Education

‘It’s the Worst Situation’: UIC Staff Decry Possibly ‘Devastating’ Funding and Research Cuts

Researchers and professors at the University of Illinois Chicago on Wednesday warned federal funding cuts proposed under the Trump administration would be devastating not only to the school’s research capabilities — but also to those whose health and livelihood depend on it.

“It is research that is essential, it is research that is nonpartisan, it is research that improves lives and improves communities,” said Aaron Krall, president of the UIC United Faculty union. “This is deadly serious, these are life-and-death matters.”

The union has said proposed cuts in grant funding by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would put educational and research activities at the university in peril.

Last week, a federal judge in Massachusetts temporarily blocked the NIH from slashing funding for medical and public health research at universities after attorneys general from nearly two dozen states, including Illinois, filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for attempts to cut medical research funding.

The NIH awarded more than $1.2 billion in funding to Illinois last fiscal year, most of which went to universities, but also to hospitals and other research labs.

Krall said UIC alone relies on $500 million in federal funding to conduct life-saving research.

Kirsten Almberg, a professor in UIC’s School of Public Health, pointed to four other CDC-funded research and training grants at the university that could be cut. Those include programs that aim to identify and evaluate interventions to protect the most vulnerable workers in Illinois and help train the next generation of occupational health and safety professionals.

If those programs alone lost funding, 28 faculty members and 18 additional staffers would likely lose their jobs, according to Almberg, while the research loss would be “devastating for the school and the communities who depend on the work that we do.”

“The proposed reductions in federal funding … would decimate our School of Public Health and the university more broadly,” she said, “but most importantly these cuts would irreparably harm the public’s health and well-being.”

University of Illinois Chicago faculty hold signs denouncing possible federal funding cuts during a rally at the school on Feb. 19, 2025. (WTTW News)

Barbara Di Eugenio, a professor in UIC’s Department of Computer Science who researches AI in health care, said two of her grants through the NSF have been flagged as “woke, DEI” research and could lose funding.

Those are part of nearly 3,500 grants identified by the Senate’s Commerce Committee, which Di Eugenio said has launched an investigation into all NSF grants awarded under President Joe Biden’s administration based on searching for specific words within the text of these proposals.

“The way they flagged these grants is they looked for words like ‘women,’ ‘female,’ ‘minority,’ ‘bias,’ ‘green energy’ — that gets you on the list of 3,500 grants,” she said. “But apart from any other consideration, taking words out of context is meaningless.”

Timothy Koh, a UIC kinesiology professor, said he has a grant under consideration by the NIH and had received promising feedback last year, but a committee meeting where funding decisions were set to be made earlier this month was abruptly canceled.

His existing grant is set to expire at the end of February and without new funding he’ll face “very difficult decisions” about the future of his research and which assistants he’ll be able to keep on.

Koh said professors and researchers are facing similar situations in thousands of labs across the country.

“It’s the worst situation that I’ve encountered in my 25-year career here,” he said.

Eunice Alpasan contributed to this report.

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