Volume 58 - Issue 1

Sep 2025

The Magazine About Yale and New Haven

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.

Volume 58, Issue 1

Letter from the editors

Masthead

Dear readers,

Editors-in-Chief

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.

Executive Editor Managing Editor

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.

Publisher Alex Moore Creative Director Verse Editors

Sophia Liu

Senior Editors Aanika Eragam Samantha Liu Josie Reich

Maggie Grether Chloe Nguyen Jack Rodriquez-Vars

Associate Editors

Odelya Bergner-Phillips Adele Haeg Dani Klein Kelly Kong Maia Nehme Sonia Rosa Drew Storino Copy Editors

Olivia Barton Zoya Haq Julian Raymond Mercuri Lam Ellie Park Jessica Sanchez Associate Business Managers

Ethan Kan

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Kade Gajdusek Smile Jiang Will Sussbauer Brianna Magtoto Celina Qu Serina Yan Tiona Zeng

Colin Kim

The Hull Barrett Family Fund

Mark Badger Kathrin Lassila Jean-Pierre Jordan Fred Strebeigh Aliyya Swaby Peter Phleger Laura Heymann Steven Weisman Jeffrey Pollock David Greenberg Julia Preston Suzanne Wittebort Armand LeGardeur Romy Drucker Katie Hazelwood James Carney Benjamin Lasman Makiko Harunari R. Anthony Reese Laura Pappano Andrew Court

Ella Piper Claffy Tali Kantor Lieber Margot Kohn Harry Lowitz Kate Rodriguez Moe Shimizu Sabrina Thaler

Photography Gabriel Haley

Thank you to our donors

The Elizabethan Club

Vivian Wang

Matías Guevara Ruales

Design Editors

With purpose, The Managing Board Chloe, Calista, Mia, Tina

Chloe Budakian Calista Oetama Mia Kohn Tina Li

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Samhita Kumar

Members & Directors: Haley Cohen Gilliland • Peter Cooper • Andrew Court • Jonathan Dach • Susan Dominus • Elizabeth Sledge • Fred Strebeigh • Aliyya Swaby

Advisors: Neela Banerjee • Richard Bradley • Susan Braudy • Lincoln Caplan • Jay Carney • Joshua Civin • Richard Conniff • Ruth Conniff • Elisha Cooper • David Greenberg • Daniel Kurtz-Phelan • Laura Pappano • Jennifer Pitts • Julia Preston • Lauren Rawbin • David Slifka • John Swansburg • Anya Kamenetz • Steven Weisman • Daniel Yergin

Friends: Nicole Allan • Margaret Bauer • Mark Badger and Laura Heymann • Anson M. Beard • Susan Braudy • Julia Calagiovanni • Elisha Cooper • Peter Cooper • Andy Court • The Elizabethan Club • Leslie Dach • David Freeman and Judith Gingold • Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts • Bob Lamm • James Liberman • Alka Mansukhani • Benjamin Mueller • Sophia Nguyen • Valerie Nierenberg • Morris Panner • Jennifer Pitts • R. Anthony Reese • Eric Rutkow • Lainie Rutkow • Laura Saavedra and David Buckley • Anne-Marie Slaughter • Elizabeth Sledge • Caroline Smith • Gabriel Snyder • Elizabeth Steig • John Jeremiah Sullivan • Daphne and David Sydney • Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather • Blake Townsend Wilson • Daniel Yergin • William Yuen

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Contents

20 A Chance to Do Their Work

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No Corrective Action

feature

feature

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

Disrupted Customs

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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

Unforced Error

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feature

feature

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

point of departure

STEM researchers entered

academia to push the frontiers of knowledge, but recent federal cuts force them to reconsider their dreams.

By Tina Li

poetry

4 The President and the Painting Reading between the lines of Maurie McInnis’s commencement speech—and the painting that accompanied it.

By Adele Haeg

19 Net Good

By Michelle So

33 11:31

By Diya Naik

multimedia

6 Federal Research Grants: What Has Yale Lost?

40 Selected Crystals

By The New Journal

By Diego Del Aguila

aside

prose

42 Lilies

By Matías Guevara Ruales

41 Sight Line

By Gabriela Ewart endnote

43 Sweetgreen and Dictators

By Harry Lowitz

Sep 2025

image credits: vivian wang (cover); celina qu (top left); bre johnson (top right); gabriel haley (bottom left); colin kim (bottom right)

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Point of Departure

The President and the Painting

especially at Princeton and Wesleyan, have also Reading between the lines of Maurie McInnis’s been outspoken. commencement speech—and the painting There was no requirethat accompanied it. ment for McInnis to make a statement about politics in

By Adele Haeg her speech, and she didn’t, not directly at least.

But her choice of In May, twenty thousand spectators painting—a scene from the watched as Maurie McInnis stepped up to But McInnis did not mention any of Revolutionary War—and her disthe podium to deliver her first commence- this context in her speech. cussion of “partisan antipathy” and ment speech as President of Yale.

