Researchers Scramble Following NSF Grant Cuts

Professors Andrea Goforth and Christof Teuscher were planning to be at a day-long symposium this month celebrating the achievements of their NSF-funded semiconductor internship program. Instead, they found themselves scrambling for funds after the sudden termination of that grant, just one year into the three-year program.

The almost $1 million grant to Portland State University is one of over 1,700 that NSF has terminated since the start of the second Trump administration. The project was likely flagged because of its name, “Diverse Internships in Semiconductor Careers (DISC),” Goforth said. NSF’s website identifies DEI, environmental justice, and misinformation as some of the topics that are not aligned with the administration’s priorities and thus subject to cancellation.

In Goforth’s view, the grant was wrongfully targeted. “It is, to some extent, also about diverse students, but it’s about diverse internships. And if you look at our language on the hiring flyer and recruiting flyer, there’s nothing that targets specific groups,” she said. “NSF is still stating that they want to broaden participation to include all Americans, all groups, and I don’t see how our project doesn’t continue to do that.”

The cuts to grants deemed DEI-related have disproportionately affected projects in the STEM Education Directorate. The administration has also moved to eliminate the Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM within that directorate, though the plans have since been paused due to a temporary restraining order on reductions in force.

But none of NSF’s directorates have been spared from grant cuts. The Portland State University grant was funded by the Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships.

“I think everyone feels like their grant could be pulled any minute,” Goforth said.

Supporting students and faculty

Several of the canceled grants aimed to create more supportive environments for physics students and educators. One terminated grant led by Northwestern University and co-led by the American Physical Society was working to produce a holistic view of the challenges that physics graduate students face, principal investigator Bennett Goldberg said. (APS is an AIP Member Society.)

The project had an explicit focus on helping “historically excluded groups.” Going forward, NSF has said it will not support projects that “directly or indirectly preference or exclude any Americans on the basis of protected characteristics,” such as race and gender.

The grant cancellation hurts the physics departments and the project team, but also the agency itself, Goldberg said. “NSF loses its investment. The research won’t be continued into physics graduate education, the departments won’t be supported to continue to improve their programs, and we won’t study a cohort model of departmental change that could be replicated and advanced across all the departments,” he added.

A separate terminated grant supported the Organization for Physics at Two-Year Colleges (OPTYCs), a support system for the community of physics and astronomy faculty at two-year colleges, managed by the American Association of Physics Teachers. (AAPT is an AIP Member Society.)

Much of the funding for OPTYCs paid for participants to attend national meetings and meet with their cohorts in person, PI Kris Lui said, noting that many two-year colleges that offer physics or astronomy have one or fewer full-time faculty members teaching those courses.

“Isolation is a huge problem for two-year college faculty, because if you’re the only one at your institution, that’s hard to find other people to collaborate with or to bounce ideas off of, to grow professionally,” she added.

No comparable resources exist for physics faculty at two-year colleges in OPTYCs’ absence, Lui said.

Priority areas for the administration

Several PIs emphasized that their work falls under priority areas for the Trump administration. Goforth said the DISC project for semiconductor internships is “perfectly within the national best interests.”

“Our need to produce computer chips is not going to go away,” she added. “Our ability to securely do that on American soil, we will still need to do that. And if the current administration hopes to have advanced manufacturing jobs here in the United States, this internship program was aimed to provide student strengths for those.”

A canceled grant at George Mason University supported stipends for three postdoctoral researchers to study ways of raising student interest in the quantum workforce. After the grant’s termination, the lab had to lay off the three researchers who had been hired to start in August.

“We know that quantum and quantum education work is, in theory, still a priority,” PI Jessica Rosenberg said. She pointed out that the National Quantum Initiative Act was passed during the first Trump administration.

But the grant was likely flagged because the proposal discussed “who we’re broadening participation for, and the importance of bringing in groups that have been underrepresented in these fields,” Rosenberg said. “That was clearly a fairly significant part of what we were talking about with those barriers to expanding the pipeline.”

Moving forward

Some PIs said they have appealed their grant terminations, and others said they plan to. NSF has stated that appeals will not be reviewed or considered.

Goldberg said he is writing an appeal letter that argues his Inclusive Graduate Programs project aligns with NSF’s priorities, is open to all, and is a significant NSF investment that will be lost.

“The postdocs and junior faculty in our group that are doing the research won’t be able to continue, won’t be able to advance their career appropriately,” Goldberg said. There’s harm done to the students in the 12 universities that we’re working with, because those PhD students won’t get the improvements and support structures because their departments won’t be involved in our project.” Those departments serve close to 1,200 PhD students, Goldberg said.

Michigan State University professor Vashti Sawtelle lost her grant supporting students who transfer from community colleges to four-year institutions. She said she is uncertain if her team can continue working on the project without the NSF grant. Eleven people working on the project have lost their paid positions, and one graduate student has lost the funding for her dissertation work.

Sawtelle said she is currently applying for bridge funding from the Spencer Foundation to support the graduate student’s work, but the student will likely need to juggle two jobs and take longer to finish her dissertation if that funding does not come through.

“Right now, we are just trying to stop the bleeding,” Sawtelle said.

Meanwhile, the OPTYCs project proceeded with an in-person meeting that was scheduled for less than a week after the grant termination date, but AAPT had to draw from its own budget to fund travel costs for faculty, Lui said.

Going forward, the OPTYCs team members have agreed to volunteer time to continue running virtual programming, though they are unable to keep the same pace given the grant’s termination, Lui said. “The two-year college community has a lot of volunteerism as a core value, I think, but it also seems really unfair to require folks who are already overburdened with teaching and service to then do more service,” she added.