From Halting Cancer to Protecting Soldiers, Big Red Research Is at Risk

Stories You May Like

Remember Applying to College? Now It’s Your Kids’ Turn

It’s Your Jam: Test Your Knowledge with a Big Red Music Quiz

From Food Network to TikTok, Hotelie Is a Gen-Z Culinary Star

A look at some projects imperiled by federal funding cuts—and how you can support your alma mater through ‘Cornell Matters’

By Cornellians Staff

In the wake of the recent federal actions that have drastically cut research funding, many alumni have wondered: what can we do to help our alma mater?

Shortly before Reunion ’25, the University launched Cornell Matters, a way for alums to make their voices heard in support of the critical research—in fields from oncology to cybersecurity—being conducted on the Hill and beyond.

“The real-world impact of this work is incalculable,” President Mike Kotlikoff said in a statement in early May. “It strengthens our national security, protects the safety and stability of our food supply, and ensures the progress and resilience of our nation.”

The Cornell Matters campaign invites alumni to be ambassadors for the University—and the enormous good it does in the world—by taking a variety of actions.

They include staying informed about the impact of Big Red research and the wider threats to higher ed’s research enterprise; sharing stories on those topics within their own networks and communities; and stressing the value of Cornell and its research to their government representatives.

The real-world impact of this work is incalculable. It strengthens our national security, protects the safety and stability of our food supply, and ensures the progress and resilience of our nation.

President Mike Kotlikoff

The funding losses will be felt at the ground level: in labs and at fieldwork sites; by professors, postdocs, and students; and ultimately, by the people and entities around the world who, for generations to come, will lack the benefits those investigations might have made possible.

As part of the effort to underscore those losses, the University has also launched an awareness campaign, Research Matters, spotlighting some of the work that the funding cuts have imperiled.

“For decades, federal agencies have relied on Cornell and other research universities to perform the highly specialized research and development work that improves and enhances our lives,” Kotlikoff said in the statement.

“This partnership has been critical to advancing and maintaining America’s economic, political, and military strength in the postwar era. Now, recent federal actions and funding freezes have imperiled that partnership—and the work on which so much of our national wellbeing and strength depend. The impact of this funding freeze is immediate and devastating.”

Here's a look at some of the essential work threatened by federal funding cuts:

Editor's note: These have been condensed from the Cornell Chronicle’s “Research at Risk” series; links to the full stories can be found by clicking on each item’s headline.

Improving Nutrition for Active-Duty Military

A research project that explores new ways to ensure active-duty military personnel get adequate nutrition has been halted—with further implications for the nutritional needs of the aging and those suffering from chronic diseases.

Martha Field, PhD ’07, assistant professor of nutritional sciences, studies how the micronutrients vitamin B12 and folate—also known as vitamin B9—can optimize health outcomes for combat-stressed soldiers.

In 2022, Field and her lab received a three-year, $450,000 grant from the Army Research Office. The research focuses on mitochondrial dysfunction, which contributes to the aging process, impacting energy production, DNA damage, and cell function.

“This is relevant to the Department of Defense because combat stresses can change nutrient status,” Field says. “We have also seen some unexpected changes in the way dietary folate affects brain folate uptake. This has implications for the aging brain and for things like depression.”

With only six months left to go on the grant, Field received a stop-work order, grinding data collection to a halt.

“The stop-work order essentially means we’ve only accomplished about half of our work,” Field says. “We can’t measure all the things we intended to, and the time and effort we have put in seem a waste.”

---

Life-Saving Heart Pumps for Babies

On a lab bench in the basement of Weill Hall, a tiny device silently pumps fluid through a series of tubes and vessels that mimic the human heart.

It has the potential to save the lives of tens of thousands of babies with heart defects. But after receiving a stop-work order from the federal government, the project’s future is uncertain.

On March 30, the Department of Defense (DoD) accepted a proposal to prepare the device for in-human clinical trial, ramping up manufacturing and obtaining regulatory approvals. A week later, the researchers got word that the funding—$6.5 million over the course of four years—wasn’t coming.

“Interruption of that funding has really brought us to a screeching halt,” says James Antaki, the Susan K. McAdam Professor of Heart Assist Technology in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering. “If the interruption lasts very long, it would be irreversible. We’ll have to start laying off people, and I don’t think we’d be able to recover.”

Antaki began to work on the device now known as the PediaFlow in 2002, and he and his team recently wrapped up a previous federal grant started in 2019 to improve the device.

