‘A continual assault.' How UCLA's research faculty is grappling with Trump funding freeze

Los Angeles Times

2 days ago

Their medical research focuses on potentially lifesaving breakthroughs in cancer treatment, and developing tools to more easily diagnose debilitating diseases. Their studies in mathematics could make online systems more robust and secure.
But as the academic year opens, the work of UCLA's professors in these and many other fields has been imperiled by the Trump administration's suspension of $584 million in grant funding, which University of California President James B. Milliken called a 'death knell' to its transformative research.
The freeze came after a July 29 U.S. Department of Justice finding that the university had violated the civil rights of Jewish and Israeli students by providing an inadequate response to alleged antisemitism they faced after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
The fight over the funding stoppage intensified Friday after the Trump administration demanded that UCLA pay a $1-billion fine, among other concessions, to resolve the accusations — and California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state will sue, calling the proposal 'extortion.'
Amid heightened tensions in Westwood, thousands of university academics are in limbo. In total, at least 800 grants, mostly from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, have been frozen.
UCLA scholars described days of confusion as they struggle to understand how the loss of grants would affect their work and scramble to uncover new funding sources — or roles that would ensure their continued pay, or that of their colleagues. While professors still have jobs and paychecks to draw on, many others, including graduate students, rely on grant funding for their salaries, tuition and healthcare.
At least for the moment, though, several academics told The Times that their work had not yet be interrupted. So far, no layoffs have been announced.
Sydney Campbell, a pancreatic cancer researcher and postdoctoral scholar at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, said her work — which aims to understand how diet affects the disease — is continuing for now. She has an independent fellowship that 'hopefully will protect the majority of my salary.' But others, she said, don't have that luxury.
'It is absolutely going to affect people's livelihoods. I already know of people ... with families who are having to take pay cuts almost immediately,' said Campbell, who works for a lab that has lost two National Institutes of Health grants, including one that funds her research.
Pancreatic cancer is among the most deadly of cancers, but Campbell's work could lead to a better understanding of it, paving the way for more robust prophylactic programs — and treatment plans — that may ultimately help tame the scourge.
'Understanding how diet can impact cancer development could lead to preventive strategies that we can recommend to patients in the future,' she said. 'Right now we can't effectively do that because we don't have the information about the underlying biology. Our studies will help us actually be able to make recommendations based on science.'
Campbell's work — and that of many others at UCLA — is potentially groundbreaking. But it could soon be put on hold.
'We have people who don't know if they're going to be able to purchase experimental materials for the rest of the month,' she said.
For some, the cuts have triggered something close to an existential crisis.
After professor Dino Di Carlo, chair of the UCLA Samueli Bioengineering Department, learned about 20 grants were suspended there — including four in his lab worth about $1 million — he felt a profound sadness. He said he doesn't know why his grants were frozen, and there may not be money to pay his six researchers.
So Di Carlo, who is researching diagnostics for Lyme and other tick-borne diseases, took to LinkedIn, where he penned a post invoking the Franz Kafka novel 'The Trial.' The unsettling tale is about a man named Josef K. who wakes up and finds himself under arrest and then on trial — with no understanding of the situation.
'Like Josef K., the people actually affected — the public, young scientists, patients waiting for better treatments and diagnostic tools — are left asking: What crime did we commit?' wrote Di Carlo. 'They are being judged by a system that no longer explains itself.'
The LinkedIn post quickly attracted dozens of comments and more than 1,000 other responses. Di Carlo, who has been working to find jobs for researchers who depend on paychecks that come from now-suspended grants, said he appreciated the support.
But, goodwill has its limits. 'It doesn't pay the rent for a student this month,' he said.
Di Carlo's research is partly focused on developing an at-home test that would detect Lyme and other tick-borne diseases, which are on the rise. Because no such product is currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, he said, people who've experienced a tick bite have to wait for lab results to confirm their infection.
'This delay in diagnosis prevents timely treatment, allowing the disease to progress and potentially lead to long-term health issues,' he said. 'A rapid, point-of-care test would allow individuals to receive immediate results, enabling early treatment with antibiotics when the disease is most easily addressed, significantly reducing the risk of chronic symptoms and improving health outcomes.'
Di Carlo lamented what he called 'a continual assault on the scientific community' by the Trump administration, which has canceled billions of dollars in National Institutes of Health funding for universities across the country.
It 'just ... hasn't let up,' Di Carlo said.
Some professors who've lost grants have spent long hours scrambling to secure new sources of funding.
Di Carlo said he was in meetings all week to identity which researchers are affected by the cuts, and to try to figure out, 'Can we support those students?' He has also sought to determine whether some could be moved to other projects that still have funding, or be given teaching assistant positions, among other options.
He's not alone in those efforts. Mathematics professor Terence Tao also has lost a grant worth about $750,000. But Tao said that he was more distressed by the freezing of a $25-million grant for UCLA's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. The funding loss for the institute, where Tao is director of special projects, is 'actually quite existential,' he said, because the grant is 'needed to fund operations' there.
Tao, who is the James and Carol Collins chair in the College of Letters and Sciences, said the pain goes beyond the loss of funds. 'The abruptness — and basically the lack of due process in general — just compounds the damage,' said Tao. 'We got no notice.'
A luminary in his field, Tao conducts research that examines, in part, whether a group of numbers are random or structured. His work could lead to advances in cryptography that may eventually make online systems — such as those used for financial transactions — more secure.
'It is important to do this kind of research — if we don't, it's possible that an adversary, for example, could actually discover these weaknesses that we are not looking for at all,' Tao said. 'So you do need this extra theoretical confirmation that things that you think are working actually do work as intended, [and you need to] also explore the negative space of what doesn't work.'
Tao said he's been heartened by donations that the mathematics institute has received from private donors in recent days — about $100,000 so far.
'We are scrambling for short-term funding because we need to just keep the lights on for the next few months,' said Tao.
Rafael Jaime, president of United Auto Workers Local 4811, which represents 48,000 academic workers within the University of California — including about 8,000 at UCLA — said he was not aware of any workers who haven't been paid so far, but that the issue could come to a head at the end of August.
He said that the UC system 'should do everything that it can to ensure that workers aren't left without pay.'
A major stressor for academics: the uncertainty.
Some researchers whose grants were suspended said they have not received much guidance from UCLA on a path forward. Some of that anxiety was vented on Zoom calls last week, including a UCLA-wide call attended by about 3,000 faculty members.
UCLA administrators said they are exploring stopgap options, including potential emergency 'bridge' funding to grantees to pay researchers or keep up labs such as those that use rodents as subjects.
Some UCLA academics worried about a brain drain. Di Carlo said that undergraduate students he advises have begun asking for his advice on relocating to universities abroad for graduate school.
'This has been the first time that I've seen undergraduate students that have asked about foreign universities for their graduate studies,' he said. 'I hear, 'What about Switzerland? ... What about University of Tokyo?' This assault on science is making the students think that this is not the place for them.'
But arguably researchers' most pressing concern is continuing their work.
Campbell explained that she has personally been affected by pancreatic cancer — she lost someone close to her to it. She and her peers do the research 'for the families' who've also been touched by the disease.
'That the work that's already in progress has the chance of being stopped in some way is really disappointing,' she said. 'Not just for me, but for all those patients I could potentially help.'