As the Trump administration has “American ideals” points to presShe projected an image of a painting ramped up its attacks on higher edu- ent-day political polarization in the from the Revolutionary War on a screen cation, McInnis has stayed quiet. Not United States. next to her: The Death of General Warren silent: in April, she and 200 other uni“When I began my academic at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill by the versity presidents signed a letter against journey at Yale as a graduate American “patriot-artist” John Trumbull. the administration’s “intrusion” into student, I never imagined that “British forces have breached higher education policy, and in May, I would become an academic American lines,” McInnis narrated from she emailed students railing against the leader,” McInnis wrote in an email her rostrum. “The fate of a young nation endowment tax proposed in Trump’s to me. Before assuming her first adminhangs in the balance.”

“Big Beautiful Bill.” But months into istrative role as Associate Dean of the That was May. In March, the Trump Trump’s second term, she has avoided College at the University of Virginia in administration had canceled $400 million saying anything potentially provocative, 2010, she had spent twelve years teaching in federal grants to Columbia University. or anything whatsoever. there as an art history professor.

In April, the administration froze Yale has mostly been spared so far. No But McInnis is not just an art hisHarvard’s federal funding, and Harvard one knows exactly why, although there has torian anymore. As president of Yale, sued. By May, universities everywhere been speculation. “McInnis’ Trump strat- she is not an observer of the battle but were nervous. egy: quiet in public, busy in Washington,” a participant in it. reads a January Yale Daily News headline.

She’s certainly no Alan .....

Garber, the Harvard president who has made several pubMcInnis sent me an email about lic statements opposing the the painting and her background in art Trump administration’s history in response to a request for compolicies, citing the uni- ment about the speech. versity’s “moral imper“I loved my time in the art history ative” to speak up. classroom, and very much miss the regular University presi- interaction with students standing in front dents elsewhere, 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.

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Point of Departure

“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 characters who acted with bravery and compassion during the Revolution, urging her audience to heed their examples of heroism today, “even when the stakes are as significant as life and liberty.”

of Small, emphasizing the importance of our “shared humanity,” a phrase she repeated throughout her speech and her email.

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 British tyrants in the painting to the Trump administration, which has been withholding federal funds to force universities to bend to its will. But McInnis kept her interpretation of it vague and open-ended. The takeaway for the audience was to be compassionate, even “amid chaos.”

But she never explains what she means by “chaos.”

Today, McInnis finds herself in a 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 The men in the painting have “these far as we know, Yale sort of deep interconnections,” Yale his- hasn’t had to concede tory professor Mark Peterson said, “even as much to the Trump though they’re now on opposite sides of administration as other the conflict,” like Major John Small and universities have. 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

photos from yale university art gallery

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.

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Multimedia Feature

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. Where 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.

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Impacted Grant Count, by Yale Recipients

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

This is likely because the majority of Yale’s federally-funded research grants are supported by the National Institutes of Health.

National Institute of Public Health

U.S. Department of War

U.S. Agency for International Development

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.

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.

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.

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$633m

Yale international and federal research funding in In the 2024 fiscal year, Yale received $663 million in research grants from the NIH.

2024, in millions According to Tina Posterli, OPAC. This graph does not include corporate, foundation, and state sponsorship.

600

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.

400

$633m

$432m

200

$236m

Yale

NIH

Other federal agencies

Institutions with Most NIH Funding in 2024

“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 Data Source: Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research Note that Yale Office of Public Affairs reported a slightly higher amount of

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NIH funding received by Yale ($663 million).

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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.

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

Read the full interactive online

Here are their stories.

Credits Reporters

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.

Web Developers

Data Analysts Designer

Mia Rose Kohn Samhita Kumar Lena Qian Eunice Han Sabrina Thaler Leslie Kim Leslie Kim Tina Li Calista Oetama Sonia Rosa, Dani Klein, Odelya Bergner-Phillips, and Moe Shimizu contributed reporting.

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A Chance to Do Their Work

By Samantha Liu

rly career The NIH cut funding for ea ounds. Now, gr ck ba e rs ve di om fr s er ch resear n’t re-apply for ca ey th d fin ts en pi ci re er form n their research funding unless they abando and propose new projects.

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y June 2024, Rafael Perez felt like he was B 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

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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.

candidate in chronic epidemiology, who had lost her F31 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 reevaluaIH GRANT TERMINATIONS ARE HISTORICALLY tion of each proposals’ scientific impact. In its notices, unprecedented. In any given year, fewer than the NIH claimed these projects—on topics such as tistwenty NIH grants are terminated, almost all on sue scarring, nuclear envelope transport, and kidney grounds of severe charges like fraud and misconduct. cancer—were “nonscientific,” “antithetical to inquiry,” But in the first five months of 2025 alone, nearly three and failed to “expand our knowledge of living systhousand NIH grants have been terminated, totaling tems,” solely because recipients had indicated they $4.52 billion across more than one hundred universities. came from diverse communities.

