EDITOR’S NOTE: The University Times reached out recently to some of the Pitt faculty who have had their federal research grants terminated during the past six months, to show the impact that these changes have had. If you’re interested in telling your story, please contact us at utimes@pitt.edu.
By SHANNON O. WELLS
Along with many of her fellow researchers relying on federal grant funding, Daria Van Tyne has experienced a turbulent first half of 2025. A couple recent twists of fate, however, indicate calmer waters may lie ahead for her current project.
In April, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) canceled a supplemental grant — classified a “Research Supplement to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research” — that provided primary financial support for Van Tyne’s graduate assistant.
This left Van Tyne, assistant professor in the Department of Medicine, not only without a collaborator but also wondering if the $1.8 million primary, or “parent,” grant supporting her research into the causes of antibiotic-resistant “superbug” infections in vulnerable patients, might also be threatened.
Fortunately for Van Tyne and her assistant, who is a year away from graduation, the School of Medicine offered to cover the remaining amount of the stipend that vanished with the canceled supplemental grant. In further good news, Van Tyne also has learned that the parent grant from NIH will continue for her “Adaptation of vancomycin-resistant enterococci during bloodstream infection” project.
“I had a slight concern that the parent grant … might be affected,” she said. “That would be catastrophic to our research program, and happily, I’ve received the notice of award to continue funding of the parent award.”
Despite the supplemental funding being canceled — along with stress and strife from all the waiting and wondering — Van Tyne is choosing a glass-half-full approach.
“As an optimist, I’m like, ‘Well, it could have been a whole lot worse,’” she said. “But it wasn’t. We had to wait an unusually long amount of time to receive this notice of award.’”
In addition to bureaucratic and administrative delays, Van Tyne suspects her parent grant was under increased scrutiny because its supplemental funding was canceled.
“It created additional administrative delays to get the original grant,” she noted, “which had nothing to do with this supplemental funding or the diversity support request.”
Although Van Tyne isn’t entirely certain why her research project was spared amid the spate of White House executive orders targeting funding for higher education research, she has a feeling it involved the systemic uncertainty amidst a sudden shakeup of the research funding status quo.
“I think this system is set up so (supplemental funding) gets tagged on, and then it travels together with the parent grant,” she explained. “What has happened now is unprecedented, where you have a supplemental portion of a grant like this get canceled, and now the process of disentangling and separating the two back out again … and making sure that the numbers all add up and make sense takes additional time (and) administrative work.”
Van Tyne said she also thinks the focus of her project, studying and figuring out better ways to prevent and treat infections from antibiotic-resistant superbugs, helped keep it from the chopping block.
“There’s nothing about training or DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) in the research grant at all,” she noted. “It’s purely research.”
This marks a shift away from what Van Tyne called a “push” by Pitt administration in recent years to make investigators aware of the NIH diversity supplement program so they could request additional funding if they desired.
“They would get additional funding for training students, and then (Pitt) would also get some additional funding from the indirect costs that get paid on any research funds that come to the University,” she said.
Around February, Van Tyne began hearing about White House-mandated NIH funding cuts. Before she heard anything from NIH, reports from the news media and her research colleagues indicated that NIH had terminated its diversity supplement program.
“They would no longer accept applications for the program. They would cease to review any application that had been submitted. They would not pay any new applications,” she said. “And they would actively terminate any awards that had been already made.”
However, it took some time for this mandate to reach her research project.
“I was anticipating that something like this would happen, and then at the end of April, it actually did happen,” she said. “I received a notice from an NIH administrator saying, ‘This supplemental funding award is now terminated. You will not get any more funding.’”
Van Tyne contacted leadership at the School of Medicine and explained the situation. “And they very helpfully offered to continue to support the (graduate) student,” she said. “The funding that the student was meant to receive from this administrative supplement … they can be supported by the School of Medicine, sort of as a gesture of goodwill, which, of course, I deeply appreciate.”
A downside, however, is the difficulty in explaining the situation to a research trainee.
“Because the conversation is basically me telling the trainee that the funders of our research don’t value their training and don’t think that they should receive extra support to get trained,” she said. “That’s a difficult conversation to have with a trainee, who is here because they want to work in biomedical research.
“It’s very difficult for me as a mentor to advise the trainees in my lab in this kind of a situation, because the future in this political climate — especially for trainees — is very uncertain.”
Van Tyne acknowledged the difference between her position and that of graduate students trying to get experience and a foothold in medical research.
“A lot of things would have to go wrong for me to not have a career or have a job anymore, but very little has to go wrong for a trainee to be pushed out of the biomedical research workforce, especially in academia,” she said. “This is one more thing now we have to fight against to try to keep trainees with high potential interested and motivated in pursuing a career in biomedical research.”
The struggle, however, did not start with the second Donald Trump administration at the beginning of this year.
“Pre 2025, there was some angst and some existential dread around the state of the academic biomedical research workforce, and fewer and fewer postdocs and more and more PhD student trainees that would leave academia and go to work in industry,” Van Tyne observed. “And I think that in the last six months, all of that has become exacerbated and exaggerated.
“It’s almost like if we thought it was bad before — and we did think it was kind of bad — now we are nostalgic for how good it was back then.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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