupted crucial studies on cancer, cardiovascular disease, infectious diseases, and more. Serrena Singh, a postgraduate researcher and first-generation college student, lost her salary support after her PI’s diversity supplement, entitled “Deciphering Epithelial Signals in the Liver to Drive Inflammation and Fibrosis,” was terminated. The proposal focused on investigating a mechanism that led to fatty liver disease and obesity—both topics among Secretary Kennedy’s list of HHS priorities.
Meanwhile, in May, the White House proposed over $18 billion in budget cuts to the NIH, a 40 percent reduction. This figure still outweighs the amount dedicated to health equity initiatives, which was roughly $5.6 billion in 2024; grants designed to support underrepresented researchers amounted to a mere $226 million in 2024, comprising just 1.2 percent of the proposed budget cut.
“These are easy places and easy people to take money from,” Yimlamai said.
“Look, the NIH needs reorganizing. And increasing the focus on chronic diseases—I think it has a lot of wisdom to it,” said Matthew Burg, professor emeritus of medicine. “But we’re slashing the budget 50 percent? That’s not a real interest in science to improve public health.”
In june 2025, a federal district judge ruled that the NIH’s termination of grants was illegal and ordered the nearly $783 million in research funding be temporarily reinstated. In his ruling, U.S. District Court Judge William G. Young, who had been appointed to the court by Ronald Reagan forty years ago, stated that he had “never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable.” In the weeks that followed, a trickle of NIH grants was reinstated. Two months later, in August, the Supreme Court voted five to four to block Young’s order. All reinstated grants were terminated again.
Perez’s bridge funding will last him until next summer. When we last spoke in late August, he had spent the morning applying for faculty positions across the nation. He thinks he wants to go somewhere with more nature, a calmer place for his newborn son to grow up.
Some days, while writing his faculty applications, he gets excited by the questions. Where do you see yourself in five years? In ten years? Recently, he’s been trying to pivot to more clinical-facing work— transferring his research on opioid pain tolerance to determine how to help people with chronic pain from spinal cord injury. Sometimes, thinking about the path ahead, he feels more negative. “It’s like, why bother?” he said. “I don’t know if I’m going to have a job after next summer.”
But he refuses to leave academia, at least for now, because he knows he loves his research too much. Otherwise, he admits he probably would’ve dropped out of the field long ago—with its long hours, low pay, and constant setbacks—probably to pursue a job in the pharmaceutical industry (the “dark side,” as he calls it). Perez truly believes in research, and he believes in its ability to help people. He jokes that if he can do research under these conditions, then if things ever blow over, he’ll be just about unstoppable.
“Everyone’s just holding on and fighting and fighting and fighting,” he repeated. “I just want a chance to do my work.”∎
Samantha Liu is a senior in Grace Hopper College and former managing editor of The New Journal.
This piece was supported by the Henry Koerner Center for Emeritus Faculty.
Net Good
You milk a fish as the year swims by and America is riding a bear.
The Long Island Sound shelves layers of holy oysters and caviar. Your fingers are brown and yellow and pink and bloodied like a rainbow on an ecologist’s hands. You get chills when you see the scientists, Khakis on the Green are marching for a raise. They are white and old, young and white, and they are not afraid.
Your father called you in a panic when he heard. You’re not like them. You are the silent kind. It’s true—you are the quiet kind.
You would sooner swim sludge pools than shout.
But tides are rising, and a fire festers within you.
This morning, you canned 200 fish into a pan with tall rims and sun-warmed sides. Sacred, they shat themselves. Their vents burst as men to a stroke.
On the 95, you giggled silently to yourself. I milked a fish. Bubble tea pearls fell out of her. An alewife is no maiden, but it feels kinder to say it so.
The city people grant these fish no dignity.
On land, your head is pounding.
The man on the mic, one million miles away, is celebrating and you groan because today is all work and no play: It is the first of May.
Your feet are wet, they smell like marsh, and wasn’t it March, just yesterday?
The summer never stops. The water runs. The fields swell and ebb. There is poison at their stomping feet. When fish suffocate, they swallow air and gulp at nothing.
Michelle So
No Corrective Action
By Ashley Wang
Junior researchers’ chances of sustaining the rest of their PhD degrees seemed to evaporate overnight—simply due to their affiliation with the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative.
In the spring of 2019, a group of twenty-one queer Black and Latino men gathered in the Fair Haven Community Health Care. At night, they slipped into a building near New Haven’s Mill River, spending ninety-minute sessions sharing their experiences of homophobic and racist discrimination.
Led by two clinical psychologists under Yale’s ESTEEM lab, the meetings were trial sessions for a new form of LGBTQ-affirmative group therapy. After ten weeks, these sessions became an important space for the participants. The men reported feeling less alone. Many spoke with a new sense of pride.
“I came out to my mom. I came out to a lot more friends, and now I’m not ‘in the closet,” the participant said in his exit interview three months after the sessions. “I’m just living my best life.”
As a graduate research assistant at ESTEEM, Tyler Harvey helped recruit participants for the group therapy program. Harvey, who spoke with me between cram study sessions for their first medical licensing exams, had wrestled with the invisibility of non-binary gender identities in the healthcare system.
Witnessing therapy sessions that successfully foregrounded their participants’ marginalized sexual and racial identities catalyzed the rest of Harvey’s academic trajectory. Despite writing their master’s thesis on mass incarceration, they began to consider becoming a scholar-physician in the field of LGBTQ+ public health research.
In 2023, Harvey returned to Yale to pursue an MD-PhD degree, seeking training under Dr. John Edward Pachankis, the David R. Kessler, M.D. ’55 Professor of Public Health and ESTEEM’s founder. Pachankis grew up
in Louisiana and received his undergraduate degree from Loyola University in 2002, before training as a clinical psychologist at Stony Brook University. During his undergraduate years, he came out to his grandfather, who advised him to take a “conscientious approach to the task of being gay.”
Pachankis has been a key figure in LGBTQ+ mental health research from its outset in the early 2000s, when federal funding for the field was virtually nonexistent. Over the past decade or so, funding from the NIH has allowed Pachankis to expand ESTEEM into the Yale LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative, now a high-profile program within the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH).
One YSPH press release describes Pachankis’s lab as “one of the world’s leading academic centers on LGBTQ+ mental health research.”
But on March 21st, 2025, the financial infrastructure supporting the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative collapsed. The Trump administration launched a nationwide attack against NIH-funded scientific research in categories that did not support “agency priorities,” targeting projects relating to DEI, vaccines, and gender.
As part of the first wave of cuts to Yale-affiliated NIH projects, the federal government terminated every one of the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative’s grants, amounting to a total loss of $5 million.
Heading into their third year of the MD-PhD program, Harvey had spent the previous summer writing an NIH diversity supplement grant application, which would cover the tuition costs of their PhD. Since 1989, the grant has been a standard source of financial support for underrepresented students. But since the diversity supplement Harvey sought was tied to Pachankis’s project, the NIH automatically deemed his application ineligible for review and funding.
Without reliable funding and a PhD advisor, Harvey wasn’t sure they would be able to finish their MD-PhD degree—due merely to their affiliation with the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative. With little over a month to find another advisor, Harvey was in crisis. At one point, they seriously considered dropping out of the PhD program altogether.
