Over the past year, WashU has faced the possibility of significant cuts in National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding. Anticipation of these cuts has been cited as a significant factor in major University decisions like the pause in construction of the new Arts & Sciences building and, more recently, a series of staff layoffs. WashU School of Medicine, which currently receives the second-most amount of funding from the NIH of all medical schools nationwide, has also faced a series of threats to its funding. 

These cuts have created a great deal of anxiety within the research community at WashU,  according to Ram Dixit, Chair of Biology, and Jeff Zacks, Chair of Psychological & Brain Sciences. However, the cuts have not been as sweeping as initially predicted.

“If we look at the total dollar amount, it’s not a catastrophic hit,” Dixit said. “But if you look at the timing and the dollar amounts of individual grants, they range from total cuts to massive budget cuts and things being slowed.”

Chair of Biology Ram Dixit. (Courtesy of Dixit)

While the total value of the grants has remained relatively steady, the delays and uncertainty surrounding them have the potential to greatly hinder “the development of the next generation of the scientific workforce and scientific leaders,” Dixit said.

Biomedical research is a cornerstone of the medical school’s curriculum — approximately 95% of students engage in some form of biomedical research. However, Dixit said labs have already begun cutting back on research positions.

“We have faculty who normally would have accepted a certain number of graduate students pulling back on the number of students that they are comfortable accepting because they want to make sure that they can continue to support current graduate students, postdocs, and other staff members,” he said.

These cuts not only put the futures of postdoc and graduate students in question, but also have the potential to affect undergraduates’ ability to engage in research on the medical campus.

“The number of undergraduates who can have meaningful experiences in the lab is totally tied to the number of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and research staff [we have],” Dixit said.” Our faculty is great and they devote a lot of time to supervising their undergraduate students in the lab, but they’ve got [a] finite number of hours.”

This is particularly threatening news for STEM students, for whom research is often a key extracurricular for medical and graduate school applications. According to the Department of Biology’s website, more than 75% of biology majors complete research before they graduate. 

The recent government shutdown has further complicated the situation, according to Zacks. Research grants like those issued by the NIH must pass through a review panel made up of scientific experts. Because of the shutdown, these panels have not met since Oct. 1, meaning new grants could not be approved and existing grants have not been refunded. As a result, researchers’ salaries have been slashed dramatically.

Chair of Psychological & Brain Sciences Jeff Zacks. (Courtesy of the College of Arts & Sciences)

If research staff cannot make a living from their work, they may be forced to seek other job opportunities.

“Those people are gonna have to go get other jobs,” Zacks said. “They’re gonna lose contact with their human participants in their studies. So it potentially sets things back by much more [than just funding].” 

Zacks added that research staff are often handpicked for research projects and assembled over long periods of time, so disruptions to that process not only affect the course of the research, but also the careers of the researchers. These researchers may then have to leave research or academia for more stable opportunities.

“The tragedy for the nation is that [if] we lose those people, [those young researchers,] they ain’t coming back,” Zacks said.

In addition to their warnings about the impacts of these cuts, Dixit and Zacks also stressed the importance of advocacy and community in their fight for stability.

“It’s now abundantly clear that those of us who care about the mission of Washington University, those who care about the success of research and the increase of human knowledge have to tell our friends, neighbors, and our elected officials that this matters to us and talk about why it’s important,” Zacks said.