It was a year ago when a handful of early career researchers made a splash — organizing “Stand Up For Science” protests in dozens of cities to voice opposition to Trump administration policies disrupting research labs and public health.
While it attracted attention, that initial day of action didn’t prevent grant terminations and layoffs across federal health and science agencies. But in the year since those largely symbolic protests, Stand Up For Science has become a formal organization and adopted a new strategy, attempting to take on the administration’s campaign to remake science, higher education, and public health on multiple fronts, while adopting more confrontational and grassroots tactics.
It hosted the letters of career federal scientists raising the alarm about the impact of Trump policies, worked with a Democratic representative to file articles of impeachment against health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and even sent an investigator overseas to investigate and then help brief lawmakers on a hepatitis B vaccine trial that many global health experts have decried as unethical. Several of the original organizers of Stand Up For Science also created a separate nonprofit called Science for Good to build trust in science.
The group’s more unabashed and combative approach — which included handing out rubber ducks to members of Congress as they called Kennedy a “quack” — has, at times, rankled more established science advocacy groups. The nonprofit says it has not received donations from any scientific societies. But Colette Delawalla, a Ph.D. candidate at Emory University and executive director of the organization, says it’s filling a niche that was sorely lacking in the scientific community.
As she consulted researchers and advocates, “what we found was that number one, fascism is stopped successfully when everybody pulls every lever. So you need everybody doing everything that they can to stop the machinery in place,” she said in the days leading up to the 2026 protests. “What we found is that the scientific ecosystem is really, really good at insider baseball, really fantastic at having experts in appropriations, who, just like a hawk, find the one word in the 1,000-page appropriations bill that will tank an agency. But it’s absolutely lacking on anything direct action, or anything with strategic communications, or any outward-facing public engaging.”
STAT spoke to Delawalla in the days leading up to this year’s protests, which will occur in 53 different locations on March 7. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What was it like transitioning from a day of protest to an organization?
After March 7, there was a lot of pressure about what we were going to do next. The entire effort was cast in comparison to the March for Science events [in 2017], which were super, super successful on their first day of action. They turned out millions of people. I mean, that’s extraordinary. Then after that was where things got challenging for them.
A lot of people were saying, “This can’t just be one day of protest, what are you going to do next?” So I sat down, I thought really hard about, personally, what I wanted to be involved in, and what my career trajectory was going to look like, because it was clear that I had crossed this red line, and I wasn’t going to be able to just go back to my original plan of being a tenured professor at an R1 university. And I needed to figure out, if I’m going to give up this dream that I worked so hard for, what would I be content building to replace that.
When I looked at the people who we’re fighting against, MAHA is very, very, very well set up. It is set up like a true political organization. They have a C3 arm, they have a C4 arm. They have PACs. They have super PACs. They have top to bottom, everything you could need. Science just didn’t have it. And so I was like, “Well, science should have it. I have a vision. People are looking to me for leadership. We’ve got a team like, let’s do the thing.” Be the change you want to see in the world, you know? It was clear that if there was ever a time, it was now.
Tell me a little bit about building a social media presence. What do you see as your role in responding to the MAHA movement?
That [MAHA] battleground is actually the everyday places that are not tied to science, where scientists are not, and where scientists have failed to go into in a meaningful way. Our strategy, our goal, is to meet the moment in the streets, so to speak. The streets are social media, the streets are in these foundational, really critical congressional districts that could be flipped. The streets are in pediatricians offices. They’re at wine nights with the moms. The streets are on food-focused Instagram pages and sports-focused Instagram pages. The public square has expanded, and there are these target places where we just see this proliferation of mis- and disinformation where scientists are just simply not there and not like, equipped to infiltrate those places.
Stand Up For Science people, we read every single Substack, every single email, and attend every single MAHA action hour, and we take notes on it. They have laid out their plan, and so then we respond.
We’ve heard in the past week or two about how the Trump administration wants to pivot away from a focus on vaccines and towards food and other more popular policies. What do you see as your role in the midterm elections?
So we have a collection of about 40 districts, congressional districts at the federal level that are off the beaten path of the DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] list, so they’re not going to be insane money pits. We have hand-selected these places specifically because there’s something about science or health care that we think could be leveraged for messaging there and so our goal is to bring science to the polls.
We tested our tactics in the Tennessee special election [for a U.S. House seat]. We’re gearing up to become a player like the thing that people sort of underestimate. STEM workers make up 34% of the workforce in the United States, by our count. I say that just to make the point that you shouldn’t be underestimating this constituency. Also, we should be working hard to mobilize this constituency to get to the ballot boxes.
The strategy is that, actually, we think people care about science. We think that people care about biomedical innovation. We think that people care about clean air and clean water. We think that people care about food sources that are not tainted with toxins. We think that people care about not getting polio. Like, it’s really simple. That’s our strategy.