For many early career researchers in the field of LGBTQ+ public health, their research is inseparable from their identities as queer people. They’ve invested years of training to serve queer communities, and the nascent field’s future hinges on their generation. Now, faced with NIH funding cuts, they’re being pushed to avoid any association with the LGBTQ community in their research. They’re questioning whether they can stay in the field at all.
The ESTEEM Lab members.
photo by esteem lab
2016 2019
In 2007, Pachankis wrote a paper in the Psychological Bulletin on the psychological impacts of concealing one’s sexuality. He noted that queer people developed higher rates of depression and anxiety when concealing their sexual orientations, even when they did not face open discrimination. This corresponds with the American Psychiatric Association’s finding that members of the LGBTQ+ community are 2.5 times more likely than heterosexual people to struggle with depression, anxiety, and substance misuse.
In the early 2000s, population-based mental health surveys had just started to recognize LGBTQ+ identities. But Pachankis’s 2007 paper set the rest of his work in motion. In 2013, he began Project ESTEEM, which offered cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) geared towards queer men. He founded the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative six years later, expanding the lab’s scope to encompass a wider range of sexual and gender minorities.
In 2016, fresh out of Pennsylvania State University, TJ Sullivan joined ESTEEM as a postbaccalaureate research assistant. Sullivan spoke softly but deliberately as he recounted his undergraduate trajectory. At the time, he had just come out and wanted to apply his experience in researching relationship stress to the queer community.
Sullivan entered the field of queer psychotherapy at a time when the tides of federal funding were rapidly
shifting in favor of LGBTQ + issues. In 2014, transgender health had first entered the NIH ’s radar. Professional organizations focused on LGBTQ + research were starting to sprout nationwide, gathering in small conference rooms from Northwestern to Stanford.
At ESTEEM, Sullivan helped Pachankis launch the first evidence-based trial of an LGBTQ-affirmative form of CBT in 2016, which would eventually become the group therapy trial at the Fair Haven Community Health Care.
ESTEEM turned one-off case studies on LGBTQ-affirmative therapy into clinical trials, aiming to create a standardized set of principles and techniques: validating painful adolescent experiences, undoing internalized homophobia, and encouraging self-expression.
While the American Psychological Association had first sketched guidelines on conducting LGBTQ-affirmative therapy in 2000, their techniques had lacked rigorous, evidence-based implementation. The community clinicians hired for Pachankis’s trial followed a ten-module plan that directly addressed queer needs, such as information about HIV prevention and intimacy in relationships.
“If found to be efficacious,” Pachankis wrote in his 2014 proposal for the pilot trial of ESTEEM, “the psychosocial intervention described here would be one of the first to improve the mental health of gay and bisexual men by targeting minority stress.”
Sullivan oversaw the protocol’s
implementation, watching clients break lifelong patterns of emotional avoidance. Many of the clients spoke about needing to shut down and ignore their queerness in order to survive, he said. “It’s kind of hard not to come out unscathed in that environment.”
In 2023, Pachankis won a $4 million grant from the NIH to implement his novel CBT methods in over ninety low-resource community health centers, training other clinicians across the country in their techniques. A year later, Sullivan returned to the project, now with a PhD in clinical psychology under his belt.
Meanwhile, investment in LGBTQ+ public health research grew: the scattered thirty-person gatherings where Sullivan started his career became packed hotel ballrooms. In 2024, the Hetrick-Martin Institute, a New Yorkbased LGBTQ+ nonprofit, awarded the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative with the Emery Award, an honor shared by stars Dominique Jackson, an actress on the TV show Pose and Leiomy Maldonado, a judge on HBO’s Legendary. Sullivan attended the ceremony in a black sequined blazer, posing for photos alongside Pachankis.
But three months into Trump’s second term, five projects under the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative received termination notices from the NIH’s extramural research program. This included the $4 million CBT-implementation project and Project EQuIP, a version of ESTEEM
March: Initiative received termination notices, Sullivan loses job April: Harvey transfers to new advisor at SEICHE lab
2024
May: McGee graduates July: Initiative is reinstated
January: McGee joins as research assistant August: Sullivan returns to Initiative as postgrad associate 2025
for queer women. Sullivan had originally intended to stay for a second year of postdoctoral training, but the funds to extend his contract vanished.
The NIH ’s cuts explicitly targeted grants containing keywords such as “AIDS,” “transgender” and “LGBTQ ,” halting many operations mid-trial. The termination notices came from the NIH ’s director of external funding. This overrode the typical chain of communication between the NIH ’s program officers and university principal investigators, according to Jeffrey Wickersham, a Yale researcher.
“Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans,” the termination notices declared. “No corrective action is possible here.” Never, in the history of the NIH, have grants been terminated without the option to appeal.
While Pachankis’s faculty position at Yale remains secure, early career researchers—whose salaries and future career prospects depend on grants—are most vulnerable to the NIH’s haphazard terminations.
“It feels treacherous,” Sullivan said. “If funding gets cut in any way, so does your job.”
In contrast to academic departments within Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative
operates under the Yale School of Medicine and the YSPH. The two schools rely on a soft funding structure: rather than receiving money from Yale’s annual budget, researchers are expected to apply for extramural funding from one of the NIH’s twenty-seven research institutes to round out their salaries. Almost all faculty members receive 70 percent or more of their salary from grants. In 2023, YSPH faculty won $70 million in grants. Two thirds of that funding came from the NIH.
Postdoctoral positions rely even more on a steady influx of NIH funding: some positions are entirely funded by external grants, while others receive funding from a mix of grants and university funds. The funding for Sullivan’s postdoctoral position was pieced together from grants awarded to the Initiative, including Project EQuIP, the CBT-implementation project, and a program supporting parents of LGBTQ children. Sullivan divided his time among these programs, pivoting from clinical supervision and therapeutic treatment for the women under Project EQuIP to mental health screenings and participant recruitment.
When the grants were terminated, all of Sullivan’s funding sources collapsed. In the absence of active projects, he feared that his postdoctoral training goals—gaining experience in clinical work and supervision—were now completely off the table.
Yale initially agreed to extend
2026
Sullivan ends second postdoctoral year at the Initiative 2030
$102,000 to Pachankis to cover lab members’ salaries. But Pachankis notes this amount only compensated 120 days of work, ending in late July—a month shorter than their annual contracts. Lab members had no promise of pay beyond that point. Sullivan was uncertain if he would still have a job come August.
Ultimately, Yale only covered about 4.4 percent of the original $5 million the Initiative had received in NIH funding, intended to last over three years of research. Yale’s temporary contribution could not sustain the Initiative in the long term.
In February, before the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative’s termination, Yale had announced a bridge funding policy for projects impacted by federal funding cuts. According to an informational webpage for Yale faculty, the policy claims to cover the salaries of impacted research staff.
“Bridge funding requests should articulate a compelling rationale for support (for example: that without support Yale might lose talent and skills that took significant time and investment to build),” stated the Dean of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences in an internal memo to Yale faculty.
Pachankis requested $275,000 of bridge funding to retain members of his staff for another year. That request was denied.
According to Pachankis, Yale School of Public Health administrators implied in private conversations that he should
deplete all his non-federal research accounts before requesting additional institutional funding, because he had received prior funds from private donors.
“However, these other accounts would only cover a small fraction of the lost NIH funding and would therefore be depleted quickly,” Pachankis said.