When President Trump was inaugurated in January That was just such an egregious example where 2025, many scientists foresaw that most DEI programs the goal was clearly not leveling the playing field, but across universities would be axed. While this has taken rather taking people who identify as diverse—after the form of a mass defunding of health equity stud- encouraging them to do so—and throwing them off ies—including studies on HIV, trans healthcare, and the playing field,” said Carolyn Fredericks, an assisracial health disparities—the NIH has also quietly ended tant professor of neurology. grants and training programs that historically funded The fallout has further strained the tenuous relaresearchers from disadvantaged backgrounds. tionship many young scientists, particularly those The wave of terminations in April that impacted from disadvantaged backgrounds, already have with Perez was a new escalation, not only shuttering academia. “I spend all my time thinking, are you going opportunities for scientists from diverse communi- to get your grant taken away? Is it going to come back? ties, but also rescinding grants that had already been Are you going to get money?” Perez said. “Where am I awarded and disbursed to them. going to get money?”

Besides Perez, other Yale researchers who sudRam, a PhD student who lost their F31 diversity feldenly lost their awards include Serrena Singh, a lowship totaling $96,668 over two years, put it bluntly. “I first-generation Caribbean-Indian college graduate mean, if you can’t get funding, then you’re fucked.” studying liver diseases, who works at an Amazon warehouse on weekends for extra money; Thi Vu, a public health researcher interested in caregiving HEN HIS FAMILY MOVED TO Pennsylvania from among older adults with dementia; Andin Fosam, a the Dominican Republic, 17-year-old Perez would Black former student-athlete investigating pathways walk from his parents’ bodega to the public library. Still to muscle mass loss and weight loss in kidney can- learning English, he couldn’t read all the books, but he cer; and A Ram, a PhD student with a chronic illness loved to thumb through the graphic novels and manga. interested in improving Connecticut’s alert system He thought he would become a comic book artist for opioid overdoses. (“A” is their full first name.) someday, or maybe a graphic designer.

In total, Yale has lost an estimated $51.6 million Later in his undergraduate years, as an art major, in funding across forty NIH projects; of these, about Perez found himself riveted by a human psychology fifteen belonged to grant programs specifically meant course. He asked incessant questions in the class. At to support disadvantaged researchers. the end of the semester, the professor noticed his “I thought that I was safe because it’d already enthusiasm and offered to let him check out their lab’s been approved,” said Mata’uitafa Faiai, a PhD research. “I didn’t even understand what that meant,”

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Perez remembered. “I was like, Oh, is that some sort of and leadership training opportunities, as well as a club where you sit around and look at papers?” At the time, slightly higher stipend, according to Perez. he could hardly fathom himself doing biology—he just With his peers’ encouragement, Perez applied for didn’t know of any scientists in his life, much less scien- MOSAIC. His proposal sought to investigate how the tists who looked like him. brain regulates the spinal cord to produce opioid tolBut if research was once a far-off concept, over a erance. While opioids are useful for pain management, decade later—after switching his undergraduate major the body’s tolerance for them can rapidly reverse in from art to psychology to biology, after completing a new settings. By exploring how the body interacts six-year PhD in pharmacology, after receiving a posi- with opioids across different environments, Perez’s tion as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale, after publishing project could help inform safer pain treatments that three papers with one more on the way—he has made minimize the risk of addiction and overdose. a full-time career out of it.

After half a year and two rounds of review—first Now in his mid-thirties, Perez has spent the past by a panel of non-federal scientists, then by the advifive years probing mouse brains at the Picciotti Lab sory council at the National Institutes of Drug Abuse at Yale, searching for the underlying mechanisms (NIDA)—Perez’s application was accepted for funding. of addiction. He studies how the brain responds to It felt like his big break. “Every scientist has environmental cues during opioid use, a process he a story of the first big grant they were awarded,” explains with barely-concealed excitement. He also explained Melinda Irwin, associate dean of research has a propensity for referencing other experiments at the School of Public Health. Even decades later, as he speaks, some of which sound like an offbeat most successful researchers can trace their start back children’s book (“if you give an animal cocaine…” he to one grant, a lucky proposal that was approved for states, probably alluding to a 2021 study where he did funding and became the basis of their research career. exactly that). Scientists, to Perez, are just “a bunch of For Perez, this should’ve been his K99. The NIDA dorks”—“I knew once I realized that, ‘Hey, these are thought so too: “This is an outstanding MOSAIC K99/ my people,’” he said with a self-deprecating smile.

R00 application from a promising candidate with a Underneath Perez’s affability remains a thought- rich scientific background and commitment to subful intensity for science. His path in academia as a stance use research,” his grant reviewers had written in Dominican immigrant has not always been easy; to this February 2024, at a meeting of twenty-four professors day, Perez still battles bouts of imposter syndrome and and NIH officers from across the country. “The candithe knowledge that he does not look like “the stereo- date has chosen a fascinating question to address.” typical scientist on a faculty website.” But in the past But in April, the NIDA sent an email explaining decade, he has not wavered in his dream to direct his that the MOSAIC training program had been halted own lab to find treatments for substance use disorders. “due to changes in NIH/HHS priorities.” Shortly after, In 2024, Perez set his sights on the K99, the Perez would receive the formal notice of his individcoveted NIH award that supported postdoctoral sci- ual award’s termination. The notice opened: entists as they transitioned to full-time faculty positions. At the time of his application, the K99 had “It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research both the standard track and a track for “Maximizing programs related to Diversity, equity and Opportunities for Scientific and Academic inclusion (DEI)... So-called diversity, equity, Independent Careers” (MOSAIC). Given that accepand inclusion (“DEI”) studies are often used to tance rates for both tracks were similar, Perez was support unlawful discrimination on the basis of told that he’d have a good shot at either. But a few race and other protected characteristics, which colleagues encouraged him to take the MOSAIC harms the health of Americans. Therefore, no route. Though the application process was nearly additional funding will be awarded for this identical, the MOSAIC grant came with networking project, and all future years have been removed.”

