Fears of brain drain grow as Trump cuts take a toll on UCLA

Research that was years in the making — into diabetes, cancer, heart disease, strokes, PTSD and fighting antibiotic-resistant infections — is on pause at UCLA, nearly a month after UCLA saw around $500 million in federal grants suspended.

While a federal judge ordered the restoration of 114 National Science Foundation grants in early August, grants from the National Institutes of Health remain suspended.

Since then, researchers have been scrambling to save their staff and experiments. And they’re increasingly worried that the uncertainty seeping into the sciences will have longer-term effects on the next generation of researchers.

“One of the things that struck me is one of the undergrad students said, ‘I don’t know if I want to do science anymore if it’s unstable and constantly under political attack,’” said one researcher.

They’d never had an undergrad say that to them before.

LAist spoke with more than a dozen researchers whose funding is in limbo across various departments. Nearly all of them asked that LAist refrain from identifying them. Some because they weren’t approved to speak publicly by UCLA and others because they were worried that speaking out could make them, their research and their departments targets of the federal government.

UCLA has dealt with several controversies this year. The Trump administration’s stated reason for suspending the grant funding was its claim that the university did not do enough to address antisemitism on campus during protests and encampments against the Israeli war in Gaza. The administration later announced that it wanted $1 billion from UCLA to settle claims of antisemitism. Meanwhile, the school settled a lawsuit related to the protests for $6.45 million, and is facing a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice.

'The train’s derailed'

“It really hit our Alzheimer's program quite hard,” Dr. S. Thomas Carmichael, physician scientist and chair of the Neurology Department at UCLA, said about the cuts. He estimates that his department lost about $23 million. The funds were meant to cover staff salaries, faculty, experiments and more.

The research suspensions, he said, interrupted projects, including those aimed at understanding and treating brain damage in Alzheimer's, stroke and Parkinson's patients.

Several investigators were working on a new drug geared toward enhancing learning and memory in those experiencing damage in stroke and dementia.

“We’re at the stage where, hey, this works,” he said. “It does something different in these diseases that we haven't been able to do. So now we need to replicate it. And now we need to do a lot of the studies that show what dose can be given. Is there toxicity? Those kinds of things.”

Carmichael estimated that — assuming all went well — the drug was on a five-year timeline from discovery to clinical trials. Now, the research has been stopped.

“The train’s derailed,” he said.

For the next three months, the Neurology Department will be able to cover salaries for faculty, trainees and staff, as well as minimal research efforts by pulling from money that’s usually meant for high-risk, high-reward projects that NIH funding may not cover.

The funds should help researchers afford resources to keep cell lines and animal test subjects alive. Some could lose more than a year’s worth of intricate, long-running experiments.

It’s unclear what happens once the three months are up.

Some researchers have been pulling from more flexible personal funds, though that money is limited, too.

“Official information from university has been so thin it's been impossible to plan around,” one researcher said.

“The question is if the university is going to pick up the tab,” said another.

LAist reached out to the UCLA administration for comment, but hadn’t received a response before publication.

Fear of brain drain

Over and over, UCLA researchers pointed to brain drain as their biggest fear.

It takes years to build up and train a reliable team, researchers said. Losing them would of course have a negative effect on a given lab. But if PhDs and others pull out of academia altogether, the knowledge pipeline could collapse — not only within research institutions, but throughout industries such as pharmaceuticals and biotech.

“What worries me the most is the country is highly dependent on using these training programs as sources of highly skilled individuals, and that seems to be shrinking massively,” said a researcher who called this a slow-moving crisis.

For some, the growing instability in funding alongside the financial trade offs have already become too much.

Dr. Spyridon Hasiakos, an endodontist, said the suspension of his NIH grant was the last straw.

Though he successfully defended his PhD in December 2024, he said he waited about six months for his NIH grant to come through, only to have it suspended a few weeks later. The grant that was canceled was intended to cover his salary and some research costs for five years.

Hasiakos has long been focused on uncovering the relationship between oral inflammation and other systemic diseases, including diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis. He hoped to illuminate how immune cells can affect a patient's response to dental treatment.

After investing more than five years into learning how to do scientific research and becoming a clinician scientist, he has now decided to drop the pursuit and turn to private practice full time.

He said he loves exploring questions and making discoveries, but he can’t afford the financial risk given how much debt he has to pay off.

“ If you're funding is liable to be pulled on a whim, it causes huge disruptions to your ability to function,” he said.

Hasiakos said he earned about $70,000 a year as a PhD. In private practice as an endodontist performing root canals, he estimates he could make around $400,000 a year.

“If you have enough logic and intelligence to do a PhD, you should be smart enough to know not to continue down this road,” he said. "It feels that at this point, you pursue that as a passion. Sort of like an artist would pursue their career. It’s clearly not the route that’s going to lead you to the most secure financial place.”

Beyond his own position, he worries that entire fields could collapse.

“It’s a little scary. If you look at all the professors and everyone involved in academia, it’s becoming an aging population," he said. "At some point there's going to be a lack of young blood in academia, and I don't know what the impact of that is going to be — both in terms of educating young people and advancing research.”