Science research at UCLA

Tyler Clites, an assistant professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCLA, leads a team of researchers working on bionic technologies to prevent unnecessary amputations.

Earlier this year, after the Trump administration froze UCLA’s federal research funding, Clites held a meeting with his team where he delivered a dire warning.

“I think that we can weather this for three months,” he said. “But, after that, I might have to start letting people go.”

At the time, Clites told LAist, his lab had 10 doctoral students, along with two post docs, “a few surgical residents” and 10 undergrads.

The worst-case scenario Clites feared did not come to pass. The Trump administration froze UCLA’s grants in July. By late September, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation — the two largest federal funders of research at U.S. universities — were forced to restore some 800 grants at UCLA in response to federal court orders.

But the temporary freeze was long enough to cause permanent damage to some research teams. Plus, students and professors like Clites fear that budget reductions at the NIH and NSF may threaten their research capabilities and professional futures.

Dealing with the aftermath  

At UCLA’s pediatrics department, Cole Peters is part of a team that’s engineering T-cells to target proteins expressed by sarcoma tumors. Sarcoma is a rare type of cancer that originates in the body’s bones and soft tissues, including muscles, blood vessels and nerves.

Currently, Peters told LAist, the five-year survival rate for pediatric sarcoma is around 66%, “which means 44% of the kids that get these tumors are going to die.”

Peters’s team uses mice to develop treatment options. “We’re trying to get the patient’s own immune system to attack [their] cancer,” he said.

The team gives the mice a human immune system, Peters added, “so that we can study how a human immune system would attack a human cancer.”

During the funding freeze, those in charge of keeping the mice healthy had to stop their work, and “the colony pretty much died out,” he said.

As a result, an experiment that he and his colleagues planned to start in August is now slated for the middle of January. This unnecessary delay, Peters added, “slows down the potential to generate a medicine” for children.

Elle Rathbun, a sixth-year doctoral student in neuroscience who studies the brain’s responses to potential stroke treatments, was also frustrated by the funding freeze.

To stem that loss, she applied for a predoctoral fellowship, which involved gathering a score of documents and letters of recommendation. All told, she said, that process took about a month.

During that time, Rathbun added, “I was doing sort of the bare minimum that my research required.”

“I just couldn’t prioritize all the benchwork and the experiments [for my research] and mentoring undergraduates in the way that I was planning on,” she said. “I had to step back from all that.”

Ultimately, Rathbun did secure that fellowship. But then UCLA’s federal funding was restored, so she had to give it back. The rigmarole, she said, was a waste of time.

“I would have rather just been doing experiments and making discoveries,” she said.

Rathbun, Peters, Clites and other researchers at UCLA expressed relief at having their funding restored. But because the court decisions aren’t final, they remain fearful.

“I think the biggest impact is [that] people are very reticent to hire,” Clites said. “I’m not really open to taking on a new graduate student . . . I’m much more risk-averse than I have been historically.”

For Peters, it feels like he and his colleagues are working with “a knife over [their] heads.”

Grappling with an uncertain future  

In addition to concerns around UCLA’s grants, researchers also worry about the broader state of federal funding.

A recent New York Times investigation — which used public data to analyze over 300,000 grants dating back to 2015 — found that NIH and NSF money is going to fewer grants under the Trump administration. There are also fewer opportunities available for new scientists through graduate student, postdoctoral and early-career fellowships and grants.

In practice, this means that researchers will face more competition for federal funding. The change could also push students to consider other careers.

Maya Weissman, a postdoc at UCLA’s Garud Lab, studies the evolution of the human gut microbiome.

The microbiome, she told LAist, helps us digest food, “but it’s also connected to a wide range of health issues, including irritable bowel disease and Alzheimer’s.”

Her lab is funded by NSF and NIH grants. Having that money restored means she and her colleagues can once again access high-performance computing resources and other critical equipment. And if the undergraduate she mentors wants to conduct research this summer, she’ll be able to pay him.

“We’re also able to recruit new members to the lab, because a lot of current members are graduating soon,” she added.

This is all cause to celebrate, Weissman said. But when she looks toward the future, her career is less certain. This year, she intended to apply for the NSF’s postdoctoral research fellowship in biology. But funding for that opportunity was not renewed.

The fellowship “is very prestigious,” Weissman said. “It would have helped my career to have that line on my resume. It would have also funded my salary for several years, and that would take pressure off of my boss, allow her to recruit more people. And it would have allowed me to fund my own experiments and give me a certain amount of independence.”

Weissman visited the NSF’s webpage repeatedly throughout 2025. She kept refreshing it, hoping that a new call for proposals would be posted.

“This huge pool of money that funds a lot of the brightest and most promising researchers at my career stage — it’s just gone,” she said.

Moving forward, Weissman will have to spend more time looking for funding.

“Instead of applying for one big fellowship, I have to apply for a dozen little ones to try to cobble together some support,” she said.

Rathbun likewise aims to become an assistant professor at a university, where she can continue doing research.

“I am really reassessing my career path,” Rathbun said. “As much as I want to develop stroke therapies and therapies for other neurodegenerative diseases, and as competitive as I think I am for those positions, if funding is going to be unstable — if, down the line, I’m going to have to constantly be firing people because the NIH suspends grants — that’s not viable. It’s no longer my dream career.”

Disclosure: Julia Barajas is a part-time law student at UCLA.