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Dean Yimlamai, an associate professor of tracks, the NIH only convenes three times a year to pediatrics, often hears the misconception that review grant submissions. From there, it is typigrants set aside for underrepresented candi- cally a yearlong process of additional review pandates are “easier” to obtain. But in Perez’s year, els and advisory council meetings before a scientist MOSAIC funding was only awarded to research- can actually receive their funding. Today, even that ers whose proposals scored above the seven- timeline is no longer dependable. Still reeling from ty-fifth percentile. The cut-off for the regular mass layoffs and the January federal funding freeze, pool was the seventieth percentile, meaning the the NIH has become backlogged with grant applicadiversity grants were more competitive that year. tions, slowing down its review process indefinitely.

“It’s not like, ‘Oh, because there’s a diversity sup- Scientists who have reapplied for grants today have plement, we just give it to whoever fits the skin no sense of when they might hear back. This limbo color,’” Yimlamai said. can be impractical, or even untenable, for early-stage For the K99, both the MOSAIC and standard researchers without the funds to support themselves tracks use identical judging systems, scoring appli- in the interim. cations across five separate categories: candidate For Perez, the message was clear. “This is a racstrength, career development goals, research plan, ist strategy to try to prevent people who don’t look mentor, and institutional environment. Under like a certain kind of person from having a voice, and MOSAIC, the applicant’s background might influ- drive them out of science in the U.S.” ence how their “candidate strength” is judged—one member he nih has long of Perez’s review panel been aware that noted his “outstandscience has a diversity ing previous comproblem. Back in the mitment to diversity,” 1990s, Cornell researcher for instance—but it Alice Pell coined the would have nothing metaphor “leaky pipeto do with how the line,” referring to how “research plan” catewomen and minorities gory gets scored. are disproportionately Yet after the driven out of biomedical sweeping cuts at the research at each stage of NIH, all award recipthe training process. In ients who applied 2020, about two-thirds through the diverof research scientists sity streams lost their funding. Still, several scientists were male, and two-thirds were white.

I spoke to had scored high enough in review panels More than funding support, the NIH diversity to nearly guarantee they would have been funded grants aim to show researchers from historically marby the regular route. Faiai, whose project investi- ginalized populations that they can belong in science. gated diabetes among American Samoan youth, The MOSAIC program, for instance, was added to the had received a perfect score in review rounds. broader K99 program in 2019, citing a report that only 7 Jared Akers, a fourth-year PhD student study- percent of K99 applicants were from underrepresented ing human genome evolution, also noted that he racial and ethnic groups. The mentorship opportunities “probably scored higher than other fellowships built into these grants can introduce young researchers that didn’t get terminated.” to the network of unspoken rules—how to meet the Explaining why funding for high-scoring right people, how to apply for the right grants—to set grants was cut, including those which aligned themselves up for success in STEM. with “agency priorities,” the NIH wrote in a stateFor scientists who did not grow up with expoment to The New Journal: “The studies themselves sure to research, this kind of representation can have value, however unfortunately they were be transformative. In his junior year of college, a funded under an inappropriate and ideological- year after Perez first stumbled upon his interest in ly-driven—rather than scientifically driven—DEI human psychology, one of his school’s professors program under the Biden Administration. In the invited him to a research conference for minority future these types of programs that NIH his [sic] communities. As he stood alongside professors committed to fund to help people with all man- “who look just like my aunts and uncles,” something ner of diseases will be reviewed based on their sci- finally crystallized. “That was the moment where I entific merit rather than on DEI criteria.” was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I can do this.’”

The NIH did not comment on why they did not The NIH’s traditional criteria for “underrepprovide an opportunity for cancelled grants to be resented in science” also include racial or genre-evaluated in contention with the regular pool. der categories. Akers initially qualified for three Though researchers can attempt to resub- of the NIH’s economic categories for undermit their proposals under the non-diversity represented in science: being on food stamps,

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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

16

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. er agency policy, there is a thirty-day winP dow 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

TheNewJournal

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 “Research programs based primarily on heard back about his application.

In response to the funding uncertainties, both the artificial and non-scientific categories, Yale School of Medicine and Graduate School of Arts including amorphous equity objectives, are and Sciences extended bridge funding mechanisms, which serve as supplementary funding to faculty antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing members who receive a premature grant termination to expand our knowledge of living systems, notice. Perez was approved for bridge funding in June, provide low returns on investment, and just one month before his principal investigator would have been forced to let him go. Still, according to the ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, School of Medicine website, bridge funding is only or reduce illness.” 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 having to self-advocate, and have to do your work, specify that bridge funding will only be extended and manage your chronic illness, which is a full-time to projects which “must ‘bridge’ to future funding— job in itself, to be honest,” Ram said. “But [in acathere is an expectation that the funding helps secure demia] you’re held to the same standard as someone data/results that make future funding more likely.” who doesn’t have any additional baggage.”

