Neurosciencist Marla Feller, a professor at UC Berkeley, had never organized a protest before. But because the Trump administration’s cuts to federal scientific funding pose an existential risk to her life’s work, she and a group of fellow scientists spent the past few weeks planning a rally that will take place Friday at Civic Center.
It is one of several simultaneous scientist-led protests that are set to sweep major U.S. cities in response to funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.
Since the changes began trickling in early February, grant funding to academic science has been largely frozen, research has been paused, scientists have been laid off, and universities have instituted hiring freezes and, in some cases, rescinded offers to Ph.D. candidates.
The grassroots organization behind the protests, Stand Up for Science, has organized 32 official rallies across the United States, with the goal of ending censorship and political interference, securing and expanding funding, and defending diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.
“We’re just all on pins and needles,” Feller said. “I don’t know how much damage is going to be done in this time.”
A few weeks ago, Feller stumbled upon a social media post about a rally in Sacramento and volunteered to arrange buses so scientists from San Francisco could participate. Feller’s initiative connected her with other concerned scientists, who realized they should organize a Stand Up for Science rally in San Francisco.
As Feller sees it, the funding cuts and overall politicization of science under the Trump administration have been “incredibly disruptive.” While she hasn’t had to lay off any of her researchers, the future for all government-funded research labs is uncertain. “Are we about to shrink? Are we about to give up our leadership in this arena?” she asked.
The dread and uncertainty are being felt at all levels, from principal investigators like Feller who lead labs, to senior postdoctoral scientists about to be on the job market, to students just starting out.
Kenneth Huang, a UCSF postdoctoral scholar who plans to attend Friday’s rally, said there is a hiring freeze in the lab where he researches antiviral treatments, with a focus on HIV. Every day, he said, he deals with “having no real sense of confidence” that his work is going to be funded “in a month or a week even.”
Aanica Gonzales, one of Feller’s mentees who started as a research associate at UC Berkeley almost two months ago, worries that these cuts might force her to leave the Bay, or even the country, to pursue her dream. “Am I going to do research here in the Bay area or in the United States at large, or am I going to go somewhere else?”
Feller has encouraged her students to consider opportunities abroad because of the funding cuts, but she is concerned about the loss of talent from the Bay Area. “We’re completely freaked out,” she said. “It’s sometimes hard to find the capacity to be like, ‘Just keep going.’”
In the last academic year, the NIH allotted $2.6 billion in funding to the University of California. Feller explained that while the “direct” costs cover researcher salaries and lab equipment, the “indirect” costs are integral to keeping administrative employees and other research support staff afloat.
“If we lose all of our funding, our academic support staff — who are proportionately women and people of color — lose their jobs,” said Nicole Holliday, a UC Berkeley linguistics professor who will speak at the rally. “So do our janitors.”
Holliday, whose sociolinguistics research touches on speech AI systems, is in the process of applying for research grants for projects that make use of terms from the Trump administration’s list of “banned” words, such as “bias” and “diversity.”
“We cannot say ‘algorithmic bias.’ We cannot say ‘dialect diversity,’ because they’re going to throw it out if it’s in the title,” she said. Feeling scared, Holliday asked her collaborators to rename their grant proposal.
“At the moment, I have grants that are privately funded, but this is something that gets a little bit lost in the shuffle,” she added. “A lot of the private foundations are also supported by federal funding.”
Holliday hopes the rally will show the next generation of scientists that “we’re fighting for them.”
The most disheartening aspect of the funding cuts, Holliday said, is the impact it’s having on her students, many of whom are considering leaving the country to pursue careers in science. “They see no future freedom here in research,” she said.
Stand Up for Science organizers in San Francisco — most of whom don’t describe themselves as political activists — are expecting a large turnout Friday. Researchers from UC Berkeley, UCSF, and Stanford are expected en masse, and some departments have cancelled Friday meetings to make attendance possible. Feller hopes the rally shows students and aspiring scientists that they have the support of their mentors, local community, and elected officials.
“I’m hoping [this is just] a moment of chaos and uncertainty,” she said, “and that we are able to right the ship.”