Their medical research focuses on developing potentially life-saving breakthroughs in cancer treatments and tools to more easily diagnose debilitating diseases. Their research in mathematics may make online systems more robust and safe.
But as the school year begins, the work of UCLA professors in these and many other fields has fallen into a halt of a $584 million grant halt, what University of California President James B. Milicken called his transformational research “Death Kunell.”
The freeze discovered that after the US Department of Justice on July 29, the university violated the civil rights of Jews and Israeli students on October 7, 2023 by providing an inadequate response to the allegations of anti-Semitism they faced after the Hamas attacks.
The fight over a halt of funds escalated Friday after the Trump administration demanded that UCLA pay a $100 million fine to resolve the charges.
Thousands of university scholars are in scope amid growing tensions in Westwood. In total, at least 800 grants have been frozen, mainly from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
UCLA scholars have explained the days of confusion as they understand how grant losses affect jobs and rush to uncover new sources of funding, or compete for roles in securing ongoing salaries or peers. While professors still use employment and payroll, many others, including graduate students, rely on grants for salaries, tuition and healthcare.
But for now, at least for the time being, some scholars told the Times that their work has not yet been suspended. So far, no layoffs have been announced.
Sidney Campbell, a UCLA cancer researcher whose grant funds have been cut, stands inside UCLA’s Biomedical Science Research Building.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
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 can affect illness, continues for now. She has an independent fellowship that says, “Hopefully I will protect a large portion of my salary.” But others don’t have that luxury, she said.
“It will definitely affect people’s livelihoods. I already know people…with families who have to cut their pay cuts almost immediately,” Campbell said.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the most deadly cancers, but Campbell’s work could lead to a better understanding of it and ultimately pave the way for more robust prevention and treatment plans that will help tame the tragedy.
“Understanding how diet affects cancer development could lead to preventive strategies that we can recommend to patients in the future,” she said. “At the moment, we can’t do that effectively because we don’t have any information about the underlying biology. Our research will allow us to actually make recommendations based on science.”
Campbell’s work, and many others at UCLA, are potentially groundbreaking. However, you can put it on hold immediately.
“We have people who don’t know if we can buy experimental material for the rest of the month,” she said.
Fear of existential crisis
For some, the cuts have caused something close to existential crisis.
He felt deeply saddened after Professor Dino Di Carlo, chairman of UCLA’s Samuelli Bioengineering, learned that four Grants, including four worth about $1 million, had been suspended there. He said he didn’t know why his grants were frozen and he might not have the money to pay his six researchers.
So Diallo, who studies the diagnosis of Lyme and other tick-borne diseases, took him to LinkedIn, where he wrote a post calling out Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial. The unsettling story is about a man named Josef K. He wakes up and finds himself arrested and then on trial.
“People like Joseph K., who have been in fact affected – the public, young scientists, patients waiting for better treatment and diagnostic tools – are asking about the crimes we committed,” wrote Di Carlo. “They are judged by a system that no longer describes themselves.”
The LinkedIn post immediately attracted dozens of comments and over 1,000 other answers. Di Carlo has been working to find work for researchers who rely on salaries that come from suspended grants.
However, goodwill is limited. “We’re not paying rent to students this month,” he said.
Di Carlo’s research focuses in part on the development of home testing to detect lyme and other tick-borne diseases. Since such products are not currently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, he said those who have experienced a tick bite must wait for the lab results to confirm their infection.
“This delay in diagnosis can prevent timely treatment, allow for disease progression, and lead to long-term health issues,” he said. “A rapid point-of-care test allows individuals to receive immediate results, allowing early antibiotic treatment when the disease is most easily addressed, significantly reducing the risk of chronic symptoms and improving health outcomes.”
Di Carlo lamented what the Trump administration calls “a continuous attack on the scientific community.” This has cancelled billions of dollars in National Institutes of Health funding for universities across the country.
It was “just… I’m not giving up,” Di Carlo said.
Scrambling funds
Some professors who lost the grant have scrambled for a long time to secure new sources of funding.
DiCarlo said he was at the meeting all week for his identity. He also tried to determine whether he could move to other projects that he still had funds, among other options, or be given the teaching assistant position.
He is not alone in those efforts. Mathematics professor Terence Tao also lost a grant worth around $750,000. But Tao said he is suffering more from the freeze on a $25 million grant to UCLA’s Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics. He said the loss of funds for the Institute, where TAO is the director of special projects, is “actually very existential.”
Tao, chairman of Letters and Science University’s James and Carol Collins, said the pain exceeds loss of funds. “A sudden, and essentially a general lack of due process — only exacerbates the damage,” Tao said. “We were not informed.”
In his field, TAO is conducting research to determine whether a group of numbers is random or structured. His work could lead to advances in encryption, and ultimately makes online systems like those used for financial transactions more secure.
“It’s important to do this kind of research, for example, it could actually be possible to discover these weaknesses that the enemy isn’t actually looking for,” Tao said. “So you need this special theoretical confirmation that what you think is working actually works as intended, [and you need to] Also explore the negative spaces that don’t work. ”
Tao said the mathematics research institute is sincerely committed to the donations it has received from its private donors recently. That’s about $100,000 so far.
“We are taking away short-term funds as we need to keep the lights up for the next few months,” Tao said.
Rafael Jaime, president of United Autoworker Local 4811, representing 48,000 academic workers at the University of California, includes around 8,000 at UCLA – has not noticed workers who have not been paid so far, but said the issue could possibly come to mind at the end of August.
He said the UC system should “do everything possible to ensure workers are not left without wages.”
What’s coming next?
The main stressor of scholars: uncertainty.
Some researchers whose grants have been suspended have said they have not received much guidance from UCLA on the road ahead. Some of that anxiety was vented last week on a Zoom call that included a UCLA-wide call with around 3,000 faculty members.
UCLA administrators said they are exploring a suspension option that includes potential emergency “bridge” funds to pay researchers or maintain labs such as researchers who use rodents as subjects.
Some UCLA scholars were worried about brain drain. Di Carlo said that undergraduates he advised have begun seeking his advice on moving to universities overseas for graduate school.
“This was the first time I’ve seen an undergraduate student asking about a foreign university for graduation research,” he said. “What about Switzerland?… what about the University of Tokyo?” This attack on science makes students think that this is not a place for them. ”
But perhaps the most pressing concern of researchers is to continue their work.
Campbell explained that she was personally affected by pancreatic cancer. She lost someone close to her. She and her colleagues are doing research “for the sake of their families” who were also moved by illness.
“It’s really unfortunate that work already in progress could somehow stop,” she said. “I was able to potentially help not only for me, but for all of these patients.”
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