But this does not address what will happen to projMeanwhile, the fallout of dealing with a canects on health equity that the federal government celled grant mirrors the very dynamics that push deems “nonscientific.” minority researchers out of academia in the first Because they are not university faculty, graduate place. “I had to basically get a second degree in law students who received the F31 are also ineligible for to figure out what was going on,” Perez said, after bridge funding. Their departments are obligated to offering an explanation of congressional appropriafund them until they complete their PhD, per univer- tions and constitutional powers at play in NIH fundsity policy, but the fate of their research projects is less ing mechanisms. He is bitterly aware that many clear. If their labs remain committed to their project, researchers from non-diverse backgrounds have been graduate students will be able to continue their work. able to continue their research. “All I want to do is to If not, they will have to scrap their progress or reduce do my job,” he added. the scope of their work.

Moreover, to incentivize graduate students to secure grant funding, Yale provides a stipend bonus esearch programs based primarily on artiof $4,000 to students who receive an external fellowficial and non-scientific categories, including amorship. As a result, when Ram lost their F31-diversity phous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific grant tracking opioid overdoses in Connecticut, Yale inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living informed them they would also lose the $4,000 bonus systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultifor the upcoming year—which, given the approximate mately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce graduate student’s $52,000 salary, is “unfortunately a illness. substantial amount,” Ram noted.

This was the language of the grant terminaWhen Ram argued the unfairness of losing $4,000 tion from NIH sent to thousands of young scientists over something they had no control over, the Office across the country who had been supported by the of Graduate Financial Aid did not budge. Since then, agency’s diversity grants. The same anti-DEI rhetoric Ram has mostly surrendered to the circumstances. “I’ve has been adopted by the administration to justify its never wanted an academic job,” they said, “and at this large-scale changes at the NIH and argue that health point, whatever job security I had [in academia] is no equity research diverts funding away from insights longer there anyway.” into illnesses and chronic diseases.

Ram grew up with several chronic illnesses that “Today, multiple offices focus on key priorities compromised major aspects of their daily life. For a like women’s health, minority health and HIV/AIDS. time, it was challenging to work for even an hour a day. Too often this results in a lack of focus and uncoThough they’ve adapted to a regimen of mostly preven- ordinated resources,” wrote Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., tative care, it remains “very easy” for them to be “dis- Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary, in a abled out of the workforce,” as Ram put it.

New York Post op-ed entitled “I’m fighting chronic The termination of Ram’s grant and the bureau- disease, slashing unhealthy fat at HHS.” cratic stresses that followed only confirmed what they But this logic is shaky. It is true that people from already thought of science research’s lack of forgive- disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to engage ness toward disadvantaged students. “It’s challenging in diversity-related research that relates to their

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A Chance to Do Their Work

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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.”

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.

n june 2025, a federal district judge ruled Iordered that the NIH’s termination of grants was illegal and 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.”

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A Chance to Do Their Work

TheNewJournal TheNewJournal

Poem

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

illustration by lu arie

TheNewJournal Sep 2025

19

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.

20

layout design by vivian wang

TheNewJournal

n the spring of 2019, a group of twenIgathered ty-one queer Black and Latino men 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 Sep 2025

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

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Pachankis starts

Harvey joins as ESTEEM research assistant

2013

2018

ESTEEM

Harvey returns to Initiative under MD-PhD program

2023

2016

2019

Sullivan joins as ESTEEM research assistant

Yale LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative” officially created

n 2007, Pachankis wrote a paper in shifting in favor of LGBTQ+ issues. In implementation, watching clients break Ichological the Psychological Bulletin on the psy- 2014, transgender health had first lifelong patterns of emotional avoidance. impacts of concealing one’s entered the NIH’s radar. Professional Many of the clients spoke about needing

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 22

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 No Corrective Action

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 TheNewJournal

March: Initiative received termi- May: McGee July: Initiative is graduates reinstated nation notices, Sullivan loses job Harvey’s projected graduation

2025

2024 January: McGee joins as research assistant

2026 August: Sullivan returns to Initiative as postgrad associate

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.

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 hile Pachankis’s faculty posi- supervision and therapeutic treatment tion at Yale remains secure, early for the women under Project EQuIP career researchers—whose salaries to mental health screenings and particand future career prospects depend on ipant recruitment. grants—are most vulnerable to the NIH’s When the grants were terminated, haphazard terminations. all of Sullivan’s funding sources col“It feels treacherous,” Sullivan said. lapsed. In the absence of active projects, “If funding gets cut in any way, so does he feared that his postdoctoral training your job.” goals—gaining experience in clinical In contrast to academic departments work and supervision—were now comwithin Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, pletely off the table. the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative Yale initially agreed to extend

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April: Harvey transfers to new advisor at SEICHE lab

