Arghavan Salles, a Stanford surgeon and clinical associate professor, led a five-year NIH grant developing interventions against sexual harassment in biomedical research until NIH terminated it midway through as “DEI-related” in June 2025, jeopardizing both her research and her position at Stanford. When she later applied for a new NIH award, an AI screening tool forced her to avoid core terms like “gender,” “equity,” and “sexual” — language central to her 15-plus years of research on gender equity and sexual harassment. Unable to accurately describe her prior work’s relevance, her application became significantly less competitive.

Abigail Hatcher, an independent public-health researcher and adjunct at UNC Chapel Hill’s School of Public Health, applied in September 2024 for an NIH grant to train early-stage investigators from underrepresented U.S. and South African communities on gender-based violence and HIV’s social determinants. Because of NIH’s censorship policies, she understood that she would need to omit terms like “underrepresented minorities,” “racism,” and “Black” and “Brown,” to receive funding — changes that obscured her work and weakened the application. As a result, Hatcher has abandoned a prospective application on race, gender, and equity in perinatal violence, and is now considering leaving research altogether.

Andrea Rosso, an associate professor of Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh who leads its Brain, Environment, Aging, and Mobility Lab, co-led a 2022 five-year grant studying how structural racism contributes to higher rates and earlier onset of Alzheimer’s Disease in two disinvested Pittsburgh neighborhoods. Despite her attempts to renegotiate the grant to align with NIH priorities, it was abruptly terminated on August 24, 2026. Without the final year of funding, Rosso’s team may be unable to assess whether four-year study participants have dementia and inform them accordingly.

Ann D. Cohen, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh who co-directs its Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, spent three years developing an application that secured a five-year grant studying structural and social determinants of Alzheimer’s risk. Three years in, after the team published over 40 articles, her NIH program officer demanded she remove “DEI-related activities,” so Cohen cut references to measures like poverty, segregation, and redlining. Yet, NIH still terminated the grant in July 2026 for “non-alignment” with its priorities. The termination jeopardizes stored blood samples, undermines a longitudinal study requiring participants’ return every 18–24 months, and halts further publications.

Dolores Albarracín, a University of Pennsylvania professor studying persuasive communication, misinformation, and behavior-change interventions, has had her NIH funding opportunities curtailed by policies targeting research reflecting disfavored viewpoints. In early 2026, her well-scoring application for an HIV testing and PrEP intervention—designed to oversample high-risk ethnic minority men based on evidence-based science—was approved only after she removed terms like “health disparities,” “ethnic minority,” and “Black person” at her NIH program officer’s direction. Albarracín remains concerned that deemphasizing at-risk populations undermines the research’s scientific value and public health impact, and worries about training future psychologists to address health disparities if the concept is stripped from academic research.

Heidi Moseson, an epidemiologist and senior research scientist at Ibis Reproductive Health, is a Multiple PI on an NIH grant studying barriers to pregnancy care, awarded to Indiana University in 2024. In August 2025, NIH pressured her to remove the word “abortion” and soften “policy restrictions” to “policy changes,” and in July 2026 she was again forced to renegotiate under threat of termination, this time reframing her research toward healthcare systems rather than policy. Though she reluctantly made both rounds of changes and received a new notice of award, Moseson remains deeply concerned the grant will still be terminated.

Jade Pagkas-Bather, an associate professor in Infectious Disease and Global Health at the University of Chicago, followed her PO’s advice in summer 2025 to strip race and gender references—including that Black and Latinx people living with HIV experience higher rates of poverty—from her NIH application studying a basic income guarantee for young people with HIV. Though the grant was ultimately awarded, her PO has since warned her it faces imminent termination. If terminated, participants relying on the income guarantee would be harmed, and Pagkas-Bather would be unable to publish her results, a significant setback for her career.

J.D. Daw, professor of Sociology and Demography at Penn State, led a four-year grant investigating how factors like education, homeownership, incarceration, and poverty drive racial and ethnic disparities in kidney failure outcomes, work NIH abruptly terminated as “DEI-related” in April 2025, with substantial work having been done on the project and significant community engagement. Though Daw continues the research at a much slower pace, without NIH funding, he can no longer publish final results or share findings with affected communities. He will also avoid future NIH applications on structural racism’s health impacts — his core area of study.

