UC Merced professor: Investing in research is an investment in our community | Opinion

I joined UC Merced in 2006. My job as a new professor was to help build the first research university of the 21st century in the Central Valley. Over the years, I brought $5.3 million in research funding to support this goal, with two-thirds of the funding coming from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

With that money, I employed and mentored eight research scientists (or “postdocs”), 12 graduate students, six lab technicians and supported research opportunities for 29 UC Merced undergraduate students. Senior lab members often worked daily with the undergraduates and helped provide research experience for an additional 50 people: students from community colleges and K-12 schools, as well as members of the community.

Mentoring future generations and increasing their opportunities — just as others supported us — is a part of our job as scientists and educators.

But this work supporting people in developing their careers — and contributing to the well-being of Californians as a whole — is now threatened by federal administrative cuts. There even exists a credible threat to stop all federal funding to California.

In my lab alone, such actions would terminate $170,000 in active funding; a grant proposal in review for just under $1 million will become uncompetitive if California is blacklisted, a threat under the Trump administration. Meanwhile, another proposal on which I had been working for a year — with a budget of approximately $2 million — is dead in the water, as the program at the National Science Foundation was shuttered in February. This means we will not be able to support any additional postdocs, graduate students, lab technicians or undergraduate students.

Community scientists will have fewer opportunities. This means — with few exceptions — that the cuts and their consequences will primarily affect American citizens (three-quarters of postdocs and graduate students and 95% of undergraduate students who conducted research in our lab are U.S. nationals working in the U.S.).

Former postdocs and graduate students from my lab have gone on to careers in government, nonprofit organizations, research and teaching. Three are faculty members at universities on the East Coast, three are tenure track faculty at community colleges (one in Texas, two in California’s San Joaquin Valley) and another two are California State University faculty. Some undergraduate students have gone on to become graduate students themselves, successfully earning medical and dentistry degrees, which they now use to serve people across Central California.

Current federal policy against research and the educational system in California will have effects far beyond the universities: These are policies against primarily young American students who will no longer have the boost of self-confidence and critical thinking that research experience provides, nor the increased opportunity to go do great things and help others. The impacts will ripple through our communities.

What’s happening at my lab is happening in many more labs at UC Merced, across the University of California system and in the California State University system. It affects many thousands of young people — you may know some of them personally. And if their careers are interrupted, the people they would have helped in the future will also lose opportunity and support.

These are the costs of current federal administrative policy; these are the opportunities that are being taken from future generations. These are the opportunities that we must demand be given back to us — to benefit our community and country today and into the future.