Professor Tim Koh has spent years researching ways to improve healing for people with diabetic wounds, but with federal funding for his latest project set to expire this month, the future of his work and career is now uncertain.
Koh, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, said he’s one of thousands of researchers potentially affected by the Trump administration’s cuts at the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Science Foundation.
Illinois’ attorney general has joined other states battling the cuts in court, but dozens of faculty at UIC and other area universities are taking their fight to the streets, rallying outside the school’s student center Wednesday with signs that read: “Science saves lives” and “Public health is a lifeline, not a line item.”
Aaron Krall, a UIC professor and president of UIC United Faculty, said the university’s Chicago campus alone receives over $500 million in federal funding to “conduct life-saving research.”
“It is research that is essential,” Krall said. “It is research that is nonpartisan. It is research that improves lives and improves communities.”
Faculty members expressed concern for the communities impacted by their work and the graduate students they are training in their labs, whose future work could lead to greater advancements in science and health.
Koh, who receives his project funding through the National Institutes of Health, said if his funding is not renewed this month he will be forced to make difficult decisions for himself and the members of his lab.
“It’s going to be devastating for their careers,” Koh said Wednesday. “It’s going to potentially put an end to my research career, and we won’t be able to develop these new therapies for diabetic wounds. It’s the worst situation that I’ve encountered in my 25-year career.”
Barbara Di Eugenio, a UIC professor who studies the ways artificial intelligence can address health inequities, said two of her grants from the National Science Foundation were recently flagged as “woke DEI research,” and are currently under investigation.
“The way they flag these grants is that they look for words like women, female, minority, bias, green energy; that gets you on the list of 3,500 grants,” Di Eugenio said, referring to the number of National Science Foundation grants flagged as “questionable” by the Senate Commerce Committee because they “promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.”
“I don’t know what will happen to all of us and to research in general at UIC and in the country if these cuts go ahead,” Di Eugenio said.
It’s not just research that will potentially be affected by these cuts. Margaret Wardle, head of UIC’s clinical psychology doctoral program, said the future is uncertain for her students who are waiting to find out where they will match for clinical training.
The number of internship positions available is unknown, according to Wardle. Some internship positions are inside the federal government and affected by hiring freezes, and others are located inside medical centers that receive federal funding.
If internship positions are pulled this year and later restored, Wardle said there will be an “enormous ripple effect,” slowing down the process at “a time when we need to be graduating more psychologists, not fewer.”
“I know many of you out there have experienced the frustration of trying to find mental health care or help for yourself or for a loved one,” Wardle said. “Going forward, if this continues, that is going to be an experience that many more families will have, that could result in watching a loved one struggle or perhaps even die because they are not able to access help in time. The funding freezing and chaos has to stop.”