When asked to comment, the YSPH’s office emphasized their commitment to supporting faculty and students affected by the terminations. “We have worked diligently to secure bridge funding that covers salaries, protects ongoing data collection, and sustains scholarship during this period,” YSPH’s chief of staff wrote. “While such support cannot fully offset the scale of lost federal research dollars, we are prioritizing early-career researchers, including PhD students, as well as protecting patients in clinical trials.”
The YSPH did not directly respond to
the claim that Pachankis’s bridge funding was denied, nor that he was asked to deplete all his research accounts before requesting additional funding.
Without the $5 million in NIH grants, Pachankis and the rest of the Initiative got creative. After the terminations, the Initiative received $70,000 in funding from the director of the YSPH’s Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Combined with private donations, the money allowed Pachankis’s team to complete the guaranteed ten-session therapy treatments and perform safe closeouts for the rest of the Initiative’s studies.
The women under Sullivan’s care in Project EQuIP had been chosen specifically for their histories of depression, anxiety, suicidality, and substance abuse. They
wanted help. They wanted treatment. By completing the ten sessions, Sullivan helped equip each woman with emotional coping strategies and relapse prevention techniques. When some of his clients voiced suicidal ideation or displayed serious depressive symptoms, Sullivan conducted mental health assessments to ensure their safety.
One of the private donors who helped support the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative’s closeouts was Jamie Marks ’83, a Yale alum who had previously partnered with the Initiative to help recruit participants for studies. The YSPH ’s press publicized the move as a bona-fide miracle. “His gift saved the study,” the headline proclaimed. It allowed Pachankis’s core team to continue a project on building family support for LGBTQ + youth.
Marks’s donation signaled a shift toward an alternative to the NIH’s base of federal funding: private philanthropy.
As a research assistant for the Initiative, Meredith McGee MPH ’25 has contributed to grant writing for Pachankis since 2024, after spending her undergraduate summers working in queer advocacy at LGBTQ+ community centers. In 2022, McGee had helped write a grant proposal for a family story hour event that congressional representative Marjorie Taylor Greene criticized as “left-wing Marxist indoctrination.” McGee saw this backlash as part of a broader conservative shift in philanthropic funding. Over time, she started writing grant applications without explicitly mentioning projects’ connections to the LGBTQ+ community.
“Before we were the LGBT community center, and now it’s more a community center where we serve these people to the best of our ability,” she said. “The language that we once relied on as a gold standard is now words that we have to try and stay away from.”
After the funding cuts, McGee helped draft the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative’s applications to philanthropic donors. Pachankis’s team highlighted the impact on community rather than science, and pivoted to training other clinicians rather than developing new clinical trials.
“Typical philanthropy doesn’t fund research,” McGee explained.
In all his email communications and press releases, Pachankis emphasizes the applications of the Initiative’s research to “all people.”
“Our work to implement mental health care in 90 LGBT community centers across the U.S.,” he said, “informs how to implement mental health care in other low-resource community settings for other populations nationally.”
By rephrasing their primary research objectives, the Initiative risks conceding to the federal government’s thesis that DEI-related projects are “antithetical to the scientific inquiry.”
On July 9, six months after the initial terminations, the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative’s grants were abruptly reinstated.
The NIH did not provide specific reasons for their decision. For one of Pachankis’s projects, he received a half-apology: “This award was
inadvertently misidentified and does not support DEI activities.”
A week later, the reason for the reinstatements became clearer: they were a result of a lawsuit filed by the American Public Health Association (APHA) and a coalition of state attorneys against the NIH. The judge ruled that the abrupt cuts were “void and illegal.” Pachankis would now receive all the money originally awarded to his projects, restoring funding for the entire Initiative.
Despite these reinstatements, Pachankis’s team has already begun to shrink. At least three members of the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative’s team have departed for different fields. McGee is considering cannabis research, while another student is working on VR-assisted mental health interventions.
Without its base of MPH research assistants, the Initiative has been operating only at partial capacity, focusing mostly on undoing the damage of the funding cuts. Over the summer, Pachankis’s already-reduced team has been overwhelmed by administrative tasks: drafting overdue progress reports, updating ethics approvals, and reconvening data safety review boards.
Pachankis is currently in the process of rebuilding entire research teams for the various projects gutted by the funding cuts. In August, he uploaded a job posting for a postgraduate associate for the 2025-2026 school year. But the process of rehiring and retraining incoming research associates will take months at best, and delay the Initiative’s ability to relaunch clinical trials.
Now, the Initiative’s active projects have yet to restart their recruitment phases. “Recruiting starting in Fall 2025!” reads the “Project Status” section on Project EQuIP’s webpage. As of late September, recruitment had not begun.
Having already invested their postgraduate years in LGBTQ+ public health research, Sullivan and Harvey are determined to stay in academia.
Through the generosity of another professor, Sullivan joined another department at the Yale School of Medicine, allowing him one more year of training.
Ultimately, Sullivan’s future in academia is subject to the whims of the NIH’s current research priorities. He has built an entire career around aiding the LGBTQ+ community—an area that the
NIH has explicitly deemed “unscientific” and “ignorant of biological realities” in its internal memos.
While some university administrators have advised researchers to modify the language of their grant applications to pass the NIH’s filters, the solution is not as simple as excising all mentions of queerness.
If Sullivan concentrated his future grant applications solely on his other research interests, his CV would still be littered with evidence of his background in LGBTQ+ mental health. Ten out of his fourteen publications directly concern queer issues, containing vulnerable keywords such as “sexual minority” and “gender identity.”
And in an academic job market as competitive as today’s, Sullivan cannot afford to equivocate.
“We spend our careers developing expertise in this particular area and
“The language that we once relied on as a gold standard is now words that we have to try and stay away from.”
being able to showcase that you are someone who has the background to carry out this research,” he said. “If you suddenly pivot to something that is still related but you don’t have direct experience in [that field], it makes it automatically more difficult for you to make a convincing case to reviewers.”
This is not the future Harvey had imagined seven years ago when they first started working at ESTEEM as a research assistant.
Harvey had started carving out a new niche in public health. In 2021, they published a paper on the psychosocial health of incarcerated gay and bisexual men, bridging their experience of
queerness and parental incarceration. Harvey had hoped their rigorous training in LGBTQ+ public health would help them develop this subfield.
After the cuts, Harvey needed to find a new PhD advisor within a month and a half, or risk taking on more debt for tuition. Although they tried to remain connected to Pachankis and carry out their PhD research as originally intended, the YSPH’s administrators suggested that they simply find a different advisor in a different area of research. The YSPH did not directly respond to a request for comment.
Harvey managed to find a different mentor associated with Yale’s SEICHE Center for Health and Justice, which focuses on the public health impacts of mass incarceration. They have pivoted to a research area that is less controversial than DEI-related fields.
On the surface, Harvey’s choice to join SEICHE seems like a seamless transition. As a student still drafting their PhD dissertation proposal, they’re able to reframe the narrative of their research, distancing themself from LGBTQ+ work far more easily than Sullivan can. One could write a moving profile of Harvey’s academic trajectory that completely omits any mention of the words “queer” or “LGBTQ .”
In fact, such a profile exists. In a February 2024 interview for KidsMates, a national nonprofit organization that supports children struggling with parental incarceration, Harvey frames their path towards medicine as primarily motivated by their childhood exposure to the criminal legal system. They trace an alternative timeline of their career that highlights their master’s research on the health impacts of family member incarceration and their three years working at the SEICHE Center as stepping stones towards their current work.
