Multiple WashU research projects have been affected by policies from the Trump administration restricting funding and access to critical information. To better understand these impacts, Student Life editors Aliza Lubitz and Zach Trabitz spoke with individuals involved in two university programs: the St. Louis Integrated Database of Enslavement (SLIDE) team and the Enhancing Neuroscience Diversity through Undergraduate Research Education (ENDURE) program.

SLIDE Project

SLIDE has spent the past six years compiling records to help people learn about the history of enslaved individuals and enslavers in the St. Louis area. However, due to recent federal orders restricting online archival information, the SLIDE team has been facing issues with their work.

SLIDE is a digital archival project which allows users to search an online database of records that pertain to both enslaved people and enslavers in St. Louis. SLIDE is intended to be used for academic research, classroom lessons and ancestry tracking. The project is also examining WashU’s tenuous relationship with slavery, and is supported by the WashU & Slavery project.

The team — composed of professors, researchers, and students — has compiled various documents, including Freedom Licenses, emancipation records from the St. Louis Circuit Court, and official court sales of enslaved individuals from the U.S. Census pertaining to St. Louis residents.

Senior Joel Brown, a Data Science major who works on the project, stressed both the variety of information that the project pulls from and the importance of the archive.

“The goal of SLIDE is to gather different records from across archives to paint a better picture of what life was like in St. Louis in terms of slavery, in around the 1800s and 1700s,” Brown said. “We use this data to help people connect with their pasts … individuals who have ancestors who they want to look up.”

Kelly Schmidt, interim director of the WashU & Slavery Project, said the project often works with census records. While this is common for archival projects, it has led to issues because of the unpredictable nature of the federal databases that hold these census records. 

One example, Schmidt said, is the National Park Service, which has been impacted by the current administration.

“Specifically on the Gateway Arch site, we were using charts of emancipations, freedom licenses, court-recorded sales of enslaved people, and court orders to rent out enslaved people that took place in Missouri [through the National Park Service sites],” Schmidt said. “A few weeks ago, I went to use one of those and found it wasn’t there anymore, and thought it might just be a coincidence. And then we looked a little further, and found several other data sets they had on slavery are now gone.” 

Schmidt noted that some of the data is now back online, and it is unclear what changes are deliberate and what are coincidences. 

Senior Dhyuti Venkataraman, who also works on the project and is majoring in the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities and Philosophy, said SLIDE differs from some other databases in how it prioritizes the identities of enslaved people. 

“For a lot of these records, the enslaved people are like ticks in a box on a census record,” Venkataraman said. “The goal of [SLIDE] is to turn them into like the main focus in things like the census records.”

Schmidt also said accessibility to the data SLIDE has been using has been fluctuating, with certain websites being taken down and getting put back up repeatedly. Sophomore Irene Herrmann, who works on SLIDE and majors in History, said the fluctuation has been frustrating to work around. 

“The unpredictability is really difficult with this administration because you don’t know if something’s going to disappear off the internet,” Herrmann said. “I spent an hour downloading thousands and thousands of pages from the Library of Congress. It’s … an inconvenience to have to spend time downloading data before you can read it and make something of it.”

Venkataraman said that, especially given how SLIDE highlights the voices of the enslaved individuals, she is concerned that data is being taken down. 

“It’s a little worrying that a lot of the data sets we use to prioritize these people’s identities and to draw out information about them are going to be taken out,” Venkataraman said. 

Schmidt clarified that while availability of data that SLIDE uses has been in flux, the funding itself for SLIDE appears to be stable.

“I’ll say, thankfully, the WashU & Slavery project is funded through the University,” Schmidt said. “I think funding for this project is secure for now, but there’s always that concern that in a state of financial distress, the University might shift its priorities.”

Herrmann said that working on SLIDE has been a gratifying experience, especially because of its tangible impacts.

“I feel like a lot of times when you’re working on history research, it can feel removed, because you’re looking at things from hundreds of years ago, you don’t feel the direct impact as much,” Herrmann said. “But when we come to a meeting and then Kelly [Schmidt] says, ‘oh, these three churches reached out and their members really want to use the database,’ it feels like [our work is] actually having an impact.” 

