The NIH cut funding for early career researchers from diverse backgrounds. Now, former recipients find they can’t re-apply for funding unless they abandon their research and propose new projects
By June 2024, Rafael Perez felt like he was 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 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.
. . . . .
NIH grant terminations are historically unprecedented. In any given year, fewer than twenty NIH grants are terminated, almost all on grounds of severe charges like fraud and misconduct. But in the first five months of 2025 alone, nearly three thousand NIH grants have been terminated, totaling $4.52 billion across more than one hundred universities. When President Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, many scientists foresaw that most DEI programs across universities would be axed. While this has taken the form of a mass defunding of health equity studies—including studies on HIV, trans healthcare, and racial health disparities—the NIH has also quietly ended grants and training programs that historically funded researchers from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The wave of terminations in April that impacted Perez was a new escalation, not only shuttering opportunities for scientists from diverse communities, but also rescinding grants that had already been awarded and disbursed to them.
Besides Perez, other Yale researchers who suddenly lost their awards include Serrena Singh, a first-generation Caribbean-Indian college graduate studying liver diseases, who works at an Amazon warehouse on weekends for extra money; Thi Vu, a public health researcher interested in caregiving among older adults with dementia; Andin Fosam, a Black former student-athlete investigating pathways to muscle mass loss and weight loss in kidney cancer; and A Ram, a PhD student with a chronic illness interested in improving Connecticut’s alert system for opioid overdoses. (“A” is their full first name.)
In total, Yale has lost an estimated $51.6 million in funding across forty NIH projects; of these, about fifteen belonged to grant programs specifically meant to support disadvantaged researchers.
“I thought that I was safe because it’d already been approved,” said Mata’uitafa Faiai, a PhD 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 reevaluation of each proposals’ scientific impact. In its notices, the NIH claimed these projects—on topics such as tissue scarring, nuclear envelope transport, and kidney cancer—were “nonscientific,” “antithetical to inquiry,” and failed to “expand our knowledge of living systems,” solely because recipients had indicated they came from diverse communities.
That was just such an egregious example where the goal was clearly not leveling the playing field, but rather taking people who identify as diverse—after encouraging them to do so—and throwing them off the playing field,” said Carolyn Fredericks, an assistant professor of neurology.
The fallout has further strained the tenuous relationship many young scientists, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, already have with academia. “I spend all my time thinking, are you going to get your grant taken away? Is it going to come back? Are you going to get money?” Perez said. “Where am I going to get money?”
Ram, a PhD student who lost their F31 diversity fellowship totaling $96,668 over two years, put it bluntly. “I mean, if you can’t get funding, then you’re fucked.”
. . . . .
When his family moved from Pennsylvania from the Dominican Republic, 17-year-old Perez would walk from his parents’ bodega to the public library. Still learning English, he couldn’t read all the books, but he loved to thumb through the graphic novels and manga. He thought he would become a comic book artist someday, or maybe a graphic designer. Later in his undergraduate years, as an art major, Perez found himself riveted by a human psychology course. He asked incessant questions in the class. At the end of the semester, the professor noticed his enthusiasm and offered to let him check out their lab’s research. “I didn’t even understand what that meant, Perez remembered. “I was like, Oh, is that some sort of club where you sit around and look at papers?” At the time, he could hardly fathom himself doing biology—he just didn’t know of any scientists in his life, much less scientists who looked like him.
But if research was once a far-off concept, over a decade later—after switching his undergraduate major from art to psychology to biology, after completing a six-year PhD in pharmacology, after receiving a position as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale, after publishing three papers with one more on the way—he has made a full-time career out of it.
Now in his mid-thirties, Perez has spent the past five years probing mouse brains at the Picciotti Lab at Yale, searching for the underlying mechanisms of addiction. He studies how the brain responds to environmental cues during opioid use, a process he explains with barely-concealed excitement. He also has a propensity for referencing other experiments as he speaks, some of which sound like an offbeat children’s book (“if you give an animal cocaine…” he states, probably alluding to a 2021 study where he did exactly that). Scientists, to Perez, are just “a bunch of dorks”—“I knew once I realized that, ‘Hey, these are my people,’” he said with a self-deprecating smile.
Underneath Perez’s affability remains a thoughtful intensity for science. His path in academia as a Dominican immigrant has not always been easy; to this day, Perez still battles bouts of imposter syndrome and the knowledge that he does not look like “the stereotypical scientist on a faculty website.” But in the past decade, he has not wavered in his dream to direct his own lab to find treatments for substance use disorders.
