Lost Science is an ongoing series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding after cuts by the Trump administration. The conversations have been edited for clarity and length. Here’s why we’re doing this.
Marina Vance: I’ve been working on air quality since I was an undergraduate student in Brazil — for more than 20 years. I was at Virginia Tech for eight years for my Ph.D and as a postdoctoral researcher, and then I came to the University of Colorado in 2016.
Growing up in Brazil, I’m from an island in a very humid place. Wildfires are not big where I’m from at all. And then living in Virginia, I wasn’t exposed to them either.
I remember my first summer here. From the window of the townhouse I rented, I could see a plume of smoke from a fire burning in the Flatiron Mountains. When I stepped out of my townhouse, I could see that plume far away, and I could smell the smoke. And I thought, “This is really important.”
I got a grant for $549,000 to study wildfires. I was inspired by the movie “Twister” — scientists collecting samples out into the real world. The idea was to hunt the wildfire wherever it might be.
We wanted to be in a place where folks would be sheltering in their homes. If there’s a wildfire, you’re going into your home and you’re going close all the doors and the windows. The walls, the windows, and the doors in houses act like a filter. But there’s very little data saying what happens to the distribution of particle sizes as they penetrate a home.
The size of a particle dictates where it ends up. The particles that are really, really small stick to some surface, so they’re gone from the air. The particles that are really big are more likely to settle through gravity. And then you have these particles that are in-between, hundreds of nanometers in size, that stay suspended in air longer. They’re more likely to be inhaled.
So we were thinking about finding these homes, measuring particulate matter indoors and outdoors. We were going to develop interventions that were cheap and easy for people to use — portable air cleaners, that sort of thing.
The grant was to be spent in three years. The plan was to do the research until August 2026. I recruited this fantastic new student to be the new Ph.D. student for this project. Her first real deployment, which turned out to be the only one, was the Elk Fire in Wyoming in September 2024. We rented a house, and she drove about six hours to get there. She was able to sample indoor and outdoors. If we deploy an air cleaner in this room, how well will it do with the wildfire smoke? She was looking into all of that, and it was looking very promising.
On April 24, I was checking emails over breakfast, and there was an email from the EPA. It said, “Attached is your termination of award from the U.S. E.P.A.” It was just one .pdf file. It said, “The objectives of the award are no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.” I had to return roughly $360,000.
I can’t imagine something more related to the E.P.A.’s mission than understanding wildfires and protecting people in their homes. That to me is frustrating and confusing. This is the kind of research that can have direct and immediate impact — not 10 or 20 years in the future, but this year, when the next wildfire hits.
Marina Vance is an environmental engineer at the University of Colorado.
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