For many researchers across the United States, the past year has held unprecedented challenges to research funding and post-grad work.

“Being unemployed after devoting so much of your life to earning a Ph.D. and trying to improve human health is really a terrible place to be,” said Maya Gosztyla, a 2024 alumna of UCSD’s biomedical sciences doctorate program.

In February 2025, the Trump administration began instituting large-scale cuts to the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. At UC San Diego, this impacted graduate and staff researchers across many departments.

“Because UC San Diego is such a highly collaborative campus, these impacts have been felt campus-wide,” Corinne Peek-Asa, vice chancellor for Research and Innovation at UCSD, said to The UCSD Guardian.

That same month, the University announced that it could no longer offer guaranteed funding to incoming graduate students — a measure that came in response to the anticipated federal cuts and statewide cuts to higher education. In addition, the University prematurely terminated graduate researchers’ contracts and laid off staff researchers across health sciences departments. One year later, researchers are still stranded.

“A lot of researchers don’t have jobs anymore, or are facing insecurity, or they don’t know how long they are going to have their jobs,” Sutanay Bhattacharya, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the math department, said. “That also means that outside of being a researcher, now we have to fight these funding cuts on different fronts, which takes away time from doing important research work.”

In early 2025, The Washington Post reported that a leaked internal document from the NSF allegedly included a list of diversity-related keywords that, if mentioned, would cause research grants to be rejected.

Gosztyla began to hear whispers of funding cuts as early as mid-2024 — when she was finishing her Ph.D. — but since graduating and going on to conduct similar biomedical research, federal cuts tied to diversity, equity, and inclusion have disproportionately impacted research like hers.

“In our case, the word that affected us was just ‘women,’” Gosztyla said. “We study a disease that only affects women and girls, so we had to figure out how to write a grant without mentioning the word ‘women’ in it.”

To protest against these cuts to research and medical care, labor unions across the nation held “Kill the Cuts” rallies on April 8. This national day of action garnered millions of participants, raising awareness not just among current researchers, but also interested student and faculty associations nationwide.

Bhattacharya, who is also a United Auto Workers Local 4811 member, emceed for UCSD’s “Kill the Cuts” rally. He shared that these rallies offered public support that the union and the University of California Student Association later leveraged to lobby against the cuts.

“I thought it was really important to make sure that we raise the profile of higher education in the public domain and kind of make sure that this issue gets prioritized in the minds and the eyes of the public, as well as the legislators and representatives,” Bhattacharya explained.

The results of their efforts were swift: On May 14, California Gov. Gavin Newsom reduced the state’s proposed budget cut to higher education from 8% to 3%, and in June, deferred all cuts to the following fiscal year.

However, the cuts have had lasting impacts.

“Some of these past research grants will be perhaps reinstated at some point, but that doesn’t solve the problem in the long term,” Bhattacharya said. “Because the central problem is the fact that there’s uncertainty at all. … All of this chaos and unpredictability is basically harming research.”

Bhattacharya explained how this uncertainty has impacted the new graduate student cohort.

“If you’re a prospective graduate student looking for a school to go to, why would you go to one that doesn’t have a funding guarantee?” he said. “That has made it really hard for UCSD, as well as other UCs, to attract talent.”

On Jan. 8, the UC system released its enrollment numbers for Fall 2025, which reported record highs across the system — except for graduate students. The UC enrolled 63,421 total graduate students this year — a moderate 0.3% increase from 2024. However, this increase is not consistent across degree levels; across all major disciplines, there was a 13.5% increase in master’s programs, but a 2.3% decline in academic doctoral enrollment.

Over the past year, researchers have also taken the fight to the courtroom. The American Civil Liberties Union, unions like UAW 4811, and various higher education associations have banded together to combat the cuts via lawsuits. But despite some successes, the litigation process is costly, both in time and money, for researchers with neither to spare.

Peek-Asa told The Guardian that the University has established the Research Disruption Response Team to mitigate the impacts of the budget cuts and support its researchers.

“Health Sciences and the Chancellor’s Office each created working groups to work across units to plan and make recommendations for strategies to address various scenarios,” Peek-Asa said.

When The Guardian asked Bhattacharya and Gosztyla about this response team or its efforts, neither one was familiar.

The future of federal cuts to research remains ambiguous as policies are subject to executive orders from the Trump administration. This situation continues to threaten research and the livelihoods of individuals involved, despite efforts from universities and activists.

Alongside the researchers and patients who count on developments in drugs and medicine, Bhattacharya explained that the federal cuts harm economic activity: “Every single dollar invested into NIH translates into about $2 in economic activity.”

However, the University remains optimistic.

“We are following the appropriation process closely, and Congress has indicated their desire to avoid deep cuts to NIH,” Peek-Asa said.

Gosztyla believes that, despite any legal victories, federal anti-DEI policies have already laid a foundation that will have lasting impacts on research.

“I think there [are] going to be long-term effects in how we can study human health, just based on the fact that people have had to write around these issues in their grants for the past year,” she said.

In the meantime, proposed Senate Bill 607, or the California Science and Health Research Bond Act, offers a potential solution to the budget cuts. The act would allocate $23 billion in research funding to UC campuses, establishing four Institutes for Science and Innovation that Bhattacharya described as “California’s own version of NIH.”

“Academic workers’ unions and other allies have taken a very big part in making sure that actually does happen,” Bhattacharya said. “That’s, I think, a potential solution to look forward to. But all of that will take a massive amount of coalition building and working together.”