A Lost Generation of Researchers

Amiyah Buan was sure she’d be starting her Ph.D. this fall after applying to eight graduate programs in biochemistry.

It was all part of a carefully considered plan, one she’d been working on since middle school. After graduating from Western Connecticut State University in 2024 with her bachelor’s degree in biochemistry, Buan took a gap year, working three jobs to earn extra money while researching her Ph.D. options. She was hoping to build a career in academe, and maybe one day branch into industry.

The Ph.D. program acceptances arrived in early 2025, first to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Southern California. On January 15, Buan heard from the chemistry department at Georgetown University, her reach school: She was being recommended for admission to the graduate school.

But in mid-April, administrators at Michigan and Southern California informed Buan that they’d have to rescind their admissions offers. Still, she thought, she had Georgetown, the institution she’d set her heart on attending. She attended an accepted students’ weekend and began touring apartments in the Washington, D.C., area with her partner.

Then on May 12, the word came: Her recommendation to the graduate school’s admissions committee had not been approved because of federal funding changes.

With that, Buan became one of thousands of early-career scholars who have become collateral damage amid policy changes at the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and other government agencies. As these agencies have sought to put caps on indirect funding, several doctoral programs paused or reduced admissions in February and March. Another wave of uncertainty hit weeks later, as the NIH and NSF terminated hundreds of existing grants, throwing many current doctoral and postdoctoral scholars’ funding into question. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year contains deep cuts to the NIH, NSF, and other federal agencies that support scientific research.

All told, the White House’s actions, many of which are tied up in court, could result in a lost generation of budding academics. Students are being forced to delay their graduate studies, continue them abroad, or forgo them entirely. The collective impact of those individual decisions is nearly impossible to measure, says Joanne Padrón Carney, chief governmental-relations officer for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“You don’t know who is the Nobel laureate we’re losing today, or the next inspired teacher for high-school students,” she says. “It’s what’s left on the cutting-room floor that we may not know we’ve lost.”

Meanwhile, the uncertainty and anxiety many early-career scientists now face mark an especially jarring contrast to the U.S. government’s recent support of STEM career paths under the Obama and Biden administrations, says Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences. “We’ve done a big disservice to these young people by jerking them around so quickly. Things were, ‘STEM, STEM, STEM, go get a STEM degree and be part of the future,’” McNutt says, “and then suddenly we’re pulling the rug out from under them.”

Facing her own sudden change in fortune, Buan tried to keep her plans on track. She asked if she could defer her admission for a year. No, she was told: Because of the depth of the funding uncertainties — which by then had come to include mass grant terminations at the NIH and NSF — Georgetown could only recommend she reapply for the fall of 2026, and promised to waive her application fee.

In a month’s time, Buan had gone from three doctoral-program acceptances to none. It was a turn of events she described as “bone-shattering.”

Buan wasn’t alone in having her plans derailed. Nicole, who asked to be referred to by her middle name to avoid jeopardizing her future admissions prospects, applied to seven doctoral programs to study racial disparities in a specific type of breast cancer. For now, she’s planning to pursue a master’s program in biotechnology at the University of South Florida instead.

It wasn’t what she’d hoped for when the year began. Four doctoral programs offered her interviews in February and March. Nicole thought they went well, even though she heard “whispers” at the time that Trump might cut research funding. But the principal investigators affirmed their commitment to protecting prospective students and their research. One faculty member, she says, even made her a verbal offer on the spot to join their lab.

That’s why she was “caught off guard” when rejections began arriving in her inbox. None cited the Trump administration’s actions, noting only that there were “competitive” application pools. But Nicole says it was easy to read between the lines, particularly because several words that were key to her proposed area of study — such as “racial” and “women” — appeared on lists of words being flagged by federal agencies. She understands that legal considerations may have made the doctoral programs circumspect in their communications. Still, Nicole says, a more direct response would “make me not blame myself” for the decisions.

“L.,” who asked to be referred to by an initial so as not to endanger her career prospects, has had better luck, but her good fortune still feels tenuous.