Katie Edwards, a professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan, has a pending application to evaluate an educational program reducing sexual violence among youth on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. In August 2026, her PO told her she must replace “gender” with “biological sex” to align with administration priorities, a change she fears could exclude transgender, two-spirit, and nonbinary participants. Concerns over being forced to erase LGBTQ+ individuals have also led Edwards to hold off resubmitting a separate application on dating violence and problem drinking among sexual minority youth.

Kelton Minor received the prestigious NIH Director’s Early Independence Award in 2024 to study how rising greenhouse gas emissions affect health-related behaviors like sleep and alcohol use, but the award was terminated. After joining the University of Copenhagen, Minor sought to transfer his reinstated grant to the Laureate Institute for Brain Research, but NIH called the transfer “out of alignment” with its priorities and pushed him to reframe his research away from “climate change.” Despite Minor’s compliance with this demand, NIH denied the transfer, leaving his grant likely to be terminated and his research unable to begin.

Michael D. Green, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, received a 2024 five-year fellowship studying links between healthcare discrimination, cardiovascular events, and cognitive decline, including Alzheimer’s and related dementias. After his first year, NIH required him to strip “DEI language”—which he understood to mean particular populations, including the word “Black”—to secure second-year funding, and he was forced to renegotiate again in early 2026 for a third year, resulting in a four-month delay in his fellowship. Green fears these repeated disruptions will continue to harm his career trajectory and research goals.

Sara Jackson, an assistant professor at the University of Utah College of Nursing, received a 2024 NIH grant to lead a five-year study on financial hardship among people with dementia and their care partners, with non-exclusive attention to LGBTQ+ individuals. When renewing year-three funding in 2026, NIH required her to remove all “DEI-related language,” including erasing LGBTQ+ mentions from completed research aims — a demand Jackson refused, causing her funding to lapse on June 30, 2026 with no word from NIH since. She now faces layoffs, discontinued research, broken promises to participants who shared personal stories, and will likely have to pivot to other research areas.

Suzanne Bell, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, conducts research funded by an NIH grant into how Dobbs v. Whole Women’s Health Organization and resulting abortion restrictions affect fertility, severe maternal morbidity, and infant outcomes, research that produced a peer-reviewed publication and two companion papers in JAMA within its first year. In summer 2025, her PO warned that the grant had been flagged as non-aligned with NIH priorities and urged her to remove all mentions of “abortion” and “Dobbs” to avoid termination. Though conflicted, Bell made the requested changes to protect the research and subsequently received continuation funding.

Jordan Doe 1, a university research scientist who studies policy impacts on reproductive health care access, applied for an NIH grant in 2025 and scored highly in peer review. Their PO advised them to remove the phrases “equity” and “structural nature of inequitable outcomes” to avoid signaling misalignment with NIH priorities, changes they made accordingly. Despite the NIH institute approving the application in spring 2026, the award was ultimately blocked by NIH officials outside the institute and never issued.

Jordan Doe 2, an assistant professor in the School of Public Health at a large university, researches structural racism’s role in diseases related to aging. After spending over a year developing a five-year career-development award application, it was granted but then abruptly terminated in mid-2025 as “DEI-related,” and the limited pilot and emergency funding they secured to bridge the gap has since run out, putting their position in jeopardy. The termination has halted their research and its dissemination, and their subsequent NIH applications have been hampered by the need to avoid language about her expertise that would be flagged by NIH’s screening tool.

Jordan Doe 3, a researcher at a university in the Northern District of California, led an NIH grant studying health issues affecting transgender people that was terminated in 2025.  Their PO advised them to remove terms like “transgender,” “gender-affirming,” and “hormones” to secure second-year funding; they complied and received the renewal, but the changes altered their research’s focus entirely by excluding transgender people instead of focusing on them. Doe 3 has also worked extensively on gender-affirming care for minors, but says NIH’s current policy—favoring research on the harms of such care over research without a predetermined conclusion over whether such care is harmful—has deterred them from applying for grants in that area.

Jordan Doe 4 is a university professor. Their research focuses on sexual violence prevention and sexual and gender minority health, among other areas. Given NIH’s current screening and censoring of grants for misalignment with agency priorities, Doe 4 has decided not to submit several funding applications in these areas that they developed over the last year, which they would otherwise have submitted. They need funding to continue to develop their LGBTQ-related sexual assault response work but do not see a viable path to receiving such funding from NIH given its current policies.