As a behavioral geneticist, Annika Barber has always enjoyed trying to make sense of the world around her.
She has a spreadsheet of every book she’s read over the last 11 years rated on a 1 to 5 scale. Even something as whimsical as the amount of times her husband eats pizza in a year gets tracked.
“I do love using Excel for a variety of unintended purposes,” said Barber, an assistant professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Lately, Barber has been using her love of data organization to make sense of the chaos happening in scientific research.
Almost as soon as President Trump was inaugurated, the federal government put a freeze on grants, including those from the National Institutes of Health, which funds research on everything from pediatric cancer to Alzheimer’s disease. A federal judge blocked the freeze, but scientists like Barber were still concerned.
In late January, scientists started reporting sudden cancellations of NIH study sections, important meetings in which academic scientists review grant applications from peers competing for federal funding.
These groups usually consist of 20 academic scientists that meet two to three times a year to review grant applications and score them based on scientific merit, said Barber, who has been part of the meetings.
There are hundreds of NIH study sections responsible for reviewing grant applications across various scientific fields, such as HIV/AIDS, the biology of aging, immunology-oncology, and more.
Scientists typically review at least 100 grant applications during each study section meeting. While study sections don‘t directly determine funding, the scientific scores they produce help the NIH Advisory Council prioritize where money should go.
But for the first two months of the Trump administration, hundreds of study section meetings failed to take place as scheduled, resulting in a backlog of thousands of grant proposals. While it’s normal for there to be some disruption to the status quo during the transition process, this seemed particularly unusual, Barber said.
“These disruptions are like nothing anybody I work with who’s been a scientist the last 40 years has ever seen,” said Barber, who started at Rutgers-New Brunswick in January 2020.
From start to finish, the whole federal grant application process usually takes about nine months, said Barber.
Even then, she said, only the top 10% of grant applications get funded.
“It’s already an extremely stringent process,” said Barber.
Under the Trump administration, it has become even more difficult.
Barber was scheduled to attend an in-person study section panel in February but had put off touching the stack of grant applications she received in January. She wasn’t sure it was worth reviewing given how many meetings were being canceled.
Another professor told her that he was supposed to attend a study section in January and completed all the paperwork, only to have it canceled days beforehand. Sure enough, 48 hours before her own study section was scheduled to meet, Barber received an email that it was canceled.
“This is what was happening in February to pretty much everybody,” said Barber.
It was chaos. Scientists had no idea if their grant was moving on.
So she tracked it.
Study sections must be posted in the Federal Register at least 15 days before the meeting is scheduled to be held. All meetings after Jan. 20 stopped. And she began logging it all in a spreadsheet.
After being asked by dozens of people to check whether their study section was going to happen, Annika Barber decided to make her spreadsheet public so people could check their own study section.Courtesy of Annika Barber
She noticed that grants of all kinds were being delayed. Everything from research into cancer therapeutics and lung infections to studies on addiction and memory loss.
Scientists involved with the study sections confirmed it to her, too, she said.
After being asked a few dozen times to share the link to her spreadsheet, Barber made it public.
In the first two months of Trump in office, more than 200 sections didn’t meet, meaning more than 1,000 grant applications that were put on hold.
They started to resume after the Trump administration lifted a roadblock that prevented the NIH from posting in the Federal Register. The agency is working to catch up, scheduling three times as many study sections as they did in the same time period last year — and doing so with a reduced workforce, Barber said.
Some grant applications, many of them related to diversity, are also just dropping off the lists and their applicants don’t know why.
Even if grants get reviewed and moved forward, scientists are worried they won’t get funding approved when the NIH Advisory Council meets in May.
In general, the NIH has been giving out less money this year, according to an independent website run by a scientist tracking NIH funding.
There are also hundreds of grants that have been terminated after previously being allocated funding. Many of the canceled grants are focused on public health, especially LGBTQ+ health and racial disparities, according to a spreadsheet tracking grant cancellations.
Rutgers University has had several grants terminated, including projects titled “Social networks and cognitive health among Black and Latino sexual minority men in NJ” and “Addressing HPV vaccination disparities through tailored messaging for hesitant families.”
The chaos happening in scientific research ultimately affects regular people waiting on advancements in treatment or a cure to what ails them.
“So if we’re not investing that money, there’s nobody to make up the shortfall,” said Barber.
Stories by Jackie Roman
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Jackie Roman may be reached at jroman@njadvancemedia.com.