Post-secondary research and diversity programs have been a recent target of President Trump’s funding cuts. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health saw over 3,800 research grants paused or discontinued, leading to over 300 job losses. 

One such post-secondary education program is the FIRST program, started in 2000 at Emory University. The FIRST program aimed to create a partnership across Historical Black Colleges and Universities in Atlanta and was terminated in 2025 due to federal funding cuts.

“There were three goals [of the FIRST program], create the complete professor [a professor skilled in both research and teaching], bring modern teaching methods to HBCUs and create partnerships between the HBCUs and research institutions,” Dr. Arri Eisen, a teaching professor at Emory University said. “Any time you bring nice people together, interesting collaborations emerge that you can’t really predict.” 

Dr. Eisen has helped to lead the FIRST program since its inception. In 1998, he went to a meet and greet with high school students interested in Emory. While there, he met a professor in the department of physiology who asked him for help with submitting a proposal to NIH.

“NIH had invited Emory to try out a new program,” Dr. Eisen said. “There was only one other one like it at Chapel Hill. But [the physiology professor] was working with NIH at the time and he came up with this idea to [facilitate] partnerships between high level research universities, like Emory, and minority institutions to train post-docs [people training in research and teaching to get experience after getting their Ph.D].”

The program would give the FIRST fellows hands-on research and teaching experience. Dr. Eisen attended the first meeting regarding FIRST in 1999.

“I was really amazed that these institutions hadn’t worked together before and it was clear that there was this tension in the air at our first meeting,” Dr. Eisen said. “It felt like ‘Here is the rich white school asking us to do something for them again.’ But then, fast-forward 25 years later, and all kinds of magic happens.“

Former FIRST fellow Dr. Mandy Gibson, a professor of biology at the University of Virginia, was in the FIRST program from 2016 to 2018. She believes her experience was beneficial to her career path. 

“I was thrilled to get into the program because of its opportunity to engage meaningfully with both research and teaching,” Dr. Gibson said. “I especially liked being a student in Arri Eisen’s teaching seminar for FIRST fellows. His class was the first formal training I received in teaching and it changed the way I saw my future job.”

Dr. Gibson attended the reunion of FIRST in 2020 and said it was uplifting to see the community it had built. Now, though the program has been terminated, she hopes the alumni will continue to collaborate.  

“FIRST trained over 200 postdoctoral fellows that went on to positions at academic institutions, companies, government agencies and foundations,” Dr. Gibson said. “Most alumni are women, and about 50% are African American. That’s an incredible record for a STEM training program, and it changed the demographics of STEM. I hope that alumni and other programs can continue the work.” 

Dr. Eisen said he thinks one of the most important aspects of the FIRST program’s success was the community it built. He said that it can be particularly lonely for minority groups in science because they have fewer people to connect with, but FIRST gave them a natural group to belong to. 

Dr. Anita Corbett is the Dean of Research at Emory University and was part of the leadership team for FIRST. While Dr. Eisen focused on training the fellows how to teach, Dr. Corbett focused on the research side of things. She also mentored four fellows in her lab. 

“[The FIRST program] had been in practice here at Emory for many years,” Dr. Corbett said. “Since 2000, many people [members] have gone on to be professors, leaders in academia and be leaders in all kinds of spaces.” 

As FIRST became more established, 21 other programs like it emerged across the country. Dr. Eisen said that this made the work feel even more important. The FIRST program was a subset of a larger group of training programs called Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award that focused on building diversity within the scientific community.

“The goal of [IRACDA] really was to ensure the development of a diverse group of scientists prepared to enter the biomedical workforce and really, we focused on developing future leaders in academia,” Dr. Corbett said.

Dr. Eisen said that while the termination of the program was incredibly discouraging, it was inevitable amid the current political climate. He saw many grants being cut across the country in similar programs, so he and his colleagues knew it was only a matter of time before FIRST was cut as well.

“[The shutdown of the FIRST program] was nightmarish but predictable,” Dr. Eisen said. “We got these mysterious letters and for a while everybody was afraid we were all going to lose our jobs. It was kind of fuzzy but eventually there was a letter that said, ‘Your program has been discontinued; it’s no longer consistent with the goals of the Trump administration.’ It was something like that, implying that the program was a waste of time but not giving any details.”

