Mahina Robbins, a
second-year Ph.D. student
at the University of Hawaii
at Manoa, moved to Hawaii in 2023 to reconnect with her Native Hawaiian heritage and family while fulfilling a dream of becoming a volcanologist.
While Robbins remains on track to graduate in two years, she’s constantly on edge knowing that at any given moment, grant money from the National Science Foundation — which supports her research and life in Hawaii — could disappear.
She’s one of the many researchers at the University of Hawaii who are “on pins and needles,” according to UH Vice President of Research and Innovation Vassilis Syrmos, as they await notices of their grants being cut by President Donald Trump’s efforts to crack down on government spending for climate change and diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives.
As of Friday, 77 grant awards at UH had been terminated, stopped or were being phased out. Of those, 66 grants have been terminated, amounting to
$83 million in federal
dollars, according to a UH spokesperson.
The culminating effects of the cuts have affected more than 90 people as a whole, Syrmos said.
Financially, UH said that when adding up all of the federal funding, the $83 million in cuts funds the equivalent of about 69 full-time employees; however, many positions are funded partially through federal funds and partially through other funding sources like state funds.
Syrmos emphasized that while some of UH researchers have had 100% of their programs and salaries slashed, it is also common for principal investigators, or head researchers, to have multiple grants at once.
“A lot of our researchers and our staff are not on one grant. They are 25% on one, 50% on the other, 10% on the other, so it does affect more than 90 people, but that does not mean that their whole pay has ended,”
Syrmos said.
But that also doesn’t mean they’re out of the woods.
Syrmos said that even if these researchers have multiple grants at once, the odds of their other programs being cut are high, given that their field of work is already at risk at UH.
“Usually, that faculty member does work in a certain field, and you’re sitting back and saying, ‘Hey, one shoe dropped today — when is the other shoe going to drop?’” Syrmos said.
But the rapidly increasing and changing cuts concern Syrmos, who told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that in 2024 around 65% to 70% of UH’s extramural funding came from federal funds.
Despite the targeted cuts on DEI and climate change initiatives, Syrmos said grants have been cut across UH’s internationally ranked programs in astronomy, oceanography, linguistics, education, agriculture and cancer research.
The real-world effects, Syrmos said, are yet to be fully comprehended and will be long-lasting.
“This is going to take time, and the effects are going to stay with us for many, many years,” Syrmos said. “It’s very easy to tear down something, and it’s extremely difficult to build it up.”
The cuts in recent months are unlike anything Syrmos has seen in his
35-year career in research and higher education, he said.
“For a lot of these individuals, this is their life’s work,” Syrmos said. “To see your life’s work go up in smoke in a couple of months, it’s very difficult.”
Robbins said cutting off graduate students from the research sphere is like ending a career before it’s even started. More than that, by denying funding, Robbins said, it eliminates opportunities for students who do work and train professionally in the medical field, for cancer research and for scientific discoveries, which don’t happen overnight — or without money.
“It’s devastating in ways that we can’t comprehend,” Robbins said.
Robbins said the cuts also have dried up opportunities to break into an already male-dominated research field.
Robbins had planned on applying to UH’s School of Ocean and Earth Science Technology Wahine Awards, which amount to around $200,000 from the NSF and provide small grants of $2,000 to $3,000 to female scientists at UH to seek out external mentorship or conduct more research for their dissertations.
Robbins, for example, wanted funding to work under a female researcher at another university for professional development and lab research. Those opportunities “increase the probability of a female scientist becoming a professor or going further in her career,” Robbins said.
But 10 days before the
Wahine Award application was due, Robbins received notice from her adviser that the grant would no longer be available.
“This is an award that is accessible to students, and
I knew it would be accessible — at least, at the time I did,” Robbins said. “I was motivated to do this project because there was money. Without money I can’t do it.”
As a mentor, Noa Lincoln, an associate professor of agroforestry at UH Manoa and the principal investigator at the Indigenous Cropping Systems Laboratory, said he feels demoralized knowing that graduate students, particularly Native Hawaiians, who already have committed to doing “thankless work” are being denied opportunities that would positively affect the world.
Some students, he said, are “ready to throw in the towel.”
For now the university has not terminated grants with students in the middle of the semester, Syrmos said, allowing them to finish their semesters with other sources of UH funds. The university also has created applications for funding that could bridge students’ involvement in slashed research programs for three to six months “until another solution is found,” Syrmos said.
On Feb. 5, Lincoln received pause-work orders that terminated graduate
assistantships that pay graduate students their stipends, while waiving their tuition fees. While the university guaranteed that students with assistantships would be covered by institutional funds, those guarantees did not extend to hired lab technicians, Lincoln said.
That afternoon, Lincoln said he had to furlough
employees.
“Our staff in that situation got screwed worse than anyone,” Lincoln said.
While that pause-work order resumed in early April, Lincoln said other grants have dried up.
That includes contractual lab work, he said.
The Hawaii Ulu Cooperative — where he serves as the production adviser and a board member — was part of a $60 million contract from the national environmental organization The Nature Conservancy that funded the promotion of agroforestry across the country.
A few weeks ago, Lincoln said, the contract was completely rescinded.
“Usually with contracted services, you don’t get paid until after you’ve done the work, so that’s a bunch of work that we did and put up the money for on the good faith that we would be reimbursed,” Lincoln said. “Both the work moving forward is canceled, and now we’re fighting to get paid for the work that we’ve already done.”
Despite the uncertainty and rapid changes, Lincoln said he’s “fared better than many.”
After the COVID-19 pandemic, Lincoln shifted the funding of his lab research to an approach of keeping eggs in different baskets of state grants, philanthropic donations and public-private partnerships.
That saved him in the long run: Prior to the pandemic, Lincoln said, 90% of his grant money was federally funded.
“We’ve intentionally created a diverse funding network, so we’ve been able to absorb a lot of the shocks,” Lincoln said.
In an ideal world, Syrmos said, the college would be able to independently hold over projects that have been affected, but “unfortunately, we’re not the federal government. We cannot supplement for what a federal agency can give us. They have tremendous resources. The university does not have those types of resources.”
Meanwhile, the lack of federal resources leaves graduate students like Robbins, whose passion is research, in the dry.
Her dream is to stay in Hawaii, do community outreach in educating students about volcanoes like Kilauea and one day work at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.
But if the funding cuts continue and opportunities slowly vanish, Robbins said, she’ll have to move away. That’s the least of her concerns, though.
“This is about our world,” Robbins said. “Aren’t we so lucky that we have radar to tell us when a hurricane is coming? Aren’t we so lucky to have MRIs? Discoveries aren’t just made; you have to have people in there making a livelihood, getting training, making relationships.”
