UCLA researchers host science fair to showcase work suspended by the Trump administration

On Thursday evening, dozens of researchers hosted a science fair at UCLA aimed at showcasing the work that’s been suspended by the Trump administration.

The administration’s stated reason for freezing $584 million in grant funding is that the university did not do enough to address antisemitism on campus during protests and encampments against the Israeli war in Gaza. Later, the administration announced it wants $1 billion from UCLA to settle those claims.

UAW 4811 — the union that represents student workers, postdocs and academic researchers across the UC system — hosted Thursday’s event, the second such science fair this week in response to the federal cuts. The event was open to the public, geared at helping community members and state legislators learn about what’s at stake.

After setting up their posters in a courtyard at Rolfe Hall, the researchers and attendees gathered around biology postdoc Sydney Campbell.

“We have engineers at the Veteran Center developing joint replacements that would prevent 5,000 amputations per year,” she told the crowd. “We have a leading Alzheimer's research team whose work has been halted as they near a breakthrough. And we have scientists working to revolutionize immunotherapies so that children diagnosed with cancer have a better chance of survival.”

Cole Peters is among the latter. He and his team, part of UCLA’s pediatrics department, are engineering T-cells to target proteins expressed by sarcoma tumors. Sarcoma is a rare type of cancer that originates in the body's bones and soft tissues, including muscles, blood vessels, nerves and tendons.

Peters and his team “take out the cancer patients' own immune cells,” he told LAist. “We manipulate them so that they're able to target the cancer, and then we put it back into the patient.”

This technology, Peters added, “was developed about 10 years ago. But after about 30 days, the patient's new T-cell product sort of just dies out — it stops killing the tumor. And so, the holy grail that cancer researchers are looking for now is how to continue that response and make the cell product continue to kill the tumor, so that the tumor doesn't come back.”

Currently, the five-year survival rate for pediatric sarcoma is around 66%, he said — “which means 44% of the kids that get these tumors are going to die.”

Martín Alcaraz Jr. is researching lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer death.

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Maya Weissman is researching adaptations in the human microbiome, which can affect health.

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Samantha Herman is part of the UCLA Anatomics Lab. Their colleagues are working on designing durable joint replacements for every part of the human body.

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Julia Barajas

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In a follow-up conversation, Peters said his salary’s been budgeted until May. After that, he said, “our boss would probably have to let a couple of us go, if the money doesn't get unsuspended.”

Peters wants the public to understand that by suspending funding, a research project "really gets set back by multiple years, not a couple months.”

“It's not like a car running on gas, and you just put more gas in the car [when it runs out],” he said. If a project falls apart, “It'd be like your car ran out of gas, and the engine fell out and exploded, and you have to basically build a new car.”

In August, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restore the 114 National Science Foundation grants it had terminated across the University of California. But these only represent a portion of the 800 federal science research grants suspended at UCLA. Researchers hope National Institutes of Health grants will also be restored.

Peters said he can empathize with people opposed to government waste. Still, he cautions against cherry-picking which research projects deserve funding.

“Science is all very interconnected. So, even if you think cutting research that sounds ‘woke’ is good because you don't like that ideology, you never know what it's actually going to lead to,” he said. “I mean, I'm a virologist. And now we're using those viruses to deliver these gene products to improve the immune system.”

“Everyone in the scientific community builds off each other's work,” he added. “And so, by cutting any of it, you're really affecting all of it.”