Things started out well: She was accepted to a doctoral program at an R1 public university on the East Coast and told by her would-be research adviser that she’d have a fully funded spot on an HIV/AIDS research project. For L., who has a master’s degree in global health, it was a perfect fit. But when the adviser received a stop-work order on the project in April, L.’s funding disappeared.

Still, L. wasn’t ready to give up. She researched external scholarships and fellowships, only to find that most required applicants to be in the dissertation-writing phase. Meanwhile, L. waited to hear if the institution could find funding for her on another project — which she was told would take until early June. Even L.’s full-time job working at a research organization, which she’s had for two years, felt uncertain. As a federal contractor, her company had to lay off or reduce the hours of hundreds of employees when the Trump administration slashed its contracts, and L. was no longer sure she’d have a job from week to week.

Then, in June, L. got good news: She was offered a fully funded role on another HIV/AIDS project, this one a maternal-health study examining the transmission of HIV to infants during breastfeeding. She’s now making plans to move and start her Ph.D. this fall, but has decided not to share her next steps publicly until August, for fear her grant funding will be canceled a second time — an outcome she worries could happen “any day now.”

Stories like Buan’s, Nicole’s, and L.’s have played out across science in recent months. The NSF, for instance, awarded only 1,000 of its Graduate Research Fellowships this year, half of its usual total and the lowest number of awards in 15 years, according to Nature; the NIH canceled a slate of early-career programs. In a spring survey conducted by the American Institute of Physics, 37 percent of department chairs whose programs offer graduate degrees in physics and astronomy said they expected to enroll fewer graduate students in the fall of 2025 than they did last fall, for a projected total decline of about 600 first-year graduate students. (The AIP survey, which was fielded in April, received 115 responses from department chairs.)

The incoming doctoral cohort in Boston College’s physics department will be about half its usual size, says Kenneth S. Burch, the department chair. Normally, Burch aims to welcome eight to 10 students each fall; this year, he’s expecting five, including an international student whose status is uncertain due to student-visa restrictions.

Foreign nationals comprise about half of the doctoral students in Burch’s department, so when Trump was re-elected, he and his colleagues began worrying about the possible effects on their recruitment. During the first Trump administration, Boston College saw a downturn in international-student applications and yield, Burch says. But at the time, Trump’s opposition to foreign nationals was largely rhetorical. “I don’t think any of us were quite ready for what was coming,” Burch says, referring to the student-visa crackdowns that started a few months into Trump’s second term.

While the department had sent out its first-round offers before Trump was inaugurated, Burch says, the college’s graduate school stopped a second round of offers from going out in late February and early March. Grant terminations by the NIH were upending plans, budgets, and lives. The college, Burch says, was understandably “concerned about being able to support the students that are already here.”

Burch worries that the admissions picture for next fall may be murkier. Students who didn’t get into graduate school this year “will have spent a year doing something else — having worked in industry, having taught, having done whatever, such that by that point, they may be completely discouraged from ever going to graduate school,” he says.

The pipeline for developing early-career researchers may be interrupted in other ways. The NSF has cut some funding to its Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, in which universities bring on summer cohorts of eight to 10 students, many from underrepresented backgrounds. REU programs “are really important steppingstones for undergraduates to see what real research is like, see what it’s like at another university, eventually get into graduate school,” Burch says.

While Boston College doesn’t offer an REU program, Burch would typically look to take on a few extra undergraduates in his own lab — especially since undergraduate research is often a potent recruitment tool for graduate programs. Instead, he’ll host fewer undergraduates than usual, five instead of eight. “This year,” he says, “not knowing what’s coming, we’re all penny-pinching.”

Amid all the uncertainty, some Americans are choosing to study elsewhere. European Union leaders have capitalized on the forecasted brain drain, announcing a “Choose Europe for Science” initiative that will offer 500 million euros in grant funding to Americans who relocate.

For Aaron, who graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in May with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, the decision to study abroad was borne of both professional and personal concerns. He worries not only about his ability to do environmental research under Trump — who issued an executive order aimed at dismantling many of the nation’s climate-change mitigation efforts — but also about his personal safety as a transgender man. (For both of those reasons, The Chronicle agreed not to use Aaron’s last name.) He decided to cast a wide net, applying to five American universities and five in Canada.

