Rachael Sirianni first learned her lab might be in trouble just a few weeks into the new year. A professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, in Worcester, Sirianni focuses primarily on an aggressive form of pediatric brain cancer known as medulloblastoma. Researchers have made great strides in treating these tumors, but they are still often fatal, and even successful treatments can come with devastating side effects. Sirianni had spent the last several years working on a potentially transformative approach to treating the most malignant type of medulloblastoma and was making real progress.
Pediatric brain cancer research is expensive. UMass Chan pays for some of Sirianni’s work, but most of her funding comes from the federal government. Entering 2025, she had three active grants at the National Institutes of Health that were all set to expire either this year or in 2026. She was prepared. In 2024, she submitted two new applications to continue her research. Both proposals had cleared the first hurdle at the N.I.H., earning strong scores from a panel of independent experts in the field. They were scheduled for another review at the agency in late January.
But then, in the days after Trump’s inauguration, Sirianni started hearing rumors that he was planning to disrupt the N.I.H.’s grant-making process. As it turned out, he did much more than that. In late January, his administration ordered the N.I.H. to cancel meetings to consider pending grant applications.
Sirianni received her first federal research grant more than a decade earlier and had never even had an application-review meeting postponed. She scrambled to learn anything she could about the status of her proposals. This turned out to be difficult, because the new administration had ordered the N.I.H. to temporarily cease all external communications. Scientists were unsure whether they could even speak with program officers at the agency.
Sirianni, who is now 40, started college when she was 13. For more than two decades, she had spent as many as 12 hours a day in a lab, hunched over microscopes, computer monitors and lab mice. Now she was spending much of her time on the phone, talking and texting with equally anxious peers around the country. “Many of us had been in uncertain situations in the past — that’s the nature of the game for academic scientists,” she says. “But this was unlike anything we’d ever felt before.”
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