In 2024, Perez set his sights on the K99, the coveted NIH award that supported postdoctoral scientists as they transitioned to full-time faculty positions. At the time of his application, the K99 had both the standard track and a track for “Maximizing Opportunities for Scientific and Academic Independent Careers” (MOSAIC). Given that acceptance rates for both tracks were similar, Perez was told that he’d have a good shot at either. But a few colleagues encouraged him to take the MOSAIC route. Though the application process was nearly identical, the MOSAIC grant came with networking and leadership training opportunities, as well as a slightly higher stipend, according to Perez.
With his peers’ encouragement, Perez applied for MOSAIC. His proposal sought to investigate how the brain regulates the spinal cord to produce opioid tolerance. While opioids are useful for pain management, the body’s tolerance for them can rapidly reverse in new settings. By exploring how the body interacts with opoids across different environments, Perez’s project could help inform safer pain treatments that minimize the risk of addiction and overdose.
After half a year and two rounds of review—first by a panel of non-federal scientists, then by the advisory council at the National Institutes of Drug Abuse (NIDA)—Perez’s application was accepted for funding.
It felt like his big break. “Every scientist has a story of the first big grant they were awarded,” explained Melinda Irwin, associate dean of research at the School of Public Health. Even decades later, most successful researchers can trace their start back to one grant, a lucky proposal that was approved for funding and became the basis of their research career. For Perez, this should’ve been his K99. The NIDA thought so too: “This is an outstanding MOSAIC K99/ R00 application from a promising candidate with a rich scientific background and commitment to substance use research,” his grant reviewers had written in February 2024, at a meeting of twenty-four professors and NIH officers from across the country. “The candidate has chosen a fascinating question to address.”
But in April, the NIDA sent an email explaining that the MOSAIC training program had been halted “due to changes in NIH/HHS priorities.” Shortly after, Perez would receive the formal notice of his individual award’s termination. The notice opened:
“It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research programs related to Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)… So-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”) studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans. Therefore, no additional funding will be awarded for this project, and all future years have been removed.”
Dean Yimlamai, an associate professor of pediatrics, often hears the misconception that grants set aside for underrepresented candidates are “easier” to obtain. But in Perez’s year, MOSAIC funding was only awarded to researchers whose proposals scored above the seventy-fifth percentile. The cut-off for the regular pool was the seventieth percentile, meaning the diversity grants were more competitive that year. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, because there’s a diversity supplement, we just give it to whoever fits the skin color,’” Yimlamai said.
For the K99, both the MOSAIC and standard tracks use identical judging systems, scoring applications across five separate categories: candidate strength, career development goals, research plan, mentor, and institutional environment. Under MOSAIC, the applicant’s background might influence how their “candidate strength” is judged—one member of Perez’s review panel noted his “outstanding previous commitment to diversity,” for instance—but it would have nothing to do with how the “research plan” category gets scored.
Yet after the sweeping cuts at the NIH, all award recipients who applied through the diversity streams lost their funding. Still, several scientists I spoke to had scored high enough in review panels to nearly guarantee they would have been funded by the regular route. Faiai, whose project investigated diabetes among American Samoan youth, had received a perfect score in review rounds. Jared Akers, a fourth-year PhD student studying human genome evolution, also noted that he “probably scored higher than other fellowships that didn’t get terminated.”
Explaining why funding for high-scoring grants was cut, including those which aligned with “agency priorities,” the NIH wrote in a statement to The New Journal: “The studies themselves have value, however unfortunately they were funded under an inappropriate and ideologically-driven—rather than scientifically driven—DEI program under the Biden Administration. In the future these types of programs that NIH his [sic] committed to fund to help people with all manner of diseases will be reviewed based on their scientific merit rather than on DEI criteria.”
The NIH did not comment on why they did not provide an opportunity for cancelled grants to be re-evaluated in contention with the regular pool.
Though researchers can attempt to resubmit their proposals under the non-diversity tracks, the NIH only convenes three times a year to review grant submissions. From there, it is typically a yearlong process of additional review panels and advisory council meetings before a scientist can actually receive their funding. Today, even that timeline is no longer dependable. Still reeling from mass layoffs and the January federal funding freeze, the NIH has become backlogged with grant applications, slowing down its review process indefinitely. Scientists who have reapplied for grants today for grants today have no sense of when they might hear back. This limbo can be impractical, or even untenable, for early-stage researchers without the funds to support themselves in the interim.
For Perez, the message was clear. “This is a racist strategy to try to prevent people who don’t look like a certain kind of person from having a voice, and drive them out of science in the U.S.”
. . . . .