“So, what I’m doing now is training to be a physician-scientist who does research on the health impacts of mass incarceration,” Harvey concluded in the KidsMates interview.
But this statement diverges widely from Harvey’s original intentions for their degree—to become a leading scholar-physician in LGBTQ+ research. It glosses over their experiences as a graduate teaching fellow for Pachankis’ class titled “LGBTQ Population Health,” their publication in LGBT Health, and their presentation on queer adolescent health at the APHA’s conference.
“Hopefully one day I’ll still be in a position to do that type of work,” Harvey said. “But it won’t happen while I’m at Yale.”
Their voice was resigned. A year before the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative’s terminations, they published an op-ed in the American Journal of Public Health calling for more LGBTQ-inclusive language in public health research.
“I present two arguments regarding the implications around the lack of LGBTQ+-inclusive language in public health: (1) it is an injustice, and (2) it is bad for science,” Harvey wrote. “If the language of public health does not even present options that appropriately and fully include us, how can we ever be truly represented? It is a moral failure of the field.”∎
Ashley Wang is a junior in Jonathan Edwards College
This piece was supported by the Henry Koerner Center for Emeritus Faculty.
Disrupted Customs
Chinese international students are the foremost targets of Trump’s student visa restrictions. Now, their place at Yale and their ability to speak freely seem more precarious.
By Kelly Kong
photos by Gabriel haley; layout design by Jessica Sánchez
Smile ’28 had always planned to study at a U.S. university. As an English literature enthusiast, she enrolled in an international school in Shenzhen, China before attending boarding school.
In late April 2025, Smile, who asked not to disclose her last name for fear of risking her visa status, submitted an application to renew her F-1 visa—a “nonimmigrant visa for a temporary stay” for students pursuing full-time courses of study at U.S. institutions.
She landed in China on May 12, with an interview appointment at the U.S. Consulate General in Guangzhou scheduled for two days later. Hoping to scout out the consulate premises, she arrived in the city a day before her appointment. The consulate had changed since her last visit five years ago, when she applied for a visa to attend high school. This time, she encountered newly added rows of metal railings outside the embassy doors—and the second Trump administration’s antagonistic policies towards Chinese students.
Between May and August, I spoke to eight international students from China about their lives since Trump’s inauguration. All of them either declined to speak on the record or use their full name for fear of putting their visa status at risk. Some also feared retaliation from Chinese authorities.
Chinese students have been the foremost targets of the federal government’s student visa revocation and restriction campaign. On May 27, the State Department announced a pause on scheduling all new student visa interviews. A day later, President Trump announced new policies to “aggressively revoke visas”
for Chinese students, especially those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
On June 4, he issued a presidential proclamation suspending entry to the United States for any international student studying at Harvard University. Five days later, his travel ban targeting the citizens of nineteen countries took effect. Then, on June 18, the White House lifted the visa interview freeze but began enforcing a stricter application criteria, including an intensified social media screening for applicants.
With the United States and China engaged in a trade war with no end in sight, Chinese students are caught in the crossfires of a diplomatic and economic battle. Many also hope to evade the CCP’s authoritarian rule, but find themselves targeted by the Trump administration’s suspicions against Chinese nationals.
The students I spoke to came to America for the freedom and flexibility of a liberal arts education. But circumstances under the Trump administration—surveillance and limitations on political expression, attacks on “critical fields,” student visa interview freezes—have left them uneasy about their place at Yale and their ability to speak freely.
The day after she arrived in Guangzhou, Smile got to her 8 a.m. visa appointment thirty minutes early only to see streams of people lined up in front of her. The queue snaked around the barrier-lined embassy premises.
Most international students who study in the United States apply for an F-1 visa several months before classes begin. For Chinese students, this visa typically lasts five years before it needs to be renewed. Smile, who last renewed her visa at the beginning of high school, needed to renew it once more to enter the United States in time to start her second year at Yale.
As Smile turned in her application materials and recorded her fingerprints, she began to feel nervous. She noticed that applicants left their interviews with slips of yellow, pink, or green paper—a procedure that didn’t exist when she applied five years earlier. Speaking to the woman in front of her, she learned that yellow indicated approval, and pink denial. Green meant that the embassy or consulate needed additional information before they could make a decision.
In her visa interview, the consulate officer posed customary questions to Smile: where she studied, what her major was, what her plans were after graduation. Then he paused and asked: “Do you have any social media?”
It was a question that Smile was anticipating. Yale’s Office of International Students and Scholars (OISS) had sent memos about increased social media checks for international visa applicants. “But I think I was nervous after he asked that question,” she said. “It makes you think: what are they going to find on my page that potentially jeopardizes [my visa]?”
The experience also reminded her of mass surveillance in China. The CCP strictly controls free speech and political expression. Any individual that
makes comments deemed politically sensitive—such as criticism of the CCP or its leaders—risks severe punishment, including imprisonment. Internet companies are legally required to monitor content that the government deems harmful or disruptful to social order. An extensive system of internet censorship, known as “The Great Firewall,” blocks access to major international media outlets.
Nearly all of the Chinese students I spoke to mentioned being hesitant to speak publicly about political issues. Cora ’28, an international student from China who asked to be identified by a nickname for fear of retaliation from U.S. and Chinese authorities, noted that most Chinese people grow up acutely aware of the risks of talking politics. She still remembers the first time she overheard a semi-political discussion in a public space in China. “I was on the subway and heard two women talking about Russia and Ukraine. And I just realized at that moment: I’ve never heard anyone in public talk about something like that.”
Juliet ’29, another international student from China who asked to be identified by a nickname for fear of putting her visa status at risk, said that the Chinese educational system rarely encouraged free discussion. “Our political science class is basically reciting what the government wants us to think,” she said.
One major reason why Juliet wanted to study abroad was to participate in political discussions and examine global issues she cares about—such as gender equality and women’s health—from diverse perspectives. Trump’s attacks on higher education, many of which target initiatives and research related to gender, has made her question whether she can still pursue her interests at Yale.
“Ever since the new administration,” said Juliet, “the States have never felt more like [China].”
After Trump’s inauguration, international student offices have advised Chinese nationals to avoid participating in protests. Trump signed a January 29 presidential action threatening to deport international students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests. In a “Know Your Rights” webinar in early April, Yale’s OISS advised international students to be particularly cautious in all demonstrations, noting that arrests, convictions, or even publicized photographs could risk one’s immigration and visa status.
Cora still remembers the very first protest she attended. Students had gathered after allegations of sexual misconduct had surfaced against teachers at her U.S. boarding school. The experience, she said, felt surreal as someone who had grown up in China. “It was really weird even just being there,” she said. “When you hold a political opinion, it’s not just thinking, I believe this is right or wrong. It’s more complicated.”
For Cora, there’s still a blurry line between a U.S. citizen’s first amendment rights to protest and an international student’s ability to come into the United States and do the same. She’s unsure whether she thinks protests should be a foreign national’s
guaranteed right—in China, it wouldn’t. But she does believe that before Trump, the United States’ ability to offer all students the right to protest and free speech was one of its most unique—and appealing—features.
“As an international student, you could come in and be like, ‘I have an opinion about what’s right with the world, and I can express that without being scared of being retaliated against and being deported somewhere,’” Cora said.
Retaliation against protesters is not the only way the federal government discourages international students from expressing potentially contentious political opinions. After resuming student visa appointments in June, the Trump administration ordered all visa applicants to make their social accounts public, escalating a social media vetting process meant to identify applicants who may be hostile towards the United States.