Some of Aaron’s undergraduate advisers were skeptical. “There is, in research and academia,” he says, “an idea that the U.S. is the best place to be, and that no matter what, they’ll produce the best research.” Some of his professors warned that a Canadian doctoral degree might not be perceived as being as prestigious as an American one, and that it could make Aaron less competitive in a tight job market.

Aaron was accepted to one American institution — the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry — and the Universities of Alberta and British Columbia, in Canada. But his would-be adviser at SUNY is primarily funded by federal agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, and NASA, all of which have seen significant cuts under Trump. That context cast a pall on his offer from SUNY, Aaron says: “I kind of automatically knew that I wasn’t going to accept it.”

That left the two Canadian institutions. Alberta, he learned, is one of Canada’s most conservative provinces and has passed legislation aimed at trans youth. When Aaron visited Vancouver in March, he found the university and city welcoming, and was excited by the atmospheric environmental-chemistry work being conducted in his prospective home department. The decision was a “no-brainer,” he says.

Despite his enthusiasm for UBC, “I feel like a lot of my choices were taken away,” he says. “Although I ultimately am happy, I think I’m a little bit resentful towards not having the choice that I might have had in a different circumstance.”

One other mark in Canada’s favor: Aaron wants to work in government science, which feels more feasible there than in the United States. When he graduates, he says, “I have no idea if the EPA will even still exist anymore.”

The crunch of funding uncertainty is affecting those who have already completed their doctoral work, too. Marianna Zhang was midway through an NSF-funded postdoctoral fellowship at New York University when she got an email in late April informing her that her funding had been canceled, effective immediately.

It was a startling turn of events: Not a year earlier, the NSF had awarded the same research a prestigious fellowship, one of only 21 from its Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences in the 2024 fiscal year. Zhang, a cognitive scientist who studies how stereotypes form in children, says that the NSF official in charge of disbursing her funding decided in February to release the rest of Zhang’s 2024 funding in advance, freeing her from immediate concerns about paying rent and giving her “a bit of a runway” to determine her next steps.

In the meantime, Zhang’s adviser, Marjorie Rhodes, a professor of psychology at NYU, secured funds through a colleague to keep Zhang at NYU for another year. Rhodes’s own grant, which examines how language shapes the development of social stereotypes, was canceled on the same day as Zhang’s. That left Rhodes responsible for finding funding for five current and future members of her lab besides Zhang: two other postdocs, a post-baccalaureate lab associate, an incoming doctoral student, and an incoming postdoc. Rhodes managed to make short-term arrangements for all of them, except for the incoming postdoc, Benny DeMayo, whose offer she was forced to rescind.

DeMayo, who recently defended his Ph.D. in psychology at Princeton, had signed an offer letter in October to join Rhodes’s lab at NYU. He started worrying about his future as soon as Trump was re-elected, and considered looking for other work in January but wasn’t sure if he should do so because he’d already committed to NYU. The day after he visited Rhodes’s lab in late April to meet his future colleagues, her grant — and his funding — was terminated. (DeMayo doesn’t blame Rhodes; it was, he says, “a really unfortunate constellation of things.”)

He has since received an offer for a postdoctoral fellowship at Rutgers University that is supported by a faculty member’s start-up funds and therefore not contingent on federal funding.

Meanwhile, Amiyah Buan, the student whose doctoral-program dreams were thwarted, is still trying to figure out her next steps. By the time she learned that her recommendation at Georgetown wasn’t going through, she’d already submitted notice that she was leaving her jobs and rented an apartment in D.C.; her partner, who has a degree in chemistry, had found work as a lab technician in the area.

Buan was hoping to find similar work but hasn’t had any luck; funding and hiring freezes, she says, means there aren’t any lab-technician jobs available. She’s stayed in touch with faculty members in Georgetown’s chemistry department, where she hopes to work as a teaching assistant and eventually begin her Ph.D.

“This is still what I want to do. This is how I want to be able to contribute to society,” Buan says. “A part of me still has that hope for science.”