From Chemical & Engineering News: On a warm sunny April afternoon, the mood at Columbia University’s campus in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood seemed high-spirited. Students enjoyed a college fair, jumping on trampolines set up on the lush center lawns. A student band performed amid a crowd eating cotton candy and basking in the spring sunshine. But the scene’s breezy mood was an illusion, both for many of the students participating in the festivities and for the chemistry researchers sequestered in the laboratories of nearby campus buildings. Inside those labs, tension and confusion were palpable for scientists as they recounted the days following massive cuts in US federal funding to the university.
...Unlike Harvard University, which is now fighting back in the courts, Columbia is engaging in negotiations with the task force, which has demanded several changes from the university before it would restore the funds. Negotiations are ongoing, and researchers say they have little clarity about their status. Some researchers say they have had grants cut. Others are on edge, fearing that funding could be canceled. All say the environment they are working in is filled with trepidation and anguish.
On March 7, Neel Shah, assistant professor in Columbia’s Department of Chemistry, attended the Stand Up for Science rally in Washington Square Park, roughly 120 blocks from his home turf, alongside some 1,500 other scientists. They were protesting federal research funding cuts from multiple agencies, layoffs at those agencies, and proposed budget cuts, all of which occurred less than 2 months into Trump’s presidency. While Shah was there, his phone pinged with the news that Columbia had lost $400 million in federal funding. Shah’s eyes immediately searched for his colleagues in the crowd. “The likelihood that anyone in that crowd just lost a grant was so high. There was just fear and terror, thinking, What must have been cut?” he says...
About 40 blocks north of Columbia’s main campus is the university’s Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, located in the Washington Heights neighborhood. It’s the research home of Barry Honig, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics who has spent over 4 decades as a researcher at Columbia studying protein interactions. Honig was one of the collaborators on a project valued at over $1 million that lost its NIH grant. The group was investigating how proteins implicated in cancers interact with each other and the most effective ways to target them with drugs. “One day, the grant just didn't exist anymore—it is nothing like we have seen before,” he says. Columbia is currently in the process of negotiating the terms to restore the funding, he adds...
Joachim Frank still has vivid memories of Oct. 4, 2017, when he received a call from Stockholm at 5:18 am informing him that he and two others had won that year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work in developing cryo-electron microscopy. The technique ushered in a new era of observing biomolecules... The recent stream of funding cuts hasn’t affected his lab so far, but they have left him feeling grim about the state of scientific research in the US. “I'm an immigrant from Germany, and this is not what I bargained for. This is not the country that I chose. So I'm bereft,” he says...
Minutes from Columbia’s historic Hamilton Hall, which was occupied last year by pro-Palestinian protestors, is the Mudd Building, home of the university’s chemical engineering department. Around 24 faculty members and over 100 researchers, including PhD students and postdoctoral scholars, investigate and innovate designs and technologies often used in chemical manufacturing. Among them is Sanat Kumar, a professor who studies nanoparticle chemistry. Kumar moved to the US from India in 1981 to pursue a PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He held a postdoctoral position at IBM before joining Columbia in 2006...
Kumar warns that the implications of the budget cuts and the government’s new hostility toward international students could be far-reaching and irreversible. “People will stop coming, and our country will be at a competitive disadvantage,” he says. “It is a matter of time before other countries overtake.”
Full story at https://cen.acs.org/policy/research-funding/Columbia-University-chemical-scientists-dismayed/103/web/2025/06.
No comments:
Post a Comment