Philadelphia universities have weathered tens of millions of dollars’ worth of cuts to scientific research

President Donald Trump’s administration says it has cut tens of millions of dollars in research funding from universities and research centers in Philadelphia.

The Inquirer has been tracking these cuts for months, analyzing the impact to research in the region from the grant terminations playing out nationally.

To better understand how Philadelphia has been affected, The Inquirer searched administration records to tally grants terminated at local universities, interviewed researchers who had lost funding, and worked to identify key areas of research that had been targeted.

Assessing the full effect of the terminations is difficult. Government websites tracking “savings” through research cuts that have slashed federal funding for scientific research are updated irregularly and sometimes inaccurately. Some researchers have told The Inquirer that their grants are misleadingly listed and have not been terminated.

Federal officials have offered little explanation of the criteria that go into selecting grants for termination, despite pledging to provide Americans with “maximum transparency” about where their tax dollars are going.

In the Philadelphia region, The Inquirer’s analysis found the impact of a reported $47 million in cuts has affected some universities disproportionately.

The 96 projects affected include a wide range of research topics and programs, but the Trump administration has particularly targeted funding for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; LGBTQ+ health; and health disparities — research into the ways social factors like race, income, and living situations affects a person’s health.

A federal judge recently ruled that some of the grant cuts are illegal and discriminatory, but it’s unclear whether Philadelphia researchers might see their grants restored, since Pennsylvania did not join the lawsuit seeking to claw back the grants.

In a statement, the National Institutes of Health, which has overseen many of the cuts, said the agency “stands by [its] decision to end funding for research that prioritized ideological agendas over scientific rigor and meaningful outcomes for the American people.”

The National Science Foundation, which has also slashed dozens of grants, declined comment.

STAT reported Wednesday that the NIH had emailed senior officials at the organization, telling them to stop terminating any more grants. It was not immediately clear whether that directive would effect already terminated grants.

Locally, some researchers already have been forced to lay off staff or scramble to find new positions for early-career researchers whose salaries depended on grant funding.

Temple University’s Laura Sinko had to reassign staff to avoid layoffs after her two-year grant was canceled in March. An assistant professor in the Department of Nursing, she was studying barriers LGBTQ+ people face when seeking help and recovering from sexual assault, domestic abuse, and child abuse, an understudied topic.

“It’s pretty devastating. We’ve been fighting for LGBTQ-related research to be considered a priority for so long,” Sinko said.

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Drexel University’s federal research funding is dwarfed by that at the University of Pennsylvania, yet it has been hit hardest by cuts. The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the National Institutes of Health, reported that it had cut $9 million from grants issued to Drexel.

Another $9 million in Drexel grants were cut by other government agencies, according to the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting agency previously helmed by billionaire Elon Musk.

Penn, which was set to receive nearly $1 billion in federal research funding in fiscal year 2025, saw the second-highest amount of reductions. The administration also paused $175 million in funding to Penn earlier this year, citing the participation of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas on its women’s team in 2021-22.

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia ranked third on the list.

In a statement, university spokesperson Britt Faulstick said that Drexel is monitoring a “dynamic situation” while working with researchers whose projects have been disrupted by the cuts.

“Drexel is currently appealing several terminated grants and working in concert with the many other universities that have been impacted to advocate for the restoration of federal funding and the important work that it supports,” Faulstick said.

Penn did not respond to a request for comment.

In some cases, researchers have said that lists of “savings” to the federal government from grant terminations are inaccurate.

Three researchers told The Inquirer that, though the federal government had listed their grants as terminated, the grants had not been cut. Instead, the government ended funding for small supplements to their grants, including some that supported early-career researchers from diverse backgrounds.

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For grants that have actually been terminated, it’s often difficult for researchers to ascertain why their research was targeted.

The Trump administration’s directives and their explanations regarding canceled grants have been broad and vague, leaving unclear exactly what criteria agencies are using to reduce spending.

To understand how some area grants may have been targeted by the administration, The Inquirer searched for basic keywords — “diversity,” “equity,” or “inclusion” and common permutations like “diverse” and “inclusive” — in descriptions of the 96 grants reported terminated at 11 institutions in the Philadelphia region where funding was lost.

About 31% of grants included those keywords.

