Here’s a new one for my publications list: the Op-Ed pages of my hometown newspaper. I’ve spent the last weeks calling my congressional reps, and hassling other people to do the same, over the Trump administration’s vandalism of research funding (alongside its vandalism of just about every other function of the federal government), but it’s hardly felt like enough. One new option presented when I happened across Science Homecoming, a project to recruit scientists to speak out in support of federal research agencies in the newspapers of towns where they grew up. As Science Homecoming points out, local newspapers continue to have a huge audience across the country, and that’s an opportunity to reach people where they live, with stories that show how the current crisis impacts their local communities.
So I looked up the opinion section editor at LNP/LancasterOnline, the modern incarnation of the paper my parents have subscribed to since I was old enough to read it, which serves central Pennsylvania. I emailed her a pitch that I’d put together following Science Homecoming’s suggestions, and she wrote back to ask for a full column almost immediately. (The topic was already very much on the editorial staff’s radar.) A bit more than a week later, my column is online and in print, alongside a parallel piece from two geoscientists with local roots, on the front page of the Sunday Perspectives section.
I wrote it as a sort of thumbnail science memoir, recalling how I first got excited about studying the natural world thanks to a high school biology teacher who took the class outside to learn the names of common wildflowers. Federal research funding made it possible for me to follow that dream, and today’s budding botanists won’t have the same opportunities I did, if the Trump administration’s policies stand:
My journey from Manheim to the Mojave, inspired by Mr. Longenecker’s wildflower walks, was really made possible by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Grants from that federal agency supported research experiences I had as an undergraduate student, as well as the work I did to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Idaho, and then postdoctoral research at the University of Minnesota before I ended up at California State University Northridge. The biggest single source of support for my own lab has been a National Science Foundation grant, and my research plans for the next five years and beyond are laid out in project proposals I’ve been working to submit.
Now, however, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health — the bigger federal agency that funds biomedical research — are under unprecedented threat from funding freezes and cuts imposed by the Trump administration.
I’ll send you to LancasterOnline to read the whole thing. And, fellow scientists and technical professionals, let me encourage you to take up the Science Homecoming banner — it’s one more way to get the word out about everything that’s at stake right now.