The NIH has long been aware that science has a diversity problem. Back in the 1990s, Cornell researcher Alice Pell coined the metaphor “leaky pipeline,” referring to how women and minorities are disproportionately driven out of biomedical research at each stage of the training process. In 2020, about two-thirds of research scientists were male, and two-thirds were white.
More than funding support, the NIH diversity grants aim to show researchers from historically marginalized populations that they can belong in science. The MOSAIC program, for instance, was added to the broader K99 program in 2019, citing a report that only 7 percent of K99 applicants were from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. The mentorship opportunities built into these grants can introduce young researchers to the network of unspoken rules—how to meet the right people, how to apply for the right grants—to set themselves up for success in STEM.
For scientists who did not grow up with exposure to research, this kind of representation can be transformative. In his junior year of college, a year after Perez first stumbled upon his interest in human psychology, one of his school’s professors invited him to a research conference for minority communities. As he stood alongside professors “who look just like my aunts and uncles,” something finally crystallized. “That was the moment where I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I can do this.’”
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 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.
. . . . .
Per agency policy, there is a thirty-day window 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-and-forth with his professors and consulted Wikipedia to make sense of neurology concepts for his new 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 heard back about his application.
In response to the funding uncertainties, both the Yale School of Medicine and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences extended bridge funding mechanisms, which serve as supplementary funding to faculty members who receive a premature grant termination notice. Perez was approved for bridge funding in June, just one month before his principal investigator would have been forced to let him go. Still, according to the School of Medicine website, bridge funding is only 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 specify that bridge funding will only be extended to projects which “must ‘bridge’ to future funding— there is an expectation that the funding helps secure data/results that make future funding more likely.” But this does not address what will happen to projects on health equity that the federal government deems “nonscientific.”
Because they are not university faculty, graduate students who received the F31 are also ineligible for bridge funding. Their departments are obligated to fund them until they complete their PhD, per university policy, but the fate of their research projects is less clear. If their labs remain committed to their project, graduate students will be able to continue their work. If not, they will have to scrap their progress or reduce the scope of their work.
Moreover, to incentivize graduate students to secure grant funding, Yale provides a stipend bonus of $4,000 to students who receive an external fellowship. As a result, when Ram lost their F31-diversity grant tracking opioid overdoses in Connecticut, Yale informed them they would also lose the $4,000 bonus for the upcoming year—which, given the approximate graduate student’s $52,000 salary, is “unfortunately a substantial amount,” Ram noted.
When Ram argued the unfairness of losing $4,000 over something they had no control over, the Office of Graduate Financial Aid did not budge. Since then, Ram has mostly surrendered to the circumstances. “I’ve never wanted an academic job,” they said, “and at this point, whatever job security I had [in academia] is no longer there anyway.”
Ram grew up with several chronic illnesses that compromised major aspects of their daily life. For a time, it was challenging to work for even an hour a day. Though they’ve adapted to a regimen of mostly preventative care, it remains “very easy” for them to be “disabled out of the workforce,” as Ram put it.
The termination of Ram’s grant and the bureaucratic stresses that followed only confirmed what they already thought of science research’s lack of forgiveness toward disadvantaged students. “It’s challenging having to self-advocate, and have to do your work, and manage your chronic illness, which is a full-time job in itself, to be honest,” Ram said. “But [in academia] you’re held to the same standard as someone who doesn’t have any additional baggage.”
Meanwhile, the fallout of dealing with a cancelled grant mirrors the very dynamics that push minority researchers out of academia in the first place. “I had to basically get a second degree in law to figure out what was going on,” Perez said, after offering an explanation of congressional appropriations and constitutional powers at play in NIH funding mechanisms. He is bitterly aware that many researchers from non-diverse backgrounds have been able to continue their research. “All I want to do is to do my job,” he added.
. . . . .
Research programs based primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.
This was the language of the grant termination from NIH sent to thousands of young scientists across the country who had been supported by the agency’s diversity grants. The same anti-DEI rhetoric has been adopted by the administration to justify its large-scale changes at the NIH and argue that health equity research diverts funding away from insights into illnesses and chronic diseases.
“Today, multiple offices focus on key priorities like women’s health, minority health and HIV/AIDS. Too often this results in a lack of focus and uncoordinated resources,” wrote Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary, in a New York Post op-ed entitled “I’m fighting chronic disease, slashing unhealthy fat at HHS.” But this logic is shaky. It is true that people from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to engage in diversity-related research that relates to their 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.”
. . . . .
In June 2025, a federal district judge ruled that the NIH’s termination of grants was illegal and ordered 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.”
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