No Corrective Action

Sullivan ends second postdoctoral year at the Initiative

$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 23

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 24

the claim that Pachankis’s bridge fund- wanted help. They wanted treatment. ing was denied, nor that he was asked to By completing the ten sessions, deplete all his research accounts before Sullivan helped equip each woman with requesting additional funding. emotional coping strategies and relapse prevention techniques. When some of his clients voiced suicidal ideation ithout the $5 million in NIH or displayed serious depressive sympgrants, Pachankis and the rest of toms, Sullivan conducted mental health the Initiative got creative. After the assessments to ensure their safety. terminations, the Initiative received One of the private donors who $70,000 in funding from the director helped support the LGBTQ Mental of the YSPH’s Department of Social and Health Initiative’s closeouts was Behavioral Sciences. Combined with Jamie Marks ’83, a Yale alum who private donations, the money allowed had previously partnered with the Pachankis’s team to complete the guar- Initiative to help recruit particianteed ten-session therapy treatments pants for studies. The YSPH’s press and perform safe closeouts for the rest publicized the move as a bona-fide of the Initiative’s studies. miracle. “His gift saved the study,” The women under Sullivan’s care in the headline proclaimed. It allowed Project EQuIP had been chosen specifi- Pachankis’s core team to continue a cally for their histories of depression, anx- project on building family support for iety, suicidality, and substance abuse.They LGBTQ+ youth.

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TheNewJournal

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.” n July 9, six months after the O 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

Sep 2025

inadvertently misidentified and does not NIH has explicitly deemed “unscientific” support DEI activities.” and “ignorant of biological realities” in A week later, the reason for the rein- its internal memos. statements became clearer: they were a While some university administrators result of a lawsuit filed by the American have advised researchers to modify the lanPublic Health Association (APHA) and guage of their grant applications to pass the a coalition of state attorneys against the NIH’s filters, the solution is not as simple as NIH. The judge ruled that the abrupt excising all mentions of queerness. cuts were “void and illegal.” Pachankis If Sullivan concentrated his future would now receive all the money orig- grant applications solely on his other inally awarded to his projects, restoring research interests, his CV would still be funding for the entire Initiative. littered with evidence of his background Despite these reinstatements, in LGBTQ+ mental health. Ten out of Pachankis’s team has already begun his fourteen publications directly conto shrink. At least three members of cern queer issues, containing vulnerable the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative’s keywords such as “sexual minority” and team have departed for different fields. “gender identity.”

McGee is considering cannabis research, And in an academic job market as while another student is working on competitive as today’s, Sullivan cannot VR-assisted mental health interventions. afford to equivocate.

Without its base of MPH research “We spend our careers developing assistants, the Initiative has been oper- expertise in this particular area and ating 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 being able to showcase that you are on Project EQuIP’s webpage. As of late someone who has the background to September, recruitment had not begun. carry out this research,” he said. “If you suddenly pivot to something that is still related but you don’t have direct experiaving already invested their ence in [that field], it makes it automatpostgraduate years in LGBTQ+ ically more difficult for you to make a public health research, Sullivan and convincing case to reviewers.”

Harvey are determined to stay in academia.

Through the generosity of another professor, Sullivan joined another his is not the future Harvey department at the Yale School of had imagined seven years ago when Medicine, allowing him one more year they first started working at ESTEEM as a of training. research assistant.

Ultimately, Sullivan’s future in acaHarvey had started carving out a demia is subject to the whims of the new niche in public health. In 2021, they NIH’s current research priorities. He has published a paper on the psychosocial built an entire career around aiding the health of incarcerated gay and bisexLGBTQ+ community—an area that the ual men, bridging their experience of

“The language that we once relied on as a gold standard is now words that we have to try and stay away from.”

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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.

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“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.

No Corrective Action

TheNewJournal

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

Sep 2025

photos by Gabriel haley; layout design by Jessica Sánchez

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mile ’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”

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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.

••••• he day after she arrived in Guangzhou, Tminutes Smile got to her 8 a.m. visa appointment thirty 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 Disrupted Customs

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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].”

••••• fter Trump’s inauguration, international A 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 30

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.

••••• hen the visa officer asked Smile if she W“You’ve had social media, she stammered. “No…no?” 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

Disrupted Customs

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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.”

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—discour••••• age international students from pursuing popular STEM majors such as physics and computer science. asters and PhD students studying certain Kay, a Chinese international student who asked STEM subjects often face extra scrutiny in visa to be identified by a nickname for fear of putting her applications and revocation initiatives. According to visa status at risk, is a senior undergraduate student Emma Zang, associate professor of sociology at Yale, looking into biology PhD programs. students pursuing advanced studies in STEM are more Most PhD students from China get a five-year likely to work with what the U.S. government consid- student visa for their studies. By contrast, some biology ers sensitive information.

PhD students only receive one-year visas due to conUnder the Trump administration, many under- cerns about biotechnology competition and espionage. graduates also avoid studying what Trump has out- If they leave the country after the expiration date, they lined, with little clarity, as “critical fields” susceptible must apply for a new visa to reenter. But student visas to espionage. This likely includes studies related to are entry documents. If students never exit the United science with military or national security applications, States, they can stay for the entire duration of their like artificial intelligence and biotechnology. study without having to renew their visas.