Cora, however, said that her worries of U.S. surveillance over her social media accounts did not originate with Trump’s policies. They started long beforehand.
“Because I’m from China, you get this increased awareness that holding an opinion publicly is probably going to get you tracked, even if an administration is not explicitly admitting that,” she said.
She remembers going to her visa interview in the summer of 2024, when Biden was president and no official social media vetting process had been in place for F-1 applicants. “In the line, I was literally worried—oh, wait, I follow some pro-Palestine accounts on Instagram. What if they asked me about that?”
She has since unfollowed those accounts.
When the visa officer asked Smile if she had social media, she stammered. “No…no?”
“You’ve got to have social media,” the officer said. Smile nodded. He slid her a piece of scrap printer paper under the glass window pane. She jotted her Instagram handle down. The officer asked if she had WeChat. She hesitated, and he continued: “Of course you have WeChat, right?”
She wrote her WeChat ID down, but wasn’t sure if she remembered it correctly, so she offered
to jot down her phone number as well. The visa officer refused. “We’ll find you.”
“Of course they could find me,” Smile said. “But it was just one of those really sobering sentences that I was like: wow. This is a well-oiled machine.”
Masters and PhD students studying certain STEM subjects often face extra scrutiny in visa applications and revocation initiatives. According to Emma Zang, associate professor of sociology at Yale, students pursuing advanced studies in STEM are more likely to work with what the U.S. government considers sensitive information.
Under the Trump administration, many undergraduates also avoid studying what Trump has outlined, with little clarity, as “critical fields” susceptible to espionage. This likely includes studies related to science with military or national security applications, like artificial intelligence and biotechnology.
In May 2025, the Stanford Review, a right-wing undergraduate publication at Stanford University, wrote that a CCP agent impersonating a student at Stanford allegedly tried to recruit an undergraduate as a spy for the Chinese government. The student was conducting sensitive research on China. After interviewing multiple professors, students, and China experts, the Review concluded that the CCP was orchestrating a widespread intelligence-gathering campaign at Stanford.
However, a New York Times investigation on the article found that its conclusion stands on weak grounds: the Review did not mention that the only Chinese spy named in the article had her visa fraud charges withdrawn a year after the initial allegations. Such conclusions exacerbate suspicion over the presence of Chinese researchers and scholars in general— most of whom, as the Times wrote, are “not here to spy or obtain information for their government.”
“Ever since the new administration,” said Juliet, “the States have never felt more like [China].”
“The Trump administration’s national security concerns about China’s role in critical sectors were not unfounded,” Zang said. “But their approach to addressing those concerns was often inefficient and lacked strategic coherence.”
The Review article claimed that Stanford was China’s “academic target number one” due to its dominance in artificial intelligence—a field considered a “critical field.”
Ordinarily, international students hoping to find work in the United States are incentivized to major in STEM All students receive twelve months of temporary employment authorization, known as Optional Practical Training (OPT), after graduation. However, students graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree are
eligible for an extension, giving them an additional twenty-four months after graduation to find work in the United States.
But, the Trump administration’s public denouncements of Chinese students studying “critical fields”—which mostly fall under STEM—discourage international students from pursuing popular STEM majors such as physics and computer science.
Kay, a Chinese international student who asked to be identified by a nickname for fear of putting her visa status at risk, is a senior undergraduate student looking into biology PhD programs.
Most PhD students from China get a five-year student visa for their studies. By contrast, some biology PhD students only receive one-year visas due to concerns about biotechnology competition and espionage. If they leave the country after the expiration date, they must apply for a new visa to reenter. But student visas are entry documents. If students never exit the United States, they can stay for the entire duration of their study without having to renew their visas.
Kay noted that applying for visas annually feels risky for many biology PhD students from China. A successful renewal process should take no more than sixty days, but with the Trump administration’s restricted visa interview process, it could be longer. Biology is an experimental subject: taking several months of leave sets back research. Many of these PhD students, Kay said, opt to not return home for five years instead.
Viki ’29, Chinese student who asked to be identified by a nickname for fear of putting her visa status at risk, also recalled family and mentors advising graduate students to remain in the United States. She intends to study physics but wants to stay open to other fields for more options.
“Any STEM student would kind of feel uncertain about the future,” she said. “It’s imposing some kind of psychological barrier. Some kind of fear.”
As of August 18, the Trump administration has revoked the visas of six thousand students, including those of four Yalies—two Chinese graduate students and at least one South Sudanese student. The two Chinese students soon had their F-1 visa statuses restored.
But on August 26, Trump spoke at a cabinet meeting at the White House: “I like that other countries’ students come here,” he said, as reported by The New York Times. “You know what would happen if they didn’t? Our college system would go to hell very quickly.”
A day earlier, he told reporters at the Oval Office that he would let six hundred thousand Chinese students into the country—twice the number of Chinese students currently enrolled in a U.S. institution. This drew backlash from Trump’s supporters, including Steve Bannon, one of his former advisors. “There should be no foreign students here for the moment,” Bannon said.
Juliet’s own embassy appointment was originally scheduled for late May before it was cancelled by the
freeze. When interview appointments reopened on June 18, she hopped on the online site, where a July 23 slot was the earliest option. “It works well for me,” she said, “but for other students who might have an earlier start to the term, it’s not ideal.”
Smile, whose appointment took place before the freeze, had left the consulate with a green piece of paper—meaning officials needed to review additional information. Her passport, updated with a fresh visa page, arrived in the mail two days before the appointment freeze. “My mom and I were like, ‘God damn, we got lucky.’”
Shaken but relieved, Smile felt like she was finally allowed to return to her second home— even if it was a home she needed permission to enter.
Having left China at age 14, there are fewer and fewer things tying her to her home country. Most of her friends are in America. She has spent the better part of her formative years in American boarding schools and among American peers. And she is more fluent in English than Chinese.
“I struggle to say the words ‘I am American,’ because I’m not,” she said. “But given a choice, I would stay in America.”
Being educated in the States has also allowed her to dive deeper into her passion for the written word. A literary editor and poet, Smile struggles to imagine a world in which she is not able to think and write in English. “I can write better in English, read better in English, than I can in my mother tongue,” she said.
Yet she is still an international student. Her ability to be here is still determined by the U.S. government. She remains a target of Trump’s anti-immigration policies. And she is unsure about the future that the country will hold for her.
Smile’s consulate experience, with its metal railings and increased social media vetting, had changed since her visit before high school. But the bulletin displayed in the embassy—“Staying in America is a Privilege, Not a Right”—remained.
Two days before her sophomore year began, Smile landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. An immigration officer inspected her updated visa. He stamped her passport. She walked through customs without an issue—uncertain whether she would be able to again, next time.∎
Kelly Kong is a sophomore in Morse College and an associate editor for The New Journal.
Late, the singular white light shines
We cusped the yellow edge and she said, will you bring it closer?
As if we were schoolchildren tying rope around the moon and pulling it behind us from the backseat window
We stood The light burned brighter 11:31
Diya Naik
Unforced Error
STEM researchers entered academia to push the frontiers of knowledge, but recent federal cuts force them to reconsider their dreams.
