This post was updated Sept. 7 at 8:33 p.m.
Federal funding cuts and tight budgets will lead to fewer opportunities for undergraduates looking to do research in UCLA labs.
Around $584 million in federal research funding – totaling about 800 grants – was suspended from UCLA on July 30 and July 31. While a federal judge ruled that the grants from the National Science Foundation must be reinstated by Aug. 19, the grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy remain suspended.
In an email sent to students in some physical science departments, Britney Robinson – the special advisor on community and belonging for the Division of Physical Sciences – said research opportunities for undergraduate students will be severely limited as a direct result of the loss of federal funding.
“This will drastically limit capacity for research labs to undertake undergraduates in their labs due to cuts in funding,” Robinson said in the email. “This may also cause (and has already caused) some programs and centers to close and may cause some staff to be laid off.”
Patrick Allard, an associate professor in the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, is the principal investigator for an NIH-supported lab studying the influence of negative environmental exposure on long-term health. In the Allard lab, undergraduate students work closely with graduate students to contribute to peer-reviewed publications, including science and systematic review-based publications, he added.
But Allard said the lab is no longer hiring undergraduate researchers – and is struggling to operate as is.
“Current funds may allow us to operate for only a few more months,” Allard said in an emailed statement. “We have already scaled back our work, focusing on fewer, lower-cost experiments that prioritize salaries for graduate students and postdocs so they can meet basic living expenses. At this time, we cannot take on new undergraduate researchers.”
Jennifer Wilson, an assistant professor of bioengineering, was awarded a five-year $1.6 million grant from the NIH in 2023. Now, RJ Nova, a rising third-year bioengineering student currently working in her Lab for the Understanding of Network Effects, was informed by Wilson, the lab’s principal investigator, that the lab’s main source of funding would be cut.
The grant’s suspension was sudden, Nova said.
“Normally, when grants are suspended, they take some time to take effect, like at the end of the month, and there’s advance notice,” Nova said. “But when they notified her that the grant was suspended … it was already gone.”
The LUNE lab only pays undergraduate students during the summer, and although there have been no immediate layoffs, the future is still uncertain, he added.
“Now – in the long term – there’s a really real possibility that my lab could be shut down and other labs could be shut down if there’s no funding to continue our operations,” Nova said.
Nova, a student who plans to eventually pursue a doctoral degree, said he relies on research as an undergraduate to demonstrate his interest to graduate schools – an opportunity that will be much harder to pursue if labs cannot continue to operate or take on undergraduate researchers.
There will also be fewer students with the skills that graduate schools look for, Allard added in the written statement.
Many universities – including the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California – have had to pause, limit or, in some cases, rescind graduate school offers because of federal funding cuts. With fewer graduate school spots available, Nova said he believes the competitive applicants will be those with experience.
Alexander Hoffmann, a professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics, is the PI for a lab studying immune responses by focusing on immune cells, including B cells and macrophages. His lab, which he said usually has around a dozen undergraduate researchers, had its two major NIH research grants suspended, though some collaborative grants remain.
Hoffman said his lab is funded in three different ways: the NIH grants, collaborative grants with other PIs in the medical school and external fellowships that provide graduate and doctoral students with their salaries. These fellowships can also come from the NIH and NSF, meaning some have also been frozen, he added.
While some labs, like Hoffmann’s, have funding outside of the suspended grants, it is generally limited, Hoffmann said.
“For my lab, in the short term, we will be fine,” Hoffmann said. “We have some of the other funding sources that can cover us, but … a budget that’s supposed to be for a year, we might now be depleting in three months.”
For undergraduates who want to take on their own projects, labs will also have less, if any, funding to cover student research projects, Hoffmann said. Labs need to provide supplies – like research reagents for students working in a wet lab – which are difficult to access under a tight budget, Hoffmann added.
As an undergraduate in England, Hoffmann said going to Johns Hopkins University for an internship opened his eyes to what research is and allowed him to discover his path to becoming a researcher. Undergraduate research is important for both undergraduate students’ self-discovery and for the research activities that undergraduates help support, he added.
“It opened my eyes,” Hoffmann said. “If I hadn’t done research and I still had applied to grad school, they would have said, ‘Well, how can you apply? How can you say that you want to do research if you don’t really know what it is?’”
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