""Emotionally, it stings," said Whited, associate professor in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, fighting back tears. "It feels very personal. It took me 19 years to build this axolotl colony and research program with a goal to ultimately help human lives. It couldn't have come at a worse time.""
""The strokes coming down are just so broad and heavy-handed," she said. "They were not really scrutinizing the individuals that were affected. But I find it very ironic the way we can be characterized as a bunch of ivory tower elitists who don't have any sense of what's going on outside in the rest of the world - even while our research is dedicated to solving hard problems that impact human health.""
Jessica Whited built a 19-year axolotl colony and research program to study molecular mechanisms of salamander limb regeneration with potential human-health applications. She won a Presidential Early Career Award and posed with her autoworker father and schoolteacher mother. Federal funding cuts during the later Trump administration eliminated five grants worth $4.2 million, roughly 90 percent of her research budget. The cuts damaged research across the University and left Whited emotionally affected. She criticized the funding actions as broad and heavy-handed and called it ironic that researchers are labeled elitists despite focusing on applied human-health problems.
Read at Harvard Gazette
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]