He said the letter contained vague and scary language telling them that their program didn’t matter anymore. He said it felt like Musk’s team was cutting funding without stopping to examine the work the programs were doing.

“The NIH employees were trying to keep our grant and grants like ours from getting cut because that was their life, that’s what they’re supposed to do,” Dr. Eisen said. “So they were moving it around in the background, into different study sections, they’re called, trying to keep it from being killed.”

Dr. Eisen said that since FIRST was focused on diversity, it was a target of the cuts. He said he wouldn’t describe the program as DEI, but it was likely that the Trump administration viewed it as such because of its focus on inclusivity.

“Every successful education program tries to include as many people as fairly as possible,” Dr. Eisen said. “[DEI] has become a catch word, but if you ask any teacher they would say that an educational program is not successful unless it includes everyone that it can.”

Dr. Eisen said that it was important to the leaders that everyone who was enrolled in the program when it was terminated received assistance to find another paying position.

“Overnight, some 300 young, budding scientists lost their jobs,” Dr. Eisen said. “It was kind of stupid. There was no explanation, no good logic for it. We managed to salvage most of our fellows getting jobs or find some way for them to not go hungry for the most part.”

The grant that funded FIRST was terminated along with other IRACDA programs. There were four of these grants terminated at Emory. FIRST, MARC (Maximizing Access to Research Careers), IMSD (Initiative for Maximizing Student Development) and INSPIRE (Infectious Diseases Summer Program Integrating Research at Emory).

“The American Civil Liberties Union] led a lawsuit that sued NIH saying it was illegal to cancel these grants because their funding was congressionally approved, so NIH couldn’t cancel them,” Dr. Corbett said. “And the lawsuit was actually successful. So MARC, IMSD and INSPIRE have all been reinstated and refunded. But unfortunately the FIRST program was [up for renewal] so there was no way to get it reconsidered.”

Since FIRST was up for renewal, it was unable to be refunded. But the other programs were not up for renewal and were bound in a legal contract that required more years of funding. So every program except FIRST was able to continue until the end of their legal funding cycle. But Dr. Corbett said that it is likely they will be terminated when they submit for renewal in a few years.

“My job as Dean of Research in Emory college is to oversee all research,” Dr. Corbett said. “So of course that includes many departments funded by NIH and NSF. But the cuts to NIH and NSF mostly impacted natural science departments.”

Beyond the funding cuts affecting the FIRST program, the cuts to NSF and NIH have impacted research throughout Emory and other universities. The cuts have largely been aimed to stop or slow research in specific areas of study.

“There are two things that have happened [that impact people],” Dr. Corbett said. “One is the termination of actual grants that don’t align with current federal directives, like anything related to climate change, vaccines, diversity and anything having to do with [the LGBTQ+ community]. So any [research] in those spaces [have been limited]. There’s also that fact that there hasn’t been any congressionally approved budget, which has really limited the overall budgets for both NIH and NSF because they don’t know what their budget is going to be, so they’re very cautious in how much they’re willing to spend.”

Though the national budget is uncertain and funding has been harder to come by, Dr. Corbett said that those working at the college have done their best to find money where they can to support researchers.

“These [cuts] have changed my job because I have to [put more focus] on finding ways to financially support faculty, and also be a cheerleader and help them to be creative and find other opportunities,” Dr. Corbett said.

Dr. Corbett said that she in particular is in an important position because she is both a scientist and in a leadership role at the college level.

“[The current political climate] has put me in a position to [give] even more support to faculty particularly in STEM,” Dr. Corbett said. “And as a scientist with a leadership position, I’m really the only scientist educating my colleagues about what it means for these types of grants to be terminated and what that means for people’s research programs.”

Amid the current political climate, Dr. Corbett said it is particularly important to continue moving forward in the research space, despite the larger implications of what these cuts mean for the world as a whole.

