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“There’s nothing that’s going to prepare you for having somebody walk in your office and tell you that your five-year, multi-million dollar grant doesn’t exist anymore,” Harvard Medical School associate professor Julia L. Marcus says.
Between February 28 and April 1, the National Institutes of Health terminated more than $110 million in grants to the University and its affiliated hospitals. The cuts were part of a broader Trump administration push to crack down on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the U.S. — according to a Crimson analysis, all of the cancelled projects prominently featured topics related to gender and sexual identity, health disparities, COVID-19, and vaccines.
Marcus has spent her nine years at Harvard researching HIV prevention. But on March 20 and 21, Marcus was notified that three of her grants would be terminated — totaling $4.2 million of funding canceled within 48 hours.
Harvard School of Public Health professor Nancy Krieger ’80 tells a similarly sudden story. At 5:45 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 28 — the evening that the first terminations began — Krieger received a letter from the NIH saying that her grant, which funded a study on ways to analyze the impacts of discrimination on health, had been cancelled. The grant would have amounted to nearly $650,000 this year alone.
“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,” Krieger’s termination notice said. “Therefore, it is the policy of NIH not to prioritize such research programs.”
{shortcode-0294e72bfa2ef217956b00f147737cacdc556a2d}rieger is a social epidemiologist who studies the “societal patterning of population health” — how the health of different groups of people is impacted by the societal conditions around them, such as their workplaces or neighborhoods. But at the same time, she’s an activist who is passionate about social justice both in and out of the lab.
As an undergraduate at Radcliffe College, Krieger was mentored by Ruth Hubbard, Harvard’s first tenured female biology faculty member. At the time, Hubbard taught a class about the intersection of biology and gender in scientific research, which Krieger took and later became a teaching assistant for. Throughout this time, she was also very involved in social movements — in college, she remembers being inspired by demonstrations against the South African apartheid and Nicaragua’s Somoza dictatorship.
After graduating, she then worked as a lab technician in Seattle, her first direct experience with population health research, and later pursued a public health degree.
“I realized public health, and particularly epidemiology, was the right place for me to pursue and bring together the different interests that I had to help generate evidence that could make a difference in the organizing and litigating to make for better health policies and better social policies,” Krieger recalls.
In 1995, Krieger was recruited to Harvard as an assistant professor to join a budding epidemiology department. Over the past 30 years, Krieger has become a veteran in the field. She built a career around her “ecosocial theory of disease distribution,” which uses biological and social factors to explain patterns of disease. Building on her theory, which she developed in 1994, her research at Harvard has aimed to develop “conceptual frameworks to understand, analyze, and improve the people’s health,” according to her group’s webpage.
She also co-founded and still chairs the American Public Health Association’s Spirit of 1848 caucus, which focuses on the link between social justice and public health. The group discusses ways to reduce social inequities in health. They have hosted presentations on issues like climate change and racial equity — topics often targeted by the Trump administration.
Since 2019, Krieger and her team have been evaluating how to quantify exposure to discrimination and have been analyzing the impacts of discrimination on health inequities in psychological distress and sleep disorders. In January 2023, NIH granted more than $3.3 million to her project.
But last month, Krieger’s work came to a sudden halt when she was stripped of the $400,000 remaining on the grant.
“It was shocking to get a termination out of the blue with no advanced notice of any form whatsoever,” Krieger says.
Krieger was given 30 days to object to the termination. She spent March crafting an appeal. Though she says she has been personally affected — including by stress and a lack of sleep — she hastens to say that the more important harms are the broader disruptions to data and research.
“It’s killing a generation of scientists, and it will have terrible impacts going forward,” Krieger says. “They’re also trying to kill a field that’s focused on health equity, and that has dire implications for people’s health.”
{shortcode-69a9ed06c887cb075e6988b5c6d61980cc21c96c}arcus researches HIV prevention and the implementation of pre-exposure prophylaxis, a medicine that reduces the risk of being infected with HIV. She has worked in the HIV prevention field for over 20 years, motivated by a broader interest in sexual health and education.
“My work is driven by a passion for generating the knowledge that people need to make informed decisions about their lives, including their sexual health,” Marcus says.
Marcus still remembers the exact moment she became interested in pursuing research on HIV. As she trained to be a sex educator after college, she attended a lecture about whether couples already diagnosed with HIV could reinfect each other.
“It was a scientific question driven by the community wanting this information to be able to make informed decisions about their lives, and I wanted to be on the science side of that,” she reflects.
After working in the lecturer’s HIV lab, Marcus pursued graduate degrees in epidemiology. She arrived at Harvard in 2016.
Throughout her research career, Marcus tells me that she is motivated by seeing her research impact communities and shape clinical guidelines. With millions in NIH funding, she was excited to study whether HIV prevention medicine could be taken over the counter.
Last month, though, those hopes were placed in jeopardy. Like in the letter to Krieger, the NIH cited “DEI” and “gender” as the cause of Marcus’s lost funding. Similar NIH letters issued to other researchers have declared that studies on gender “often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to advance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.”
But Marcus disagrees. “This was about ideological targeting of topics disfavored by the current administration,” Marcus says.
As Marcus’s plans were scrapped, she first turned to figuring out how her trainees could still get paid. The next step was to file an appeal. Though she has talked with other investigators who have lost their funding, the process is filled with uncertainties for institutions that have never undergone this process.
“There are very few details provided about the appeal process, and it’s pretty unfamiliar to institutions, because grant terminations are so unprecedented, so we’re all trying to figure it out as we go,” Marcus says.
Now, many are anxiously awaiting the results of their appeal, but there is no time frame for when Marcus and other researchers can expect to hear back.
“We are all trying to share what we’re learning and support each other as we try to figure out a path forward for the whole field,” Marcus says.
{shortcode-dd08abb0bb2b02bf4881baaa9fb305566107f8d4}hough March was the first time that Marcus and Krieger say they directly felt conservative rhetoric affect their work, both are unsurprised. The pushes to defund DEI or gender-related scientific research, they say, have long been present.
During Trump’s first term, climate change research often came under scrutiny. In response, researchers across the country — including at Harvard — protested in support of public science funding.
“I was very engaged with the attacks on science and public health in the first Trump administration, so I assumed there would be a reprise, but I wasn’t prepared for this one,” Krieger says.
In Trump’s second term, the attacks have grown broader — and more relentless. Just this month, after Trump announced a freeze of $2.2 billion of Harvard’s funding, Harvard-affiliated researchers received stop-work orders on their research. On Friday, several news outlets reported on an internal email instructing the NIH not to make grant payments to Harvard while its funds were frozen.
Krieger says that there was a “growing appreciation” for the equity-related public health research before the Trump administration, but that the last few months have “whipped up and magnified a kind of backlash.”
In response, organizations such as the American Public Health Association have worked with researchers to file lawsuits against Trump and his administration. However, the fate of individual scientists like Krieger and Marcus is still uncertain — and they are now scrambling to find alternative sources of money.
“Me as a little scientist, as one person, has to say, ‘Okay, are there foundations that might support the kinds of work that I do?’” Krieger says. “But there’s no way that that kind of non-federal funding can ever supply the amount of funds that NIH was funding.”
