At Columbia University, chemical scientists are dismayed by funding cuts

On a warm sunny April afternoon, the mood at Columbia University’s campus in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood seemed high-spirited. Students enjoyed a college fair, jumping on trampolines set up on the lush center lawns. A student band performed amid a crowd eating cotton candy and basking in the spring sunshine.

But the scene’s breezy mood was an illusion, both for many of the students participating in the festivities and for the chemistry researchers sequestered in the laboratories of nearby campus buildings. Inside those labs, tension and confusion were palpable for scientists as they recounted the days following massive cuts in US federal funding to the university.

On March 7, a government task force set up by the Donald J. Trump administration severed $400 million in funding to Columbia, saying that the school had failed to protect Jewish students during campus protests related to the Israel-Hamas war. The 270-year-old institution was the first to become part of the escalating conflict between the administration and elite universities. It has laid off at least 180 people whose salaries had been funded by federal research grants.

Unlike Harvard University, which is now fighting back in the courts, Columbia is engaging in negotiations with the task force, which has demanded several changes from the university before it would restore the funds. Negotiations are ongoing, and researchers say they have little clarity about their status. Some researchers say they have had grants cut. Others are on edge, fearing that funding could be canceled. All say the environment they are working in is filled with trepidation and anguish.

A fateful day

On March 7, Neel Shah, assistant professor in Columbia’s Department of Chemistry, attended the Stand Up for Science rally in Washington Square Park, roughly 120 blocks from his home turf, alongside some 1,500 other scientists. They were protesting federal research funding cuts from multiple agencies, layoffs at those agencies, and proposed budget cuts, all of which occurred less than 2 months into Trump’s presidency. While Shah was there, his phone pinged with the news that Columbia had lost $400 million in federal funding.

Shah’s eyes immediately searched for his colleagues in the crowd. “The likelihood that anyone in that crowd just lost a grant was so high. There was just fear and terror, thinking, What must have been cut?” he says.

Shah's lab is in Columbia’s historic Havemeyer Hall, the site of research by seven Nobel Prize winners and home of the university’s chemistry department. His lab includes a dozen researchers, most of whom are PhD students and postdoctoral scholars. They work on learning how dysfunctional proteins lead to cellular malfunction that causes cancers and developmental disorders. Currently, he has three grants from the US National Institutes of Health, including one worth about $250,000 per year that funds half his lab.

Over several decades, the NIH has become the backbone of academic biomedical research in the country. The agency states that, with its annual budget of approximately $48 billion, it supports over 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 universities, medical schools, and other research institutions across all 50 states.

But Trump has proposed slashing the agency’s budget by $18 billion in 2026. He has also proposed cuts for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and other science-funding agencies. These agencies, meanwhile, have also canceled multiple research grants, adding to the woes of scientists across the country. Columbia researchers would be hard hit by these planned budget cuts even without the actions directed specifically at the university.

The announcements weigh on Shah. He worries about the prospects for the quarter-million-dollar annual grant, which lasts for 5 years and is up for renewal this year. “We have no idea if and when it will get renewed. It is scary,” he says.

Pick any research inquiry in Shah’s lab, and it is undoubtedly built upon work that the NIH has funded, he says. “I could think of every protein that we work on in the lab and I am sure that it was unquestionably discovered in an NIH-funded lab,” he says.

Meanwhile, Shah points to a handful of postdoctoral scholars in Columbia’s chemistry department who lost their NIH fellowships. “I think that it's pretty depressing to hear that the federal government wants to divest and doesn't see the value in publicly funded basic scientific research,” he says.

The university’s chemistry department, founded in 1864, has over 100 graduate students and 80 postdoctoral scholars as well as 20 research support staffers. They all work under the 42 faculty members. The department’s chair, Laura Kaufman, didn’t respond to C&EN’s requests for comment on the potential loss of funding for the department.

A senior researchers’ anguish

Shah, a faculty member at Columbia for the past 6 years, is not alone in fearing the loss of funding. Even-more-senior and tenured researchers are worried.

About 40 blocks north of Columbia’s main campus is the university’s Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, located in the Washington Heights neighborhood. It’s the research home of Barry Honig, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics who has spent over 4 decades as a researcher at Columbia studying protein interactions.

Honig was one of the collaborators on a project valued at over $1 million that lost its NIH grant. The group was investigating how proteins implicated in cancers interact with each other and the most effective ways to target them with drugs. “One day, the grant just didn't exist anymore—it is nothing like we have seen before,” he says. Columbia is currently in the process of negotiating the terms to restore the funding, he adds.