In May 2025, the Stanford Review, a right-wing Kay noted that applying for visas annually feels undergraduate publication at Stanford University, risky for many biology PhD students from China. wrote that a CCP agent impersonating a student at A successful renewal process should take no more Stanford allegedly tried to recruit an undergraduate as than sixty days, but with the Trump administration’s a spy for the Chinese government. The student was restricted visa interview process, it could be longer. conducting sensitive research on China. After inter- Biology is an experimental subject: taking several viewing multiple professors, students, and China months of leave sets back research. Many of these experts, the Review concluded that the CCP was PhD students, Kay said, opt to not return home for orchestrating a widespread intelligence-gathering five years instead. campaign at Stanford.

Viki ’29, Chinese student who asked to be idenHowever, a New York Times investigation on tified by a nickname for fear of putting her visa stathe article found that its conclusion stands on weak tus at risk, also recalled family and mentors advising grounds: the Review did not mention that the only graduate students to remain in the United States.

Chinese spy named in the article had her visa fraud She intends to study physics but wants to stay open charges withdrawn a year after the initial allegations. to other fields for more options.

Such conclusions exacerbate suspicion over the pres“Any STEM student would kind of feel uncertain ence of Chinese researchers and scholars in general— about the future,” she said. “It’s imposing some kind most of whom, as the Times wrote, are “not here to spy of psychological barrier. Some kind of fear.” or obtain information for their government.”

“The Trump administra••••• tion’s national security concerns about China’s role in critical s of August 18, the Trump administration sectors were not unfounded,” has revoked the visas of six thousand students, Zang said. “But their approach including those of four Yalies—two Chinese gradu“Ever since the new to addressing those concerns ate students and at least one South Sudanese student. was often inefficient and lacked The two Chinese students soon had their F-1 visa staadministration,” strategic coherence.” tuses restored.

The Review article claimed But on August 26, Trump spoke at a cabinet meetsaid Juliet, “the that Stanford was China’s “aca- ing at the White House: “I like that other countries’ studemic target number one” due dents come here,” he said, as reported by The New York States have never to its dominance in artificial Times. “You know what would happen if they didn’t? intelligence—a field considered Our college system would go to hell very quickly.” felt more like a “critical field.”

A day earlier, he told reporters at the Oval Office Ordinarily, international that he would let six hundred thousand Chinese [China].” students hoping to find work students into the country—twice the number of in the United States are incen- Chinese students currently enrolled in a U.S. institivized to major in STEM. tution. This drew backlash from Trump’s supporters, All students receive twelve including Steve Bannon, one of his former advisors. months of temporary employ- “There should be no foreign students here for the ment authorization, known as Optional Practical moment,” Bannon said.

Training (OPT), after graduation. However, students Juliet’s own embassy appointment was originally graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree are scheduled for late May before it was cancelled by the

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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.

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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.∎

Disrupted Customs

Kelly Kong is a sophomore in Morse College and an associate editor for The New Journal.

TheNewJournal

Poem

11:31 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 —Diya Naik

illustration by angela huo

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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

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layout design by serina yan

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layout photos by vivian by colin wangkim

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t 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.

After being dropped from his quantum error correction lab, Santanu Antu started questioning whether academia was the right path for him.

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Unforced Error

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. *** april 2025, The New York Times ran an article Ionntitled “How Universities Became So Dependent 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

TheNewJournal

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.

Physicists are divided on how much progress Nearly every they’ve made. While some undergraduate could researchers trumpet recent name peers whose advances, others, including summer research Antu, believe progress has jobs vanished this been largely incremental since year, while graduate a major algorithmic breakstudents knew friends through in 1994. The next whose PhD offers were advance, Antu believes, would pulled. Across the board, need to come on the theostudents and faculty retical side—something that described a future mainly academics work on. clouded by anxiety and In the race to build a uncertainty. 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 Sep 2025

Unforced Error

Quantum computing relies on academia for theory and industry for scale.

ourselves, and it seems extremely risky and completely unnecessary.” *** months ago, Antu leaned toward an acaSlabixdemic career. But after the upheaval of losing his 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 37