“There are so many long-term implications of what is happening now and even [if things were] to turn around by the mid-term election, which is still a year away,” Dr. Corbett said. “The changes that have already been made are not things that you can just snap your fingers and go back to. Even if we do get a change in government that allows these [research programs] to start up again, it could really set the U.S. back in terms of research.”

She said that the funding cuts are going to set the United States back from being a hub of scientific innovation. Additionally, they will impact how future generations view science moving forward, which has more serious consequences.

“The problem is the impact on training future generations of scientists,” Dr. Corbett said. “We were the destination. People across the world wanted to come to the U.S. to train in biomedical science. And the combination of [funding cuts, program termination and immigration policy changes] is changing that. People aren’t going to want to come here anymore. We’re not going to have as many people that we can train because of [lack of] resources.”

Corbett said that having that diverse biomedical workforce was critically important to tackle the most challenging problems and now that’s being destroyed. And areas of research that were celebrated under previous administrations like diversity are not being celebrated anymore.

“When we take out a whole generation of people seeing science as something good, something worth striving for and [something] that would be interesting to be involved in, that can have long term implications,” Dr. Corbett said. “Not just [implications] for the U.S.’s standing in these spaces, but also the ability to really make major discoveries that could impact the health and well-being of not just people in the U.S. but across the whole world.”

Dr. Zoe Diaz-Martin, a professor at Spelman, said that the cuts have significantly slowed down her research. She said the lack of federal funding will impact scientific discovery going forward, which will set back the healthcare industry.

“It’s been a difficult landscape to navigate,” Dr. Diaz-Martin said. “These funding cuts also go beyond just scientists’ ability to conduct their research. I work with a lot of different students and something I do with them is work to find programs that give them hands-on training in the sciences. And these types of research experiences are really fundamental in developing important skills that enable students to be good at their jobs in the future. A lot of the students I work with are interested in being doctors. So these research opportunities train our future doctors in really important skills like problem-solving and critical thinking. These are skills we want our healthcare providers to have. But unfortunately, these funding cuts are reducing the number of programs that are available.”

Dr. Joanna Wardwell-Ozgo is a professor at Kennesaw State. She said scientists need to do better at advocating for the importance of their work and talk to people about their research. She frequently writes to her representatives and encourages others to do the same. Additionally, she takes part in different advocacy organizations and marches in protest with organizations like Stand Up for Science.

“We have to start working really hard to get public help and advocate for ourselves,” Dr. Wardwell-Ozgo said. “We need the general population to get excited about science and think that it’s important and deserves funding.”

Both Dr. Diaz-Martin and Dr. Wardwell-Ozgo want people to understand that these cuts will impact more than just science because by setting back research, the cuts are impacting the future population’s well-being.

“Sometimes the sciences, for whatever reason, can feel so far apart from everyone’s everyday lives when in reality science and technology are really fundamental to everything we do,” Dr. Diaz-Martin said. “It’s because of investments by our government that we’ve been able to make so many important developments in how we live our day-to-day lives.”

Dr. Wardwell-Ozgo said the cuts have also directly affected her work and what she is able to do. She submitted a grant in May 2024 and it took over a year for her funding to get approved.

“That was emotionally gutting because I didn’t really know what was happening,” Dr. Wardwell-Ozgo said. “I had to go back and forth with NIH and take out any mention of diversity. I had to completely remove and scrub that language from my grant. Once I did that, my grant was funded. It was a very long and emotional process that felt like I was being strung along. And I was really unsure what to expect.”

Dr. Corbett said similar situations have occurred at Emory, which has made it harder to do research and hire new people.

“I fear [funding cuts] are going to create an environment where it’s just so challenging to be successful that it may kill some people’s research programs, that are really, really important research,” Dr. Corbett said.

Dr. Corbett said that through this hard time, you can see the resilience of the scientific community. And the determination of scientists to keep doing what they’re doing because they know it’s the right thing to do so they are creative and find ways to persevere.

“[Scientists] know their work is important and they’re committed to keep doing it,” Dr. Corbett said. “So there’s this kind of yin and yang on any given day because somebody can be really down because they’re thinking about the reality of this situation. And then on that same day, they have a conversation with a colleague about an exciting result or a student who is doing really well. And that keeps us going and moving forward.”