This post was updated Sept. 7 at 8:39 p.m.
The suspension of about 800 of UCLA’s research grants halted projects across campus – including some in its highly-ranked applied mathematics program.
Andrea Bertozzi, a distinguished professor of mathematics and mechanical and aerospace engineering, received five stop work orders Aug. 1. The orders also paused compensation for graduate students working on affected projects, she said.
“I’ve been concerned for a number of months now. I just wasn’t sure when or if we would see this happen,” Bertozzi said. “It’s extremely disappointing.”
Bertozzi’s impacted grants support research in several fields – including laser technology, active learning for threat detection and quantum sensing for climate monitoring, according to their National Science Foundation award abstracts.
UCLA’s suspended research grants from the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the NSF total $584 million. The agencies cited “antisemitism and bias,” affirmative action practices and allowing “men to participate in women’s sports” as reasons for the freeze.
[Related: FEDERAL FUNDING CUTS TO UCLA]
About 300 NSF grants were restored by a federal judge Aug. 12, but NIH and DOE grants remain paused. The same judge scheduled a Sept. 18 hearing to decide if a preliminary injunction should be granted for NIH grants, which would temporarily restore the funds while the merits of the case are decided.
[Related: District court judge to hear arguments on restoring suspended NIH grants to UCLA]
One of Bertozzi’s affected projects involved a collaboration with researchers in electrical engineering on building digital twins – adaptable virtual models – for lasers, she said.
Modern technology and scientific tools – microchip production, fiberoptics, satellite communication and microscopy – are all enabled by lasers, said Sergio Carbajo, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.
Carbajo, whose research group is also working on the digital twins project, added that current laser design and optimization is largely driven by human intuition.
“When you have a school of thought always driving design in the same way, you might start getting into an echo chamber and not see the best set of possibilities that laser technology could offer if you did not think about it in traditional ways,” he said.
Carbajo and Bertozzi’s collaboration is vital for collapsing complicated equations – which are challenging for normal computers to process – into more manageable problems, enabling discovery, he added.
The NSF weighs the prospective broader impacts of scientific work when evaluating grant and fellowship applications, said Harris Hardiman-Mostow, a mathematics graduate student. Hardiman-Mostow, who is advised by Bertozzi on his work in graph-based machine learning, added that he believes these suspensions impede interdisciplinary collaboration, ultimately limiting scientific progress.
Exploratory research of this nature is often conducted by graduate and postdoctoral students, Bertozzi said, adding that funding uncertainties place strain on nascent scientific careers.
“My department only guarantees a certain number of years of funding, and that’s assuming we have grants running and TA options,” she said. “I don’t know how all of this is going to affect the graduate student contracts or whether we can admit more students in the coming year.”
This pressure could dissuade young scientists from remaining in academia, leading to fewer professors and university researchers staying in the field, Hardiman-Mostow said. He added that federal spending on the NSF is a small fraction of the government’s budget compared to other areas such as the military.
“It’s not even a drop in the bucket – it’s a molecule of water in the bucket for them to fund one PhD student,” Hardiman-Mostow said.
The federal budget for the 2025 fiscal year – which ends Sept. 30 – included $850 billion in discretionary budget authority allocated to the Department of Defense compared to $10.2 billion for the NSF, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget’s website. The 2026 budget request submitted by the current administration recommends the removal of a cumulative $4.7 billion from the NSF, a reduction of 46%.
Grant funding is necessary to maintain the entire research ecosystem, including staff and administration costs, Carbajo said, adding that the United States has long been a supportive environment for scientific exploration.
“Even if we were out of this within the next days, you just don’t start the machine and go at the same speed again,” he said. “The amount of loss and damage that this has caused is at the expense of taxpayers, at the expense of people that will not graduate, people that would not be able to enter the workforce.”
Carbajo said scientific advancement is tied to social progress, adding that U.S. universities have historically been centers of intellectual revolution through student-led efforts. Without grant support, Carbajo added, these universities’ research progress will ultimately slow, harming all Americans.
“As somebody who thinks of themself as a public servant, I have to insist that it’s not only up to scientists – it’s up to all of us to stand up and do the right thing,” he said.
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