current challenges feel a little worse than those sort anti-aging research to help people lead longer, more of natural cycles.” dignified lives. When she was young, her grandIn his May 23 executive order on federal research, mother fell ill. Her grandmother’s age meant docPresident Donald Trump insisted he wants to restore tors couldn’t administer her all the treatments they “a gold standard for science.” Some scientists share could’ve for younger patients. Bhargava wants to his skepticism about what he calls the current sys- devote her career to changing that standard. tem’s “reproducibility crisis”. The relentless pressure Bhargava had previously worked at four Yale to publish—key to prominence and hireability in biomedicine labs. This summer, she interned at academia—has flooded the literature with papers of Schrödinger, an international physics-based dubious value. In 2024, a landmark paper highlighted biotech software company. But whether the glut of 2.82 million articles in 2022 compared to she’ll pursue a PhD is still “up in the 1.92 million in 2016—far outpacing the number of air,” she said. She prefers industry’s faster practicing scientists and their available time for peer pace but worries she might need the skills review. And artificial intelligence is further enabling and “scientific intuitions” that only years Restricting academic “paper mills,” schemes to mass-produce articles with of grappling with foundational questions freedom and driving doctored images and faked bylines and data, Yale can provide. Even if she does choose to bright students to other professor Carl Zimmer reported for The New York pursue a PhD, she anticipates working a countries or corporate Times in August. few years first to build savings. jobs won’t necessarily But the federal administration’s actions have A desire for certainty, combined with hurt tomorrow’s disrupted ongoing projects without addressing exist- a heavy finance and consulting recruiting discoveries, ing problems of dubious science. In his first term, presence at Yale, can push otherwise aspirbut can erode the Trump signed the National Quantum Initiative Act, ing scientists to reconsider their career foundation for committing $1.2 billion in funding from 2019 to choices. Thirty percent of the class of breakthroughs a decade 2023 for quantum information science (the act is 2024 landed in finance or consulting after into the future. awaiting reauthorization in the House.) The sit- graduating, according to Yale’s Office of uation shows how haphazard the cuts are, Girvin Career Strategy. In a time when schools said: health sciences and diversity, equity, and inclu- can rescind PhD offers and labs cut posision-related research have been hit hardest, but other tions weeks before start dates, Goldman fields—including federally prioritized ones like Sachs secures interns eighteen months in quantum—are also getting caught in blanket cuts to advance. The same reasoning and problem-solving universities and the NSF. skills that researchers hone transfer neatly to quantitaIn February, University President Maurie tive trading, Bhargava added. The difference: an entryMcInnis broke her precedent of public restraint to level trading job at Jane Street pays over $300,000, denounce the NIH’s proposed cap on research facil- while a Yale PhD stipend barely clears $50,000. ities 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 As he adapts to his new lab researching computational biology, Antu feels the weight of practical pressures. 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. *** ast 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

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“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.”

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?” ∎

*** y late August, Antu had switched to a new lab B to work on computational biology. In a maze of hallways under Kline Tower, his group works among

Tina Li is a junior in Pierson College and managing editor of The New Journal.

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 Sep 2025

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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

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Sep 2025 TheNewJournal

illustration by jacinda webber

Prose

Sight Line

By Gabriela Ewart

ultures are circling some carcass a few meters off the of burning pavement. It’s a prayer that will probably go V highway. Each city along this route from Culiacán unanswered because your God probably isn’t here, and to Hermosillo is topping some violent crime chart; if you’ll look out the windshield to search for anything 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

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.

illustration by james tibang

TheNewJournal Sep 2025

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Aside

Lilies

By Matías Guevara Ruales

s the boy knelt to lay down the A flowers he’d brought to the gravestone—lilies, they were—he felt sud-

denly struck by something. Not grief, walls he had scarcely known how to decwhich usually visited him at this place, orate and it was a long time before he but a very strange thought. did this again after that but he had also It occurred to the boy that the dead taken his kids out for ice cream. He had man in the ground under him had once sent money on Christmas Eve. been young. In fact he had lived a whole Sometimes, he and the boy had eaten life. He had done all the things men do. at restaurants, just the two of them. He He had owned shirts and ironed them, had been bitterly apprehensive before the had made eggs in the morning and boy was born, it was said, because he had driven to work and dealt with cowork- felt too old to have another kid. But then ers and hated his boss. He had held a he had loved the boy. He had worked stethoscope against people’s chests to very hard for years. He had cut behind listen to their hearts. He had spilled people’s ears with a scalpel to help them his coffee. He had married a woman. hear again. He had lost count of how Together, they had bought a house. They many implants he’d done. And then he had had children; he had rocked them had aged. He had seemed to age early at to sleep. He had petted their dog. Had first, for his hair had grayed while he was grown a mustache. He had dutifully still a young man, and then, later, he had voted in elections and lived through two aged for real, forever. He had fallen ill coups d’etat. He had swum in the ocean with a terrible illness that made his hands once a year on their trips to the beach. wither until he couldn’t sign his name on And in their backyard pool he had done a piece of paper or button his shirt. He laps until his body was spent and then had asked for things to be passed to him he had dried himself and gone back very often close to the end, had pointed inside and paced around that echoey with a shriveled finger at a piece of bread, house until he had felt weary with life. a blanket, the TV remote. He had said He had felt trapped, actually. He’d got- I love you more often, had reached out ten angry. He’d given the boy’s mom with his arms, like a baby flapping a pair ugly bruises, and then he had left. He of awkward limbs, asking for a hug. He had not gone far but he had left. He had had been a child once, too, hadn’t he, with bought a lonely apartment uptown with eager brown eyes and a wide-open smile. a great view of the mountains and white 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.

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Sep 2025 TheNewJournal

illustration by ariel kim

Endnote

Sweetgreen and Dictators

By Harry Lowitz A new sweetgreen on York and Broadway, and Trump just suggested that maybe America Tbeenhere’s would “like a dictator.” All the “Trump” headlines from The New York Times in my email inbox have 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.

ut sometimes I glance beyond campus and remember—really stop and think and remember—that The B 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.

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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.

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Sep 2025 TheNewJournal