Penn State has not been impacted as heavily as some of its peer institutions, but still has lost 45 federal grants as of Friday and about $10 million in funding as the federal government cancels research grants at institutions across the country.
Andrew Read, senior vice president for research at Penn State, gave an overview of what has happened with research funding from federal agencies during Tuesday’s faculty senate meeting. Although everything is “incredibly fluid,” overall Penn State has not been impacted nearly as much as some of its peer institutions, he said.
Some grants were from National Science Foundation, others were sub contracts from other universities. Read estimated they’ve had around $10 million in grants terminated.
“The dollar amount of what we’ve had terminated is a bit hard to work out because many of the grants were near the end of their period of work, and there are termination costs which we don’t fully understand yet. My guess is that we’ve lost something short of $10 million,” Read said, noting there is a large grant “hanging in the balance,” so that number could dramatically change.
Penn State has about $1.3 billion in research expenditures, so the $10 million isn’t a huge amount. Still, the grants canceled will have an impact on research in areas like climate change.
Read’s research interests include infectious disease and said it “breaks my heart” to see all of the projects they’ve had canceled on HIV prevention, vaccines that prevent cervical cancer, and recently one on syphilis diagnoses, which affects the health of newborn babies.
More grant terminations are likely to come.
“We really haven’t been through the full list of NSF grants yet or (National Institutes of Health) grants that are being reviewed at the moment by those agencies. So we’re expecting substantial more terminations — very worried, especially in the climate space,” Read said.
The university is working to see what costs can be recovered, termination appeals process, certification requirements and working with professional organizations across the country.
The major area that they’re seeing issues with are with diversity, equity and inclusion, he said. Agencies like NIH have been clear on what to do with that space and removing language, but others, like NASA or NOAA have been unclear.
Tracy Langkilde, Penn State’s interim executive vice president and provost, said some program offices have given clear advice on how proposals can be changed to meet the current landscape and priorities. The university has partnered with them as much as possible to get that advice and share it with the principal investigators, she said.
Read encouraged the faculty to continue submitting proposals, and acknowledged the painfulness of losing a grant.
“I do want to say that every grant that a faculty member gets that’s terminated has been won against incredible competition. There’s no such thing as an easy grant, and for somebody to get a grant in the first place, that means they’re nationally in the top 10% or 15% in that round,” he said. “So they’ve got these things against terrific competition. And so it’s a tragedy for the PIs involved, it’s a tragedy for the people that are employed on those grants, that are being trained on those grants. It’s a loss to scholarship. It’s a loss to the stakeholders whose lives would have been impacted by that research.”
