President Donald Trump has signed a series of executive orders freezing medical federal research funding across the nation. While many of these orders have been delayed by federal courts, researchers at both the Geisel School of Medicine and Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center have seen the early impacts of funding freezes, according to Northern New England Co-Op Practice and Community Based Research Network executive director Meagan Stabler.
Stabler told The Dartmouth that four funding grants that engaged early-stage clinician researchers on topics such as long Covid, climate health and promoting primary care patient voices through storytelling were “terminated.”
“Three of them were actively funded and one was in the just-in-time phase meaning that it was actively awarded and the grant was ready to start July 1,” Stabler said.
Stabler believes that the impact of funding cuts will “[weaken] our country as a whole in being a leader in scientific innovation and research.”
Funding freezes “eliminated” the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s public health program for epilepsy at DHMC, according to an email statement from Community Epilepsy and Self-Management Training Center director Elaine Kiriakopoulos. DHMC is one of the CDC’s national coordinating centers for the Managing Epilepsy Well Network, and the CDC has “funded Dartmouth based projects in epilepsy for more than a decade,” she added.
“We are at high risk for losing this funding and will need to work with our collaborators here in rural northern New England and at academic medical centers across the country to find solutions that enable us to continue advancing our public health initiatives and providing important epilepsy self-management supports to people living with epilepsy and their care teams,” Kiriakopoulos wrote.
Some programs — including Dartmouth’s clinical and translational science institute Synergy — have not yet seen funding cuts or freezes, but are making preparations for the possible loss of necessary funding, according to DHMC chief research officer Steven Bernstein.
According to Bernstein, who serves as director and lead principal investigator of Synergy, the program receives large multi-year NIH grants to provide infrastructure to do translational science and is not currently experiencing changes to its funding. Bernstein said the program intends to continue with its research by awarding pilot research grants, engaging with local community groups and developing training programs. However, Synergy is preparing for the need for possible adjustment in the future.
“What’s happening now is rather unprecedented,” Bernstein said. “But we are committed institutionally to preserving and protecting the biomedical enterprise here, and we work closely with institutional leadership [and] closely with our government relations people.”
When asked what advice she would have for community members and students at large to respond to these cuts, Stabler suggested “working through representatives or the press to tell your story [to] make sure people are aware of what’s happening,” and encouraged students to “continue doing the work.”
Bernstein added that DHMC leadership is “paying extraordinarily careful attention to the situation.”
“We keep our investigators very well-informed of what’s going on and address their concerns as best as we can,” he said.