Interruption of that funding has really brought us to a screeching halt.

Prof. James Antaki

About the size of an AA battery, it is designed to boost the flow of blood in children with heart defects. Such pumps can also provide support until a donor heart becomes available for transplant.

“The PediaFlow is intended for children with congenital and acquired heart disease,” Antaki says. “That means babies that are born with a hole in the heart or with a missing ventricle that need serious surgery to survive. Sometimes the child can’t survive to surgery, and they need some kind of crutch to get them over that difficult period.”

---

Better Testing for Tick-Borne Diseases

Laura Goodman, PhD ’07, was close to finalizing a prototype of a new test that can detect any tick-borne disease. Unlike some current tests, it could provide results even before symptoms occur—and even for unknown diseases.

That’s important, because ticks around the world can potentially transmit hundreds of disease agents, some of them not yet known, and they account for at least two-thirds of vector-borne disease in the U.S.

When comparing confirmed diagnoses with insurance claims, it is estimated that there are 10 times more people infected than what available diagnostics show, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

But in April, Goodman, an assistant professor of public and ecosystem health in the Vet College, received a stop-work order. It brought to a halt the research the DoD had asked her to do, via a nearly $900,000 three-year grant it awarded her in 2022.

“It’s a huge impact on my ability to advance this work,” Goodman says, “which is only just at the beginning.”

---

Chronicling Enslaved People Seeking Freedom

A project collecting records of freedom-seeking enslaved people in the pre-Civil War U.S. came to a halt when researchers received a stop-work order from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In many cases, they are the only written records of these individuals.

Enslavers posted as many as a quarter million newspaper ads and flyers before 1865 to locate runaway slaves, in slaveholding states and northern states as well. The public crowdsourcing project, Freedom on the Move, has digitized tens of thousands of these advertisements in an open-source site accessible to the public.

Without a concerted effort to collect and digitize these ads, the names, faces, personalities, and sense of individuality of these freedom-seekers might otherwise be lost to history.

The database has historical value on several levels, says history professor Ed Baptist, a principal investigator on the project.

“It puts a human face on history; it teaches us that ordinary people can resist profoundly evil systems,” he says. “It reminds us that enslaved people were not faceless robots. They had will and courage and the power to resist slavery, and they did so.”

---

Stories You May Like

Remember Applying to College? Now It’s Your Kids’ Turn

It’s Your Jam: Test Your Knowledge with a Big Red Music Quiz

Building Our Future in Space

Hovering in a three-story, hangar-like room called a high bay, the spacecraft would have moved around each other as if in orbit, to model space on Earth.

The simulator—the only one of its kind in the U.S.—would have allowed researchers, companies, and government agencies to test and refine space technologies and to address a particularly difficult and important challenge: understanding how spacecraft can interact while they’re in orbit.

The work is crucial for building job opportunities, stronger economies, and a better future for our species, says Mason Peck, director of the New York Consortium for Space and Technology.

“We’re building a unique facility where we’ll be able to test and verify and understand better all the technologies involved,” says Peck, the Stephen J. Fujikawa ’77 Professor of Astronautical Engineering, “where we’re forming the basis for how the future of space will look.”

The simulator and consortium are vital enough that the DoD committed $5 million in September 2023 to support the effort. But in April, Peck received a stop-work order that halted progress on renovations of the high bay and on construction of the spacecraft that would have hovered at its center.

We’re forming the basis for how the future of space will look.

Prof. Mason Peck

Peck had hoped to have the simulator running by August, but the funding cut has scuttled the timeline. That could amount to the loss of tremendous economic opportunity.

Peck cites studies from NASA finding that taxpayer investment in the agency generates three times as much in economic activity. The simulator would also vastly expand the ability of small companies to enter the arena of space exploration and commerce.

---

Stopping Metastatic Cancer

For more than 20 years, Nancy Du, associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, has researched how metastatic cancer arises. With a $500,000 grant over three years from a DoD program, she was poised to study how to prevent cancer from spreading to the bones of patients with estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer.

“The first line of treatment for this type of cancer is endocrine therapy; but soon after treatment, the cancer becomes resistant to treatment,” says Du, also the Rasweiler Family Research Scholar in Cancer Research.

“So, we are trying to determine what makes the cells stop responding. We have a clue, and we are testing our hypothesis to develop a better treatment plan for these patients.”

Du had recently begun the research when she received a stop-work order from the DoD.