By Tina Li
photos by colin kim
It is one of the most consequential decisions facing America’s brightest minds. Undergraduates deliberate it, graduate students agonize over it, scientists write op-eds defending their choices. Online forums overflow with debates about stipends versus salaries, independence versus security. Some researchers wouldn’t have it any other way, drawn to academia’s promise of intellectual freedom. Others find themselves disillusioned early on. Some drift away naturally as their interests evolve. Many prefer starting salaries that surpass what they’d make after years of academic research.
The choice between academia and industry has always tugged at ambitious researchers. But amid the Trump administration’s cuts to university funding, lab budgets are shrinking and positions are vanishing. The future of American research feels uncertain.
Santanu Antu DPhil ’29 was wrapping up his first year as a PhD student researching quantum error computing when his principal investigator (PI) pulled him aside. The federal government had terminated a grant that co-funded his lab. His PI the faculty member managing the lab and grant money—could no longer afford to keep Antu and another student researcher on the payroll. Antu, an international student from Bangladesh, risked losing his visa if he couldn’t find a new lab by the fall.
Antu scrambled to find a new placement. Typically, students are told early on—about three or four months into the academic year—if they’ll need to look for another lab the next year. Antu suspected that his PI, and the applied physics department, had been caught off-guard amidst the sweep of funding cuts. According to Antu, his PI had mentioned losing sleep over his ability to keep the lab afloat.
Antu asked around, but other PIs were also conserving their budgets. None of the applied physics labs offered him a spot.
“If I am not on top of all of this, I can get kicked out of the country any minute,” Antu said. He started therapy. And for the first time, he began questioning his academic future.
Over the last five months, the federal government has slashed NIH and NSF grant funding, attempted to cap facilities reimbursements at 15 percent (a judge has paused the order indefinitely), and raised the university endowment tax from 1.4 to 8 percent. Due to shrinking budgets, the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship halved its cohort this year and Yale and peer institutions instituted hiring freezes.
I spoke with ten student researchers across STEM at Yale—from mathematics and applied physics to biomedicine and neuroscience—as well as professors nationwide and alumni who’ve since moved into industry. An additional fifty-five did not respond to requests for interviews; two explicitly declined out of fear of jeopardizing their career prospects. Nearly every undergraduate could name peers whose summer research jobs vanished this year, while graduate students knew friends whose PhD offers were pulled. Across the board, students and faculty described a future clouded by anxiety and uncertainty.
In april 2025, The New York Times ran an article titled “How Universities Became So Dependent on the Federal Government.” But Sterling Professor of Physics Steven Girvin told me he thinks the real question is: “How did the U.S. research system become so dependent on universities?”
Before the end of World War 2, Germany clinched most Nobel Prizes in science. The United States was not a scientific powerhouse until wartime shifted domestic priorities. The federal government, military, and universities formed a triangle of collaboration, channeling research talent into projects such as nuclear physics and codebreaking.
After the war, the federal government decided to fund basic research through universities rather than control it from the top down. This model was institutionalized with the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950. Locked into a mutually beneficial relationship with the federal government, U.S. universities became engines of scientific discovery. Countries like the UK , Germany, and Japan adopted the U.S. model.
Academia is not a particularly sexy path. Graduate students and postdocs work for relatively low pay, faculty balance research and teaching the next generation, and universities shoulder the infrastructure.
Companies excel at commercialization, but they rarely invest in research that may only produce discoveries decades later. The mRNA technology behind
After being dropped from his quantum error correction lab, Santanu Antu started questioning whether academia was the right path for him.
COVID-19 vaccines emerged from years of overlooked work at the University of Pennsylvania; GPS, lasers, and transistors all originate from university laboratories pursuing seemingly abstract questions.
Antu—curly-haired, soft-spoken—has always loved math. Physics seemed like a fascinating application, something more “grounded in reality,” he said. After studying math and physics at Bard College in New York, he received a master’s degree in physics from the University of Waterloo in Canada. He eventually developed an interest in quantum computing—a hot, relatively new, field in physics.
The promise of quantum computers lies in two revolutionary capabilities: processing information exponentially faster than today’s computers, and simulating complex systems. They could speed up drug discovery, optimize traffic flows across cities, predict weather patterns weeks in advance, and model financial markets accurately enough to prevent crashes. The stakes have triggered an international race. But building a quantum computer is like trying to coordinate billions of moving parts.
Nearly every undergraduate could name peers whose summer research jobs vanished this year, while graduate students knew friends whose PhD offers were pulled. Across the board, students and faculty described a future clouded by anxiety and uncertainty.
Physicists are divided on how much progress they’ve made. While some researchers trumpet recent advances, others, including Antu, believe progress has been largely incremental since a major algorithmic breakthrough in 1994. The next advance, Antu believes, would need to come on the theoretical side—something that mainly academics work on.
In the race to build a quantum computer, academic research acts as an incubator. Unlike industry, which often chases commercial returns, academia can be more “nimble,” Girvin said—able to take risks, pursue novel ideas, and pivot quickly. The broader ecosystem has a rhythm: academia develops frameworks like new error correction codes and tests them with prototypes, while quantum companies like IBM, Quantinuum, and IonQ use their more abundant resources to scale them up and build as close to a quantum computer as they can.
Yale has been at the frontier of both the promise and the uncertainty in the field of quantum computing. Girvin—a theorist—and his experimentalist colleagues pioneered advances in quantum processor design. They also founded the Yale Quantum Institute in 2015, drawing students worldwide and positioning Yale as a physics innovator alongside schools like Stanford, MIT, and Caltech.
Given this intricate web of academic research, industry applications, and national priorities—built over decades and battle-tested—the current funding cuts alarm Girvin. “In baseball terms, this is an unforced error,” he said. “We’re doing this to
ourselves, and it seems extremely risky and completely unnecessary.”
Six months ago, Antu leaned toward an academic career. But after the upheaval of losing his lab placement, he’s now “50/50.”
In 2024, twelve Yale physics and applied physics PhDs entered for-profit industry positions, while two pursued academic careers, according to data from the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The class of 2023 shows a similar split. In the past decade, excluding a two-year period in the mid-2010s that skewed toward industry, cohorts were more evenly divided. Small sample sizes and limited data before 2015 make trend analysis difficult.
While many physics graduates enter fields like quantum computing, biotech, and data science, some pursue careers in aerospace and defense. The United States doesn’t publish a clean tally of physics PhDs hired by defense contractors, but physics backgrounds align closely with the engineering skills sought by major defense employers. Federally funded labs such as Los Alamos National Laboratory explicitly recruit physics PhDs for weapons design. The American Institute of Physics’ employer lists routinely include the likes of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and the Department of War (formerly the Department of Defense).
Career trends for physicists have always been cyclical, Girvin said, pointing to past booms and busts in computer science and finance. “But the
Quantum computing relies on academia for theory and industry for scale.
current challenges feel a little worse than those sort of natural cycles.”
In his May 23 executive order on federal research, President Donald Trump insisted he wants to restore “a gold standard for science.” Some scientists share his skepticism about what he calls the current system’s “reproducibility crisis”. The relentless pressure to publish—key to prominence and hireability in academia—has flooded the literature with papers of dubious value. In 2024, a landmark paper highlighted the glut of 2.82 million articles in 2022 compared to 1.92 million in 2016—far outpacing the number of practicing scientists and their available time for peer review. And artificial intelligence is further enabling “paper mills,” schemes to mass-produce articles with doctored images and faked bylines and data, Yale professor Carl Zimmer reported for The New York Times in August.
