The Scientists Who Lost the Most When NIH Cut Grants Were Disproportionately Women and Early-Career Researchers

Minoli Perera had spent years building an NIH-funded research program at Northwestern University studying how African ancestry affects medication responses — specifically, whether the blood thinner clopidogrel works differently in patients with mixed European, African, and indigenous genetic backgrounds. The NIH terminated her grant in 2025, citing what it described as non-scientific diversity categories. She had already spent roughly $250,000 of a $500,000 award on infrastructure. The remaining work — the clinical validation that would have made the research useful to physicians prescribing clopidogrel to diverse patient populations — will not happen.

Perera's story is not an outlier. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on March 23, 2026, analyzed NIH grant terminations over the past year and found a pattern that goes beyond individual cases: women and early-career scientists absorbed a disproportionate share of the damage.

The Numbers Behind the Disparity

The PNAS analysis found that women who lost NIH funding saw an average loss of 57.9 percent of their grant portfolios. Men lost 48.2 percent. The nearly ten-percentage-point gap is not explained by differences in grant size or research topic — it reflects structural patterns in who holds what kinds of grants and at what career stage.

Among doctoral students and assistant professors, 60 percent of terminated grants were led by women. This is striking because women already receive less NIH funding than men overall, meaning the terminations hit a population that was already underfunded relative to their representation in the scientific workforce. The researchers found that women and early-career scientists were more likely to hold smaller grants and to be in earlier project phases when cuts occurred, amplifying the disruption.

Training grants were particularly impacted. Donna Ginther, one of the study's authors, warned that these terminations could "derail scientific careers just as they are getting started." Training grants fund the pipeline — the postdoctoral fellowships, the graduate student support, the mentored research experiences that turn promising students into independent investigators. Cutting them does not just end a single project. It removes a rung from the career ladder that future scientists need to climb.

NIH responded that it "allocated its full budget" and maintains "a fair and objective review process" based on scientific merit. The agency denied any intentional bias in how terminations were distributed. But the PNAS authors argue that the structural patterns speak for themselves: when you cut grants disproportionately held by women and early-career researchers, the impact is disproportionate regardless of intent.

A Survey of a Thousand Broken Labs

The PNAS data quantified who lost funding. A separate STAT News survey of nearly 1,000 NIH-funded researchers, published the same week, documented what happened next.

More than 25 percent of respondents reported laying off laboratory members. Over 40 percent canceled planned research projects entirely — not delayed, canceled. Forty-seven percent had to pause experiments or studies, and 61 percent adjusted project timelines or milestones to fit reduced resources.

The career implications are cascading. Eighty-one percent of junior tenure-track researchers expressed serious concern that disrupted productivity could jeopardize their tenure prospects. In the academic system, tenure decisions hinge on a six-to-seven-year record of publications, grants, and research productivity. A year of stalled experiments, laid-off staff, and unfunded projects does not show up as a footnote in a tenure file — it shows up as a gap that promotion committees will evaluate.

Perhaps the most damaging signal: two-thirds of surveyed researchers have advised students to pursue careers outside academia. The people closest to the next generation of scientists are actively discouraging them from entering the profession. That advice, once given, is difficult to reverse. A student who pivots to industry consulting in 2026 is unlikely to return to academic research in 2030, even if funding recovers.

The Human Cost Behind the Percentages

The survey follow-ups put faces on the statistics. UCLA's Center for Behavioral and Addiction Medicine was reduced by 40 percent. One scientist took a 95 percent pay cut to avoid laying off staff — essentially working for free to keep a laboratory operational. In Puerto Rico, patients withdrew from diabetes prevention trials because the research infrastructure supporting their participation disintegrated.

An Ohio researcher on the cusp of launching her first independent laboratory to study endometriosis — a condition affecting roughly 190 million women worldwide — lost funding as her employment contract was expiring. A Baltimore HIV researcher saw his grant canceled with data from hundreds of patients sitting unanalyzed. Those patients consented to research participation with the understanding that their data would advance scientific knowledge. Instead, their contributions may never be published.

Steve Shoptaw of UCLA captured the emotional register: "This is like the Titanic hitting the iceberg. People are still eating at the table, music's still playing, and yet the ship is sinking."

Only 35 percent of researchers whose grants were cut or delayed reported full restoration by the end of 2025 — despite court reversals of some terminations and Congress explicitly rejecting the administration's proposed NIH budget cuts. The gap between what Congress funded and what NIH distributed reveals an operational problem that appropriations alone cannot fix.

Why This Pattern Matters for Everyone Seeking Funding

The demographic disparity in NIH grant terminations is not just an equity problem for women and early-career scientists. It is a structural signal about how federal funding disruptions cascade through the research enterprise in ways that are predictable but rarely planned for.

Researchers at vulnerable career stages — those without tenure, without large diversified portfolios, without institutional endowments to bridge funding gaps — bear the greatest risk when agencies contract. This has always been true during budget squeezes, but the current environment combines budget pressure with political screening, forward funding constraints, and administrative delays in ways that compound the vulnerability.

The PNAS findings also raise questions about the composition of the scientific workforce five to ten years from now. If women and early-career scientists are absorbing disproportionate losses today, the demographics of senior researchers in 2035 will reflect those losses. Fields where women have made the most recent gains — genomics, behavioral health, health disparities research — may see those gains reversed not by any explicit policy but by the structural distribution of funding cuts.

What Affected Researchers Should Do Now

Document everything. If your grant was terminated, maintain records of the termination notice, any communications about the rationale, and the status of your research at the time of termination. This documentation matters for institutional advocacy, for potential legal challenges, and for explaining gaps in your publication record to future reviewers and tenure committees.

Diversify aggressively. The STAT survey data shows that researchers with funding from multiple agencies weathered the disruptions better than those dependent on a single NIH award. The Department of Defense's Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs, NSF's biological sciences portfolio, the Department of Energy's biomedical AI initiatives through the Genesis Mission, and foundation funding from organizations like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative all support research that overlaps with NIH's mission.

Target training grant alternatives. If your training grant was terminated, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, the Ford Foundation Fellowships, and institutional funds may provide bridge support. Some universities have established emergency research continuity funds specifically in response to the current NIH environment.

Engage your institution. Universities negotiate with NIH on behalf of their researchers, and institutional advocacy carries weight that individual researchers cannot generate alone. Government affairs offices, research deans, and faculty senate leadership should be aware of the demographic patterns the PNAS study documented — particularly if your institution is preparing testimony or comment letters for upcoming appropriations hearings.

The data published this week makes something concrete that many researchers have felt intuitively: the current NIH environment is not equally difficult for everyone. The scientists with the least institutional protection are absorbing the greatest share of the disruption. Understanding that pattern clearly is the first step toward building strategies that account for it — and tools like Granted can help researchers identify alternative funding sources and build competitive proposals across multiple agencies while the NIH landscape remains volatile.