With more than $200 million in research activity last year, the University of Alaska Fairbanks is Alaska's research epicenter.
Alicia Torok is afraid her work as a Climate Scholar through the UAF Honors Program, will be cut off.
“We do hands-on research. This is only offered through the climate scholars. This is a huge opportunity, but unfortunately a lot of this is coming to an end because the funding is being cut. So these opportunities for students to leave here and be able to step into jobs that benefit everybody is no longer existing,” Torok said.
Tuesday’s “Kill the Cuts” protest reflected others across the country concerned about federal research, healthcare, and education funding. It was publicized and supported by a coalition of labor and education organizations, including SEIU, AFSCME, and AFT.
Among other cuts in research funding, the National Institutes of Health last month began to pull back money it had already approved for research, including projects focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), LGBTQ+ health, and vaccine hesitancy, on the basis that the projects no longer align with American priorities, as defined by the Trump Administration.
There are currently 37 NIH-funded projects in Alaska.
Neurobiologist Abel Bult-Ito says that’s why they chose to demonstrate in front of the flagship science building named after Margaret Murie, the grandmother of the conservation movement and the first woman to graduate from what’s now University of Alaska Fairbanks.
“The focus is on biomedical research because that is so important for you know, healing people. I just read an article just last week that the first person was cured of sickle cell anemia with the gene editing tools that they now have. I mean, that would not have been possible with the without National Institutes of Health funding.”
With an annual budget of roughly US$47 billion, the NIH dwarfs the rest of the world's funders of biomedical research. And cutting that funding is impacting medical research in Alaska.
According to the Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research that tracks such funding, UAF gets about six and a quarter million dollars from NIH. (6,269,752) The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium in Anchorage gets a little under five million (4,867,351) The Sitka Tribe of Alaska gets a half a million ($597,625) and the University of Alaska Anchorage about $400-thousand (411,047.)
Effects of research cuts are rippling nationally and internationally, and Alaska scholars say they are feeling it. Kas Knicely (KASS NEYESS-lee) works for the Geophysical Institute.
“I had a DEI-related proposal that had been funded and then the funding terminated because of the executive order. But it was one project, and there are so many other people who are affected so much worse than me.”
Ingrid Johnson researches in the UAF Justice Department. She has published projects research on violence against women in Alaska.
“This spring I was going to apply for OVW funding. That's the Office of Violence Against Women, but they froze their funding in February, the beginning of February, and it's still frozen.”
She says Alaska, with the highest rates of violence against women in the country, needs to keep working on the solutions.
“So, this is important not only for violence against women research, but it's also important for all research on crime and justice. And so essentially right now there is no new funding for those topics.”
The University has calculated that every dollar in UA research generates $8 in the state economy.