But the federal administration’s actions have disrupted ongoing projects without addressing existing problems of dubious science. In his first term, Trump signed the National Quantum Initiative Act, committing $1.2 billion in funding from 2019 to 2023 for quantum information science (the act is awaiting reauthorization in the House.) The situation shows how haphazard the cuts are, Girvin said: health sciences and diversity, equity, and inclusion-related research have been hit hardest, but other fields—including federally prioritized ones like quantum—are also getting caught in blanket cuts to universities and the NSF.
In February, University President Maurie McInnis broke her precedent of public restraint to denounce the NIH’s proposed cap on research facilities reimbursements. In a May email, she urged the Yale community to speak up against the increased endowment tax. Congress passed the legislation in July, costing Yale an estimated $280 million in the first year and likely more in the years to come.
“Universities perform fundamental research that has led to advancements that define modern life,” McInnis wrote. She warned that the endowment tax hike would be ruinous: “The U.S. will cede leadership in new technologies to other countries.”
The current moment feels reminiscent of the 2008 financial crisis, when Yale’s endowment plunged by $6 billion and its hiring froze for two years. One unsettling feature of today’s turmoil is that its impact won’t be felt immediately, researchers warned me. Restricting academic freedom and driving bright students to other countries or corporate jobs won’t necessarily hurt tomorrow’s discoveries, but may erode the foundation for breakthroughs a decade into the future.
Last year, Riya Bhargava ’26, an undergraduate student studying biomedical engineering and philosophy, sat down at a formal, intimate club group dinner with a high-profile venture capitalist. Over the meal, the venture capitalist told her it would be “stupid” to pursue a PhD.
Bhargava, a student from India, is interested in
anti-aging research to help people lead longer, more dignified lives. When she was young, her grand mother fell ill. Her grandmother’s age meant doc tors couldn’t administer her all the treatments they could’ve for younger patients. Bhargava wants to devote her career to changing that standard. Bhargava had previously worked at four Yale biomedicine labs. This summer, she interned at Schrödinger, an international physics-based biotech software company. But whether she’ll pursue a PhD is still “up in the air,” she said. She prefers industry’s faster pace but worries she might need the skills and “scientific intuitions” that only years of grappling with foundational questions can provide. Even if she does choose to pursue a PhD, she anticipates working a few years first to build savings.
Restricting academic freedom and driving bright students to other countries or corporate jobs won’t necessarily hurt tomorrow’s discoveries, but can erode the foundation for breakthroughs a decade into the future.
A desire for certainty, combined with a heavy finance and consulting recruiting presence at Yale, can push otherwise aspiring scientists to reconsider their career choices. Thirty percent of the class of 2024 landed in finance or consulting after graduating, according to Yale’s Office of Career Strategy. In a time when schools can rescind PhD offers and labs cut positions weeks before start dates, Goldman Sachs secures interns eighteen months in advance. The same reasoning and problem-solving skills that researchers hone transfer neatly to quantitative trading, Bhargava added. The difference: an entrylevel trading job at Jane Street pays over $300,000, while a Yale PhD stipend barely clears $50,000.
As he adapts to his new lab researching computational biology, Antu feels the weight of practical pressures.
“Because of how solid your friends’ trajectories look, you almost want that certainty for yourself,” Bhargava said.
For some, the move to industry wasn’t driven by certainty, but disillusionment. Pranet Sharma, a senior majoring in physics and economics, lost interest in academia after observing its bureaucracy as a research assistant. “This is not really what I want to spend the rest of my life doing,” he said.
His PIs, he saw, were always stressed about funding. A 2012 National Academies report surveyed 13,453 PIs across the nation and found that, on average, 42 percent of their faculty research time was dedicated to administrative activities. The burden is so great that some universities hire specialized grant writers. The daily grind of managing operations and seeking grants is arduous, almost akin to running a business, as Sharma and two other researchers independently described.
Perhaps most troubling is the psychological impact on the next generation of researchers. Violet Kimble, a fourth-year graduate student in neuroscience, used to be “really pro academia, really pro becoming a PI.” While PhD students usually wait until their last year to seriously deliberate their postgrad choices, she’s now meeting first-years who are already agonizing over their future. And though industry may seem more secure than academia, it doesn’t guarantee certainty. Even computer science undergraduates and economics PhDs are now struggling to find roles in the job market.
Kimble and her friends aren’t concerned about finding the ideal job because they don’t feel like they have “power in the economy” to be picky, she said. “We just want a job, full stop.”
By late August, Antu had switched to a new lab to work on computational biology. In a maze of hallways under Kline Tower, his group works among white boards scrawled with math equations and molecular diagrams.
After his PI dropped him, Antu couldn’t find another lab in the applied physics department. Computational biology seemed more stable: it was an area he found better funded at Yale, though very different from his quantum background.
He said he’s grown more practical as he matures, whether that means switching to a new field or being open to an industry role in the future. And given the current funding challenges, he doesn’t consider taking an industry job a concession, but rather “going with the flow.” He even told his girlfriend that they can’t get married until he graduates from his PhD program in 2029, because an annual stipend of barely $50,000 cannot support a family.
Before his PhD, he hadn’t considered the constraints of academia—it had seemed like a world driven by pure curiosity, free of financial pressures. Now, with PIs unable to take him on without grant money, he’s confronting the reality of scarce funding. He’s even
considered a career in finance or consulting.
Despite everything, Antu still feels pulled to academia. “You can pursue any question,” he said. “It’s a simple life.”
But he’s still mentally recovering from the shock of losing his job and having to prove his mettle in his new field. The past few months have forced him to rethink his limits in this balancing act of independence and stability.
He pursued academia for the opportunity to choose what problems are worth exploring. The question is how funding cuts might continue to hinder that freedom.
As he tried to articulate his mental state, his voice, soft as ever, hesitated. “How much does one want to give up on the pay to satiate their curiosity?” ∎
Tina Li is a junior in Pierson College and managing editor of The New Journal
Poem
Selected Crystals
Today I got to my apartment and as I walked through the door, my lava lamp broke. Against the floor, it split into more than ten pieces—into edges and curves and tips, far less forgiving than they seemed.
After the yowl of glass, after its dance on the bare tiles of the basement where I sleep, came the spread of a puddle I could have seen my reflection in. But I didn’t.
A puddle, two orange balls, two rubber spheres, a bottle cap. My lava lamp was A bottle.
But none of that matters. The orange of my room is gone. The orange of home and its reflection on the walls and on the windows—gone. It vanished along with the silence of the world.
It had been with me for three years, even here, in this basement where I sleep. It was with me when hundreds of crows visited my window, and when I found a spider catching insects hidden behind the memory of love.
And now my room ignites with absent silhouettes, and crystalline visions of what once was, when I still knew no metaphors for time other than the river and the immensity of the sea. But there is an incongruence before this lava lamp, and before the now fading trace of its orange glow: Its fire doesn’t burn or bruise like fire usually does.
My lava lamp has shattered into more than ten pieces and I, tranquil, watch its symbol turn into a specter without blades. A specter trying to pierce the stillness of the moment but miserably, with no dignity or melancholic power.
There is already too much melancholy, by itself in the roots of my body.
All things must come to their end, must perish, be destroyed, cease to exist; all things must dig the grave of novelty. Everything breaks. Everything has a slot reserved underground. Everything will become
a trace of itself. Every trace awaits. The question is: How?