Honig says the research is fundamental to the field because scientists are only beginning to understand how proteins interact with each other. “We need this information to understand how drugs might bind to these proteins,” he says.

NIH funding has contributed greatly to Honig’s career, and the current work in his lab is aided by close to $250,000 in funding from the agency for a separate project. He gets other grants from the Gates Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Like Shah, Honig fears for the future of federal funds. “I'm preparing a grant [application] now, but honestly, I don't know if it will be reviewed. We are all in this sort of uncertainty stage,” he says.

For now, if funding cuts affect his lab, Honig says he has enough on the books to cover salaries for his lab of nine, including two postdoctoral fellows and two research scientists. “I've managed to save up my nickels and dimes, and I am not in danger of having to lay people off. However, I've heard that people have to lay off young scientists. The long-term effect of this will be that people will leave this institution and the country. I mean, we're all in shock right now.”

A Nobel laureate’s consternation

Joachim Frank still has vivid memories of Oct. 4, 2017, when he received a call from Stockholm at 5:18 am informing him that he and two others had won that year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work in developing cryo-electron microscopy. The technique ushered in a new era of observing biomolecules.

“Unlike previous methods, such as X-ray crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy allows for imaging molecules closer to the living environment,” Frank says. His lab, comprising nine researchers, uses the technique to study translation, the process by which the genetic information encoded in messenger RNA is translated into polypeptides.

Frank received his first NIH grants in 1981 and has relied on them for most of his career. “The grant amount grew over time as more successes were reported, making this an unbelievable success story. Even the NIH acknowledges this,” he says.

The recent stream of funding cuts hasn’t affected his lab so far, but they have left him feeling grim about the state of scientific research in the US. “I'm an immigrant from Germany, and this is not what I bargained for. This is not the country that I chose. So I'm bereft,” he says.

Frank’s lab has at least three international students who are worried and may no longer be upbeat about establishing careers in the US. “They might have set their hopes on having a career here in the US,” he says. “I would tell them to just forget about the career in the US because it's going to be an uphill struggle no matter what happens.”

And more generally, Frank fears that the government’s moves could collapse the nation’s research ecosystem. “All the government actions right now are really destroying the country, destroying the fabric of the country, not just in science, but in all other aspects,” he says.

Multiple obstacles

Minutes from Columbia’s historic Hamilton Hall, which was occupied last year by pro-Palestinian protestors, is the Mudd Building, home of the university’s chemical engineering department. Around 24 faculty members and over 100 researchers, including PhD students and postdoctoral scholars, investigate and innovate designs and technologies often used in chemical manufacturing.

Among them is Sanat Kumar, a professor who studies nanoparticle chemistry. Kumar moved to the US from India in 1981 to pursue a PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He held a postdoctoral position at IBM before joining Columbia in 2006.

Funding cuts are just one of the ways research at Columbia has been threatened, Kumar says, describing an unusual encounter that he and a coinvestigator had with a federal granting agency. He asked that the agency not be named to avoid jeopardizing his chances of funding.

The duo had planned to apply for renewal of a grant of approximately $500,000 per year that the agency has funded for the past 9 years. Their research aims to obtain a deeper understanding of nanoparticle assembly. “This could one day help with bringing down computing to the scale of a single DNA,” he says.

But recently, a program manager from the federal agency called Kumar’s coinvestigator to say that the agency had been instructed not to review any grant applications from Columbia. When Kumar’s colleague requested that this response be put in writing, the program manager refused, Kumar says.

“So here we are, not being told we are losing money,” he says. “We are not being rejected, but we are being told not to come in. It's very insidious.”

The two researchers have apprised Columbia’s higher-ups of the matter, but so far, the advice they have received is to “wait it out,” Kumar says.

Meanwhile, some impacts of the funding cuts are already visible, he says. Every year, the chemical engineering department accepts, on average, 22 new PhD students, but this year it took only 11 owing to the funding cuts, according to Kumar.

At one time, chemical engineering departments received generous funding from industry for basic research, but over the years, that revenue stream has dwindled, leaving scientists highly reliant on federal funds. “Losing federal funding is a nightmare,” Kumar says. “It will get rid of so much wisdom and knowledge from this country, to a point of no return.”

Kumar warns that the implications of the budget cuts and the government’s new hostility toward international students could be far-reaching and irreversible. “People will stop coming, and our country will be at a competitive disadvantage,” he says. “It is a matter of time before other countries overtake.”