This has been a really bad time for science since January 2025. For most of last year, every week, we got new guidance, new rules. Our NIH [National Institutes of Health] grants were essentially frozen for months because of our research collaborations with Nicaraguan and international colleagues. They did not even give us the next fiscal year of money on time for grants they had already approved. This has been really detrimental. They added a lot of restrictions on foreign collaborations and on using research funding outside the U.S. We were in great uncertainty about when our grants would come back online, and we lost millions in funding for our Nicaraguan studies. That’s really troubling.
Eva was contacting the NIH constantly to try to get these grants moving again, but for a long time they were barely responsive.
From my understanding, most of our lab members are supported by NIH grants. This includes funding for graduate students, postdocs, technicians, and program managers in our lab at UC Berkeley. The salaries come from these NIH research grants, so we were in a hard position because jobs are at stake, and people didn’t know what’s going to happen in the next few months. Currently, we are initiating collaborations for European funding to help fund the Pediatric Dengue Cohort Study in Nicaragua but we have a very long way to go to replace the lost NIH funding and we also still need to raise more funds for our lab here at UC Berkeley.