Anil Oza , 2025-05-19 21:42:00
Molecular biologist Chiara Masnovo spent weeks filling out an application for a research fellowship earlier this year — taking it over the finish line as she was 38 weeks pregnant and starting a new job.
The chance of getting this fellowship was well worth the toil. The Hanna Gray fellowship, created by the Howard Hughes Medical institute, supports postdoctoral researchers from diverse backgrounds in their transition to heading their own labs. During normal times, the opportunity was transformative, but in an era of cuts to research funding and uncertainty at universities, some saw it as a lifeline to an academic career.
Friday morning, that lifeline was pulled out of reach from Masnovo and other hopeful postdoctoral researchers: HHMI, the largest private funder of biomedical research, announced it would no longer be considering applications for the upcoming cycle. It’s the latest retrenchment by HHMI, which had become a leader in efforts to make the science workforce more diverse, amid the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
While hopeful applicants were understanding of the difficult atmosphere, several said the decision was a demoralizing blow during an already-precarious time in their careers.
“Defeated, I think is a word that I would use,” Masnovo said. As an international researcher currently on a visa, she cannot apply for many other funding opportunities, like those from federal agencies. “It was already a restricted pool of fellowships that I could apply for, and then I started being worried that there will be problems with those as well. Which turns out to be the case.”
A spokesperson for HHMI said that the decision will not impact current fellows, nor will it affect its other programs, like the Freeman Hrabowski or Gilliam fellows.
“This is an uncertain moment for science. In such a moment, HHMI is focused for the upcoming year on how best to support the scientists in our community. As a result, we have made the difficult decision to pause competitions for now in order to devote our attention and resources to current HHMI scientists, postdocs, graduate students, undergraduates, and educators,” Alyssa Tomlinson, the spokesperson, said.
The Hanna Gray fellowship is a program meant to support postdoctoral researchers in their transition to lab heads. Previously, the program said it “seeks to increase diversity in the professoriate.” But, that language was scrubbed from HHMI’s website in February, when it axed a $60 million program to support inclusivity in science education and began wiping most mentions of diversity, equity and inclusion from its other programs. Now, the landing page for the fellowship also includes a disclaimer reading “We are not currently accepting applications.”
The changes at HHMI have been an example of the head-spinning adjustments institutions are making in the wake of the Trump administration’s attack on programs it deems focused on “DEI.” In 2021, the philanthropy announced it was committing $2 billion over ten years to improve diversity in science. Some applicants to the Gray fellowship have found it all difficult to navigate — Masnovo noted that the institute asked applicants how they planned to foster an inclusive lab. Yet HHMI has been seemingly walking back support from diversity-related programs by its recent website changes.
“On one hand, I have my own opinions about inclusivity and diversity, in the sense that I’m very much in favor of them, but then, on the other hand, I want to get the funding. So if they don’t want me to write too much about it, maybe I won’t. There was a duality there,” she said.
The pause in the Hanna Gray fellowship came as a surprise to applicants, in part, because HHMI stated in February it did not anticipate changes to other programs.
“I was actually very shocked, because earlier in the year, HHMI tried to solidify everybody’s worries that they would be very grounded to staying true to their values, to their pillars and so forth of these fellowships and the aims of these fellowships. But after today’s decision and earlier decisions to cancel other programs, I am starting to question if that statement is true at all,” said Jesse Garcia Castillo, an immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco.
Garcia Castillo knows the value of HHMI support, having been part of its Gilliam fellowship, which supports Ph.D. students by providing them and their Ph.D. advisors with funding as well as access to a supportive network of fellows and alumni.
The UCSF researcher said that with the end of the Hanna Gray fellowship, he finds it “very disheartening to think that a community like that is maybe not even going to exist,” he said.
Postdocs are often on short-term contracts, which gives them less job security, and most funding opportunities are limited to a certain number of years after a person completes their Ph.D. These concerns have ratcheted up as research grants are being terminated and some universities limit hiring.
“The biggest thing that is missing right now is really stability, you know, a little bit more certainty with respect to what a future may look like,” said Ryan Boileau, a bioengineer at Duke University. He said he hopes to stay in academia. “But, it’s kind of hard to be hard-headed about chasing academia, [when] universities are not in a stable position.”
That stability is even harder to come by for many of the applicants to the Hanna Gray fellowship who come from marginalized backgrounds or work in areas of research that may struggle to gain funding. Boileau wrote about being a first generation college student from a family with limited financial means in his application, which he shared with STAT:
“To support myself through five years of college, I worked at a motel and shoveled sheep pens, allowing me to complete a third major in biochemistry and my honors thesis. After graduating, I was unhoused for a summer to afford my move to Berkeley for a technician job. In graduate school at UCSF, I spent extra effort to design independent projects, built expertise, and mastered new skill sets to realize my greater potential. To pay off predatory college loans, I even lived in a van for several years at UCSF. I still owe money.”
Gabrielle Scher, a viral immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, was hopeful about the HHMI opportunity because she works with mRNA and vaccines — an area that the Trump administration has attacked recently.
“That’s one of the reasons I was really excited about the HHMI opportunity, because it’s this private foundation. So, [I was] thinking like, ‘Oh, this would be safe from any cuts that might be that we might see from government funding,’ but apparently not, right?” she said.
“These candidates should rightly be furious to have HHMI do this, especially at a time where the federal government is doing the same thing. It’s a dreadful time to be an early career researcher, and to run a contest that you end up not funding as a private organization at this time is… both extremely wasteful of these people’s time, but just devastating in terms of morale,” said Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist who has studied how competing for grant funding can lead to inefficiencies in research.
At a time when researchers are “starved” for funding, he said, the benefits of investing more into the trainee pipeline would be even higher than normal. He hopes more philanthropy organizations will make a move like the Gates Foundation, which has chosen to accelerate its spending.
In many ways, the atmosphere postdocs are navigating is unprecedented. But Hanna Gray, a historian who was previously the president of the University of Chicago and a trustee at HHMI, gave what now seems like a prescient talk more than three decades ago. She worried, according to an editorial discussing the talk she gave at an AAAS annual meeting, that a “contraction of external resources and significant reduction in the definition of overhead reimbursement for scientific research will simply mean less research conducted in a university setting and a more selective approach to academic research.”
Hopeful Gray fellowship applicants see another outcome: that research may shift overseas. Masnovo, who is originally from Italy and got her undergraduate degree in Austria, said she moved to the United States because of better funding opportunities.
Now, she wonders, “Why am I even here?”