My lava lamp broke and I thought: maybe it was time, maybe it was time to let go, to free myself from this basement that is home only for a few years, and will then return to the great void from which all things come. That is where my lamp is now. That is where it is, and from there it glows.
I thought: maybe at last, now yes, I can pick up the broken pieces, gather my own mess. Maybe I give in to the temptation of glimpsing a metaphor for the destruction of things:
The orange trace slowly dissolves and is absorbed by the white paper towel.
Diego Del Aguila
Prose
Sight Line
By Gabriela Ewart
Vultures are circling some carcass a few meters off the highway. Each city along this route from Culiacán to Hermosillo is topping some violent crime chart; if miles of sand didn’t stand between them, the road would be a blood-red river flowing North, to the border. An old man sits outside the toll booth and shakes a cut-open milk carton at the passing cars to collect tolls—the penalty for not paying is a muttered curse on your life. Considering the surroundings, his words are more daunting than a fine. Whatever minimal sum of pesos he gathers is certainly not funding the highway, which is more pothole than pavement. Half-kilometer stretches of speed bumps and jackknifed semi-trucks spanning both lanes make joining the gardens of burnt-out cars on the shoulder look appealing. Maybe the man is charging passersby to look at whatever concrete-hut town he’s sitting in front of, the only variation in the vista along this desolate expanse of road.
Driving here feels like staring into an exhibit; it is somewhere you shouldn’t end up and that belongs behind a glass plane. In the dry heat, the place where you came from melts into the mirage on the horizon, and you pray to find anything at the end of that stretch
of burning pavement. It’s a prayer that will probably go unanswered because your God probably isn’t here, and you’ll look out the windshield to search for anything that moves just to know something can survive here.
Nothing about the toll man’s lonely village is pleasing to the eye. Dirt roads weave together an OXXO gas station, a church, and fifteen sand-colored crumbling concrete cubes topped with Roto-Rooter water tanks. At least the soil here isn’t hot and dry like the desert— yet only the desert could make a town like this, so desolate it offers no respite or escape.
Accepting death as a fact of life isn’t enough in Northwestern Mexico; you must learn to survive off it. This is why there are more vultures than people. Whether or not they realize it, everybody is hoping to get out of here. Perhaps the light of the burning sun obscures the beauty of this land from those driving through. The old man, who awakens to the light of it, praises his God for every grain of sand that makes its way down the boiling asphalt into his nearly-empty milk carton and the wet of his eyes.
Lilies
By Matías Guevara Ruales
As the boy knelt to lay down the flowers he’d brought to the gravestone—lilies, they were—he felt suddenly struck by something. Not grief, which usually visited him at this place, but a very strange thought.
It occurred to the boy that the dead man in the ground under him had once been young. In fact he had lived a whole life. He had done all the things men do. He had owned shirts and ironed them, had made eggs in the morning and driven to work and dealt with coworkers and hated his boss. He had held a stethoscope against people’s chests to listen to their hearts. He had spilled his coffee. He had married a woman. Together, they had bought a house. They had had children; he had rocked them to sleep. He had petted their dog. Had grown a mustache. He had dutifully voted in elections and lived through two coups d’etat. He had swum in the ocean once a year on their trips to the beach. And in their backyard pool he had done laps until his body was spent and then he had dried himself and gone back inside and paced around that echoey house until he had felt weary with life. He had felt trapped, actually. He’d gotten angry. He’d given the boy’s mom ugly bruises, and then he had left. He had not gone far but he had left. He had bought a lonely apartment uptown with a great view of the mountains and white
walls he had scarcely known how to decorate and it was a long time before he did this again after that but he had also taken his kids out for ice cream. He had sent money on Christmas Eve.
Sometimes, he and the boy had eaten at restaurants, just the two of them. He had been bitterly apprehensive before the boy was born, it was said, because he had felt too old to have another kid. But then he had loved the boy. He had worked very hard for years. He had cut behind people’s ears with a scalpel to help them hear again. He had lost count of how many implants he’d done. And then he had aged. He had seemed to age early at first, for his hair had grayed while he was still a young man, and then, later, he had aged for real, forever. He had fallen ill with a terrible illness that made his hands wither until he couldn’t sign his name on a piece of paper or button his shirt. He had asked for things to be passed to him very often close to the end, had pointed with a shriveled finger at a piece of bread, a blanket, the TV remote. He had said I love you more often, had reached out with his arms, like a baby flapping a pair of awkward limbs, asking for a hug. He had been a child once, too, hadn’t he, with eager brown eyes and a wide-open smile. And none of these things were news to the boy kneeling there in the warm afternoon, holding his lilies. But also, all of it was.
Sweetgreen and Dictators
By Harry Lowitz
There’s A new sweetgreen on York and Broadway, and Trump just suggested that maybe America would “like a dictator.” All the “Trump” headlines from The New York Times in my email inbox have been blurring together, piling up and then needing to be cleaned out again and again, like the trash in my dorm bathroom. The “dictator” comment only grabbed my attention in an Instagram post making fun of him. However, I’ve been dutifully following the Sweetgreen coverage on Fizz, so my peers and I have plenty to talk about at dining hall roundtable discussions. We convene these panels over the orientation leaders who misplaced their first-years, the wasp nest on Cross Campus, the sight of a gratuitous and interminable goodnight kiss in our residential college quad, the complicated politics of frats negotiating their leases.
But sometimes I glance beyond campus and remember—really stop and think and remember—that The New York Times emails are pretty important too. Tonight before I go to sleep, I’ll ask my roommate who is smart and engaged and caring and will probably save his home state of Mississippi from something one day, what he thinks about the new person in charge of the CDC. I promise that we will focus on this news. I really hope that we keep that promise. That we’ll wonder about the Trump administration’s decisions and the direction of the country and our university and our careers and let our stomachs churn. We could sit in this reality and be scared but also empowered. Or maybe we’ll discuss whether we’d be comfortable at a naked party.
Remembering Paul Hofheinz (1962 - 2025)
Paul Hofheinz (Silliman, Class of 1984) was one of a small group of campus journalists who revived The New Journal back in 1982. By his senior year, portents of a brilliant career to come were already evident: An ambitious feature story he co-authored for The New Journal won the Yale English department’s coveted Wright Prize for non-fiction, and his gargantuan senior thesis was awarded the history department’s prestigious John Addison Porter Prize.
After college, Paul earned a masters degree in Russian politics at the London School of Economics, then became a correspondent for Time, where he chronicled the fall of the Soviet Union. Later, he served as Europe bureau chief of Fortune magazine and wrote for The Wall Street Journal. In 2003, Paul and his wife Ann Mettler founded the Lisbon Council, a Brussels-based think tank that focuses on the economic and political future of the European Union. But he said his greatest achievement was his family—Ann and their two boys—who live on in his spirit and continue his legacy.
Paul’s thinking was big, broad, and incisive, and his laughter and curiosity were infectious. He was always brimming with ideas and had the talent and zeal to make them a reality. Fluent in Russian and French, he believed in building bridges and making connections. Before his death earlier this year from cancer, he returned to Yale to attend a New Journal event and was thrilled to see the magazine still thriving—and still serving as a proving ground for new generations of aspiring journalists.
He’ll be greatly missed by his many friends and colleagues at The New Journal. This magazine wouldn’t be what it is today were it not for his unique vision, his zest for rigorous reporting, and his love of the written word.
