Northwestern graduate students are taking part in a nationwide initiative, Science Homecoming, to advocate for the importance of science in local news commentaries. 

Rising seventh-year anthropology Ph.D. candidate Tabor Whitney wrote an opinion piece for The Daily in May to share how national budget cuts and specific stop-work orders and grant terminations at NU have impacted her and other students. She called cuts to science funding “a failure to invest in the future.”

Whitney said as she was writing her op-ed, University President Michael Schill released the numbers of how NU was being impacted by federal funding cuts.

“So I was like, ‘Perfect. I’ll go through and I’ll use these stats,’ and that kind of fueled my hate fire again,” Whitney said.

Whitney is working on another opinion piece for her hometown paper, The Vail Daily in Colorado, where she will discuss why federal funding is important to science and society.

Whitney learned about Science Homecoming through social media platforms like LinkedIn and Bluesky. 

She and rising sixth-year anthropology Ph.D. candidate Elijah Watson, who wrote an op-ed  for his North Carolina-based hometown paper The Citizen-Times, hosted a Science Homecoming event at NU following conversations with Medill Prof. Patti Wolter.

“At a time where these are the students whose labs are being closed down, and whose post-doc opportunities are being ruined, and who are on the front lines of the impact, giving them something that they can do and contribute and think hard about … I think is really impactful,” Wolter said.

Wolter spearheads Medill’s Media and Science Communication program, which both Whitney and Watson are completing the cluster for. Through this program, which teaches STEM students journalistic techniques, Wolter said she has engaged graduate students in conversations about the impact of federal funding cuts.

Whitney said she began to reach out to different networks of students at school, informing them about the four-hour event she and Watson planned to host in late May. 

The workshop provided participating students with time to brainstorm, write and even edit potential op-eds regarding the importance of scientific research for their hometown newspapers. Science Homecoming co-founder Steve Piantadosi also gave a brief presentation to explain the purpose of the initiative.

Wolter said she and other Medill professors helped students revise their drafts at the May event and a second Science Homecoming event. Rising fourth-year Biology Ph.D. student Gracie Siffer organized the latter event with funding from the Northwestern University Graduate Workers Union. About 70 students total attended between the two events, Wolter said. 

“Just the idea of having journalists on hand, journalism professors on hand, I think gives them all some confidence and a sounding board with some knowledge of how media works,” Wolter said.

Siffer’s op-ed published in the Toledo Free Press weighs in on the damage the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will cause to important, publicly funded research. She said she wrote most of her article at Whitney and Watson’s original Science Homecoming event. 

Siffer said science can feel foreign to people, and therefore researchers have a duty to “demystify” their work to make people invested in science’s impact.

“This is about the public opinion of science in America, and so we need to be focusing on creating sort of a societal shift in understanding of what it is to do research at a research institution like a university,” Siffer said.

Since her op-ed was published in July, Siffer has shared the piece on Facebook, garnering shares and comments, which she said felt “validating.”

As labs across the nation are shuttered and students find themselves facing unknown futures, helping researchers speak out is incredibly important, Wolter said.

“By giving them these tools, I think that it will have dividends for them their whole careers,” Wolter said. “Because they will be scientists that are unafraid to speak out, who are much more aware of how to talk to the public about their work.” 

Email: [email protected]

Related Stories:

— Northwestern highlights research efforts through ‘Research Matters’ campaign

— Internal NIH memo pauses additional research grant terminations

— Northwestern officials confirm ‘significant impacts’ on university research due to funding freeze