7 days ago
How a researcher from Medfield created the go-to database of federal research cuts
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'There was a lot of grief in that, because I know what's been lost,' Delaney said of seeing the status in black and white. 'The crazy thing is that there are thousands of grants in Grant Watch, and every single one of them entails loss somewhere.'
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For five months, Grant Watch has provided a singularly detailed account of the devastation within American scientific research, as its biggest funder, the US government, has morphed into an unrelenting adversary.
The website is a near-complete list of grants
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Maintained by seven volunteers, the database is searchable by grant status (frozen, terminated, possibly reinstated), university affiliation, or key details, such as a project's title or award number. The people behind the project scrape government websites and review submissions from scientists to add entries.
A researcher examined samples on the campus of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on June 11.
Kent Dayton/Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Crowdsourced and consistently accurate, Grant Witness has become a go-to tool for journalists, lawyers, congressional staff, and even some universities themselves, counting the money no longer flowing to their coffers.
Root around the website, and you'll find money axed for
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A tiny slice of those funds went to Delaney, an affable lawyer-turned-epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
He received a
He coaches his kids' soccer, picks them up from summer camp, and frequents the Blue Moon Bagel Cafe on Main Street, where most midday patrons are twice his age.
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On a muggy July day, Delaney entered the spot in neon orange HOKA shoes and ordered a double-shot cappuccino, before recounting the story of Grant Witness from day one.
When NIH money started to disappear in February, the initiative started as a perfunctory Google spreadsheet to keep tabs on what projects were cut, and why. Then Harvard epidemiology professor Brittany Charlton connected Delaney to Noam Ross, executive director of the science data tracker
Delaney in his office at his Medfield home.
Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
'This started as, 'Is this something we can find out beyond people's social media posts essentially?'' said Ross, a Brooklyn, New York resident. 'Everyone had complementary initiatives going on.'
Now Delaney and his colleagues share weekly Wednesday meetings, early morning Signal messages, and midnight coding sessions to keep up with the latest in research news between their
day jobs in data science, biotechnology, and academia. They won a small grant in June to pay a part-time staffer and are searching for additional private investment. In the meantime, volunteers across states are compensated in goodwill for creating a research archive that meets the moment, amid obligations to kids and jobs and grocery runs, said Anthony Barente, a Boston-based data scientist among the group's volunteers.
'My brain is set up to be a data hoarder. When I started this project, I didn't realize what the data would be used for, and I didn't really care,' he said. 'It's all a record for people to take forward, because none of us have been able to fully elucidate how science is changing right now.'
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And Grant Witness's to-do list keeps growing: Checking for more lost grants. Monitoring whether reinstated research projects actually receive their next checks. Adding canceled Environmental Protection Agency grants to the site. And automating features of the website to reduce the need for manual updates. Then there are all the media interviews and endless calls from fearful scientists phoning Delaney to help, vent, or puzzle through what comes next.
He once talked about the project as something that would last days or weeks. Now it's years.
'There wasn't an exit strategy at the beginning. There still isn't,' Delaney said. 'We're in this until the end.'
But that 'end' feels only more and more amorphous. The shock-and-awe announcements of big funding cuts have waned, but academics are girding for a future of smaller federal investments in all kinds of science. Researchers today scarcely know who to call at grant-making agencies anymore, and even those whose funding remains intact worry about whether the money will flow as planned.
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The negotiation between Harvard and the White House is a toss-up, too. It could lead to research dollars being returned to campus scientists — 'My best case scenario,' Delaney said — or push President Trump to make good on threats to international student visas and
The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where Delaney works, in Boston.
SOPHIE PARK/NYT
To Delaney, much of the utility of his database is in providing ammunition for lawsuits to defend research funding.
He started his career as an attorney at a big firm. After a recession-era layoff, he hopped between countries to train lawyers advocating for former child soldiers in Burundi and work as a public defender in Palau. Eventually, a stint living with employees of the global health nonprofit Partners in Health inspired Delaney to pursue epidemiology. He got his masters in public health in Baltimore, before moving to Massachusetts for his doctorate at Harvard.
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Now, as universities battle the White House in court, Grant Witness is referenced in lawsuits about NIH dollars, NSF funding, and another that relates to the Trump administration's actions against Harvard.
A complaint in court is a tangible vehicle for hope, Delaney said, but he still struggles to dodge cynicism every day. A child of the 1980s, Delaney often thinks about how much money has been unwound for AIDS and HIV research. He's horrified to see grants cut for suicide prevention efforts for transgender children. Funding revocations for research projects led by women and people of color make Delaney question why the background of a scientist has any impact on the credibility of their science.
It moved him to seriously heed warnings about the country shifting, away from democracy towards authoritarianism.
'The people pointing to the most extreme possible consequences are oftentimes dismissed,' he said. But 'when the most extreme versions of terrible things start happening, we should probably start listening to those that are warning us.'
As for Delaney personally, the options are dizzying. He made peace with the fact that he will likely no longer work at Harvard by Halloween and may leave epidemiology entirely — though he won't depart Grant Witness.
Delaney not-so-silently hopes that universities stand their ground against threats to their academic freedom and research enterprise. But he hopes they survive either way.
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'We've come to appreciate that the fight is bigger than we thought it was,' Delaney said. 'Or maybe I didn't have a thought at all about how big the fight was. It's just that it's a damn big fight.'
Diti Kohli can be reached at