Earlier this month, the prominent academic journal Science obtained documents from five different institutes and centers at the NIH, listing guidelines for how staff should select grants to terminate.

The guidelines “varied widely” between institutes, Science reported, with different definitions of DEI and different lists of keywords for staffers to flag, including “marginalized,” “ethnic,” “gender,” and “climate.”

Terminated grants in the Philadelphia region that used versions of the keywords “diversity,” “equity,” or “inclusion” include Dalmacio Dennis Flores’ research, aimed at helping parents with gay and bisexual sons communicate better about sexual health.

He said that NIH officials told him his study, which was set to test a training tool for parents this summer, was canceled because he was researching gender.

That’s not an accurate portrayal of his work, said Flores, an associate professor in Penn’s School of Nursing. He stressed that he also disagrees with the Trump administration’s targeting of research involving transgender people.

Flores is concerned the cuts will set back scientific progress, especially for populations who have historically been underserved by the medical establishment.

“It’s such a mean-spirited way of stopping the progress that has been made by thousands of people across the country devoted to addressing the health of minority populations,” he said. “Even if this were to turn out to just be a pause, the pause itself has done damage.”

Other “DEI”-related projects in the Philadelphia area included two major projects at Drexel headed by Ana Diez Roux, a Drexel professor of epidemiology and the director of the university’s Urban Health Collaborative at the Dornsife School of Public Health.

One of these initiatives supported early-career researchers studying health disparities. After the grant was terminated, Diez Roux had to lay off several staff, and the university scrambled to continue to cover the salaries of 11 researchers recruited through the project.

Another terminated grant funded a nationwide project that helped community groups develop programs to combat health inequities, including projects to address food insecurity and inadequate access to mental health treatment.

“These justifications [for cuts] have been primarily ideological, and unfortunately, have ended up effectively censoring certain kinds of research, which is very troubling,” Diez Roux said.

Keywords that The Inquirer associated with “diversity,” “equity,” or “inclusion” don’t show up in the grant Sharath Chandra Guntuku lost earlier this year. But the associate professor in Penn’s Department of Computer and Information Science believes it was targeted for studying health disparities.

Guntuku and his team had recruited 650 participants out of a hoped-for 800 to study how misinformation on the COVID-19 pandemic affected white and Black Americans living in rural and urban settings.

When the grant was canceled, his lab lost 80% of its funding and had to lay off three staffers. The termination of a second grant he was working on means he’s now lost 88% of his own salary.

Guntuku filed an appeal over the termination and is working with Penn to find other funding, including from outside organizations.

But it’s hard, he says, not to feel that years of work have been wasted — and that both researchers and the communities they aim to help will suffer.

“This is not an ideology, it’s not an opinionated agenda that we’re trying to push. Health disparities exist,” he said. “And when you take away money to study those disparities, you’re not really helping people live healthier lives.”

For now, dozens of researchers in the Philadelphia area are in limbo, navigating the fallout from terminated grants as they wait to hear on the outcome of lawsuits and appeals to restore their funding.

Recently, ruling in two lawsuits filed over the grant cuts, a federal judge said that some of the NIH reductions are illegal, calling them discriminatory and “arbitrary and capricious.”

“This represents racial discrimination, and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community,” District Judge William G. Young said, ordering the government to return the grants referenced in the lawsuit. “That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out.”

Earlier in the case, he had noted that the Trump administration hadn’t defined DEI even as it cut grants related to such policies, STAT reported.

The NIH said in a statement that the Department of Health and Human Services is “exploring all legal options, including filing an appeal and moving to stay the order.” On Tuesday, Young declined the government’s motion to stay the order.

The impact of the order to return the grants is unclear in Philadelphia. Unlike more than a dozen other states, Pennsylvania did not join the lawsuit that spurred the ruling, and neither did any area universities.

Local researchers like Drexel assistant epidemiology professor Ayden Scheim are cautiously optimistic.

Scheim is a member of the American Public Health Association, which is a party in one of the lawsuits. He hopes funding would be restored for his four-year grant, studying how stigma impacts HIV prevention and treatment among gay and transgender Latinos.

Still, he said: “Given how things have been going over the last few months, until we have documentation from the NIH that the grant is reinstated, we’re not going to count our chickens.”

Inquirer data reporter Chris A. Williams contributed to this article.