Schmidt said that the federal impacts on the project are particularly disheartening since so many people use it to trace their own lineages.

“In addition to institutions using [our] site for reparative work, there’s a lot of people who are tracing their ancestry and learning more about their ancestors through it, who normally wouldn’t have time to go visit the archives in person,” Schmidt said.

Venkataraman said working on SLIDE has reinforced how necessary access to information is, and how often it is taken for granted.

“I think that one of the benefits of working for a project [like SLIDE] is you realize how important those small things [like archival access] can be to larger communities,” Venkataraman said. “We’re in a very lucky position at WashU to have access to these archives, whereas a lot of people in the communities that want or need them the most don’t have that. ”

ENDURE Program

WashU ENDURE, a program preparing undergraduates from diverse backgrounds for neuroscience PhDs, is facing an uncertain future due to the Trump administration’s decision to temporarily freeze National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding. The freeze, which delayed the processing of new grant applications, has had ripple effects on federally funded research programs across the country, including those designed to support students from diverse backgrounds.

The NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research and allocates about $40 billion of its $48 billion annual budget to extramural research. In 2024, WashU School of Medicine received the second highest annual research funding from the NIH among all schools nationwide.

In late February, the administration partially lifted restrictions on peer-review committee meetings, allowing some progress on the stalled grant evaluations, but the effects of the freeze have already been far-reaching. Roughly 16,000 research proposals in total have been caught in limbo as they compete for $1.5 billion in NIH funding.

ENDURE offers participants summer research training with the option to continue their research during the school year and/or return for an additional summer. Participants also attend neuroscience seminars and receive ongoing mentorship through the program.

​​WashU is one of 10 universities with ENDURE programs, all of which are primarily funded by the NIH Blueprint ENDURE initiative. 

According to Dr. Erik Herzog, director of WashU’s ENDURE program, the program has produced 87 alumni in the nine years since it launched, 98% of whom have gone on to enter the biomedical workforce.

In an email to Student Life, Herzog wrote that he was significantly concerned about the program’s future funding due to inconsistent messaging regarding its financial support. 

“The NIH removed, restored, removed, and restored the opportunity to renew our grant,” Herzog wrote. “Without clear messaging from DC, the 10 existing two-year [ENDURE] programs struggle to determine whether they can support returning students or admit a next cohort.”

WashU ENDURE recently informed their 320 applicants that admissions decisions are on hold as they await NIH funding confirmation. Herzog said that a private foundation’s support will fund the research of the seven undergraduate students returning for their second-year in the program.

WashU ENDURE also receives some funding from the office of the Provost and the WashU McDonnell Centers for Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience and Systems Neuroscience, according to Herzog. Funding from these sources supports expenses not covered by the NIH, such as hosting an international scholar, program dinners, and t-shirts for trainees.

Halla Elmore, a senior and participant in the WashU ENDURE program, is conducting research in a lab on the role of sleep in neurodegenerative diseases. She said that ENDURE has given her the confidence to see herself succeeding in a scientific career.

“This past year I actually applied for the Graduate Research Fellowship Program through the National Science Foundation and I one hundred percent would not have been equipped to do that had I not taken the grant writing lessons [ENDURE] provided,” Elmore said. 

Elmore said that building a community of people of color in science is incredibly valuable, as it helps students see themselves in spaces that might otherwise feel difficult to navigate.

She also said that she plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Neuroscience and, with the help of ENDURE program coordinators, is currently deciding between schools where she has been accepted.

Noah Kabbaj, a junior and current member of ENDURE, is conducting research in a lab to better understand the mechanisms behind electroconvulsive therapy. Kabbaj said ENDURE sparked his goal to pursue a Ph.D. in neuroscience.

“ENDURE has been really revolutionary in my confidence as a scientist,” Kabbaj said. “I feel so well equipped to do research anywhere, including top schools with the skills it has given me.”  

Kabbaj said it’s unfortunate that WashU ENDURE faces an uncertain future, given its positive impact on students.

“There are so many amazing scientists that I have seen formed through ENDURE, and I don’t know that they would have had the opportunity to engage in science in the same way if it weren’t for [the program],” Kabbaj said. “The uncertainty of ENDURE’s [future] really risks losing a lot of potentially incredible scientists.”