Within FAS, the effect of cuts will vary from department to department, with the biology and physics departments being hit harder and the humanities largely remaining unscathed.

Though specific details are unclear, both the NIH and NSF have said they expect to reduce award amounts for existing multi-year grants and significantly cut the number and amount of future grants, most likely to the tune of approximately 1,000 fewer grants a year, according to the most recent White House advisory.

Because the NIH announced late last year that it was withholding 10 percent of the promised award amount for all grants in advance of the possible sequester, many researchers have already begun to feel the pinch of the cuts.

That sharp reduction in grant numbers is expected to reduce already low award rates in the NIH and NSF to 14 and 16 percent respectively, according to a report by Research!America—an organization that advocates for research funding.

Even if sequestration does not occur, Harvard administrators are still gearing up for what many believe will be inevitable budget cuts.

“There is general agreement that whatever happens with sequestration, the profile for research funding from the federal government is going to be a different one going forward,” University President Drew G. Faust said.

SHUTTING DOWN THE PIPELINE

Though the numbers are most striking at the University level, individual labs and researchers will bear the brunt of the cuts as competition for grants becomes more difficult and awards shrink in size.

In September 2012, Medical School biologist Robin E. Reed announced that her lab had discovered a long-sought-after link between spinal muscular atrophy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. That finding, which came after five years of basic research on a protein related to ALS, has the potential break the field wide open, Reed said.

But like dozens of her colleagues at the Medical School and thousands more around the country feeling the impact of shrinking federal funding, Reed finds herself increasingly on the sidelines, spending less time in the laboratory and more than ever before writing grants to try maintain her piece of the funding pie.

“I have an idea, and I think it’s a good one, but I simply don’t have the money to pursue it,” Reed said. “Before you would write a grant and get a decent amount of money so you could do work. Now you have to spend a lot of time just writing grants, and that’s not a productive use of my time.”

“On the one hand, the public says cure this awful disease, and on the other hand, they won’t even give us enough money to even buy the reagents,” she added.

Though Harvard researchers will likely weather the cuts better than others because of the high caliber of their work, assistant professor of both computer science and biology David D. Cox ’00 said the overall reduction of funds will mean that both funding agencies and researchers will become more conservative with the grant money they do have.

In advance of potential cuts, researchers have sought to minimize some of the losses at the lab level by cutting staff and spending more frugally on expensive chemicals and equipment.

“I just think it’s having a major impact in every area. Labs are shrinking. Money is dried up, so I can’t imagine it drying it up any more,” Reed said.