Six months after Northwestern struck a deal with the Trump administration to restore frozen federal funding for research, student researchers remain worried about the future of research funding and its impact on their careers.
In April 2025, the Trump administration froze $790 million in federal research funding for NU, resulting in research labs, primarily in the Feinberg School of Medicine, McCormick School of Engineering and Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, being met with more than 100 stop-work orders for federally funded projects.
Communication senior Yaewon Woo, who works as a laboratory operations manager at the Creative Interfaces Research + Design Studio, said that although her research was not affected by the freeze, her friend’s lab had to admit fewer Ph.D. students due to the funding cuts.
“It’s a really sad thing to see because they definitely worked hard and have topics they want to research, but are unable to do so because of the federal cuts,” Woo said.
Woo said the federal funding freeze also impacted her friends who wanted to continue pursuing research after graduation, and made them consider a different career path because “there are less opportunities.”
SESP junior Claire Kim, who works as a design research aide at the Advancing Care through Technology Lab, said she witnessed the effects of the funding cuts when she saw her friend at the University of Pennsylvania being “let go” from the lab where she worked.
“If I did (want to pursue research post-graduate), it would definitely have me rethinking that,” Kim said.
Third-year Ph.D. student in psychology Erin Hugee, who works at the ReberLab, said her peers were reconsidering their dissertation topics.
Hugee said that many of her colleagues — regardless of whether their research faced direct consequences — felt growing uncertainty and restrictions about what studies can receive federal funding.
“There are a lot of people in the social area who do cultural work,” Hugee said. “That’s where their work has been grounded the entire time they’ve been in their whole Ph.D. And now they’re like, ‘Wait a minute, are you saying I can’t do my work? This is my work, and now, what am I supposed to do then?’”
Hugee described the funding freeze as “one of the largest blowbacks” felt by many academics and researchers.
She added that researchers felt the freeze’s impacts even in areas they didn’t expect to be impacted.
“If any lab is having their grants canceled because (the federal government doesn’t) like a word that they used in their experiment framework, that’s a problem for all of us — or it should be,” Hugee said. “Everyone should be bothered by that attitude towards research that’s being done, especially research being done in good faith.”
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