“We were very close to having enough data to begin testing our idea in the clinic,” she says. “Our project had been chosen for funding because of our promising results.”

---

Facilitating Employment for People with Autism

When autistic individuals land jobs in science and technology, they often thrive, yet many struggle to even get hired.

Susanne Bruyère, professor of disability studies in the ILR School, and a small team of researchers started a project in October 2024 to identify barriers in the hiring process that prevent qualified autistic job seekers from getting jobs. The National Science Foundation funded the project with $830,000 over 30 months.

But in May, the team received word that their project had been terminated.

“With an increasing interest in growing our manufacturing, our tech sectors, our AI sectors, this is talent that we need for the workplace of the future,” Bruyère says. “So thwarting opportunities to learn how to better recruit, hire, and retain this talent is going to cost American industry in a way that hurts our economic growth for the future.”

Thwarting opportunities to learn how to better recruit, hire, and retain this talent is going to cost American industry in a way that hurts our economic growth for the future.

Prof. Susanne Bruyère

The researchers undertook the project because employers had asked for help hiring this largely untapped labor pool.

Says Bruyère: “Talent is a top issue for most employers today.”

---

Safeguarding National Defense from Cyberattacks

“Semiconductors are at the core of everything we do in the economy and for national security,” says Sarah Kreps, the John L. Wetherill Professor in the government department. “Because they are so important, that also makes them a vulnerability and a target.”

In late 2024, the Cornell Brooks Tech Policy Institute (BTPI), of which Kreps is founding director, began a congressionally authorized assessment of risks in the semiconductor supply chain and how to mitigate them.

Congress appropriated $3 million in startup funding for the bipartisan, multiyear initiative, which BTPI was implementing under a cooperative agreement with the DoD.

An interdisciplinary research team commissioned a new cyber test range; initiated industry partnerships; and developed case studies about cyberattacks that have infiltrated chip supply chains.

But in April, a stop-work order put on hold the team’s plans to map and stress-test semiconductor supply chains, seeking to expose and then patch vulnerabilities.

Semiconductors are at the core of everything we do in the economy and for national security.

Prof. Sarah Kreps

Newly hired staff were laid off, including veterans, and the cyber test range is dormant. Previously, Kreps says, government officials working with BTPI had expressed enthusiasm about the project.

“They told us on a nearly daily basis that they need this assessment, and they need it now,” says Kreps, also a professor in the Brooks School. “They have been relieved that there’s a project like this.”

---

Helping to Protect Navy Divers—With Robots

Everybody needs a buddy—especially Navy divers. Working underwater is physically taxing, visibility is low, and divers can easily become exhausted or suffer from insufficient oxygen or nitrogen narcosis, resulting in cognitive impairment.

The problem with relying on a partner who can come to your rescue, however, is that they are vulnerable to the same conditions.

That’s why Cornell researchers are working to understand how robots can assist humans in dangerous and physically challenging environments.

Cornell researchers are working to understand how robots can assist humans in dangerous and physically challenging environments.

“We have these tools with amazing capacity, but for them to work with people, they need to be able to understand people,” says Andrea Stevenson Won, associate professor of communication.

“So if we have a robot buddy that can work with a diver when they’re doing these dangerous, challenging tasks in this really stressful setting underwater, then we can leverage all of the strength of the person—their intelligence, their ability to make good decisions quickly, to change strategies on the fly—and we can have a robot buddy that can keep them safe so that they can do that job again the next day.”

In April, Won’s research, funded by the DoD, came to a halt when she received a stop-work order.

“It’s frustrating, because we can’t continue the work that we had started on, but we haven’t heard anything that would let us know how to continue,” she says. “Without this funding, we don’t have the opportunity to help push the research forward.”

Top: Photo of Prof. Nancy Du's lab courtesy of Weill Cornell Medicine.

Published June 30, 2025

---

Comments

1. 

   Roberta Probber, Class of 1982

   6 Jul, 2025

   The depth and breadth of research that is being done is staggering. The cancellation of grants is not only potentially illegal, but it will result in our country falling behind economically and will likely convince our best and brightest to leave the USA. Cornell must stand with Harvard and other universities that fight against this decimation of our culture and country.

   Reply

Other stories You may like

• 

  • Bear Hugs

  Couple Flocks Together—Running the Lab of Ornithology’s Gift Shop

• 

  • Alumni

  Celebrating Big Red Pride—in June, and All Year Long

• 

  • Cornelliana

  Johnny’s Big Red Grill Sign Is All Aglow—in Ohio