In the laboratory, Sara Blick-Nitko searches for treatments for cancer. But before she could become a scientist, she had to find what deaf people like her call the "Deaf Scientist Pipeline."
The federal grants that make up that pipeline helped her earn a Ph.D., begin her post-doctoral research and overcome the multiple barriers that historically keep deaf students from becoming scientists.
"Growing up, I never met another deaf person working in the science field," says Blick-Nitko. "I didn't see role models."
Now, though, the path that worked for Blick-Nitko has ended.
Over the past several weeks, the Trump administration canceled a series of education grants that provided opportunities for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. These include the science grants that made up the Deaf Scientist Pipeline. Those paid for things like scholarships, mentorship programs, sign language interpretation, stipends for research supplies and travel to professional conferences.
Another program, canceled by the Trump administration, paid for graduate school scholarships to fill the shortage of teachers of the deaf.
These are small programs, a few million dollars a year for each. University officials and students say federal agencies gave vague explanations for ending the programs, saying they were no longer aligned with administration priorities.
With the cancellation of these competitive grants, Blick-Nitko's professional advancement got a bit cloudy. She had one year left on the federal grant that funded her post-doctoral fellowship to study how cancer cells respond to pharmacological drugs. Her lab director, she says, told her he will try to find other funds to cover her next year at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
Things are more uncertain for 24-year-old Matthew Peeks, who's just starting his career. Peeks felt he'd found his calling when, late last year, he went to work at a school for deaf students in New York City. He's a classroom instructional aide at the Lexington School for the Deaf, helping high school students and teachers.
"Everybody's very passionate about their jobs," he says. "And everybody really cares about these students and wants the best for them."
Peeks, the hearing son of two deaf parents, grew up fluent in American Sign Language. Now he wants to get a master's degree and move up to become a teacher.
But the federal grant program he applied for – to train teachers of deaf students – just got canceled. It was at Teachers College at Columbia University.
Peeks can't afford the tuition without that scholarship.
"I definitely feel like if things had been different, I wouldn't be feeling so, so lost and unsure about my future," he says.
The program to train teachers of the deaf and hard-of-hearing was set up to address a nationwide shortage. The Teachers College program planned to train 24 teachers over the next three years, says co-director Elaine Smolen.
"That doesn't seem like a huge number," says Smolen. "But the impact of 24 teachers working with 30-plus students a year, that's huge." She says the school can't train those teachers without that funding and it has filed an appeal with the U.S. Department of Education.
The federal agency did not reply to a request from NPR to explain why the program for training teachers was ended.
The National Institutes of Health, which funded the grants for the Deaf Scientist Pipeline, said in a statement that it is "taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned" with the administration's priorities to "directly affect the health of Americans."
Gerard Buckley says the loss of the grants will affect the health of Americans.
Buckley helped build the pipeline. He's the president of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, a science college for deaf and hard-of-hearing students at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Rochester, with the sign-language interpreters and support from NTID, is a center for deaf scientists.
This spring, he's had to tell his students that federal support for aspiring scientists is gone.
"They're naturally upset," Buckley says. "They tried to train for these careers. They really believed they were doing the right thing. They were ready to contribute to the sciences and the treatment of diseases."
His students, who he says are eager to contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the sciences, "just happen to be deaf."
"But they're interested in cancer," he says. "They're interested in HIV prevention, they're interested in pregnancy."
Michelle Koplitz says the sudden termination of her grant "has completely thrown my future plans in question." She made a mid-career change, giving up her federal government job in public health to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry.
She has one year left to finish.
Koplitz is studying how the long-term health of deaf children is affected when they're not taught American Sign Language or live and go to school with others who don't use it.
She's working with a deaf professor, Wyatte Hall, whose own career was boosted by the Deaf Scientist Pipeline. That funding for his postdoctoral research, Hall says, "certainly did open the door to my subsequent success now as a faculty member" and the "first-ever Deaf tenure-track faculty" at the University of Rochester Medical Center. (Deaf people use "deaf" to refer to the medical condition of hearing loss and "Deaf" to note a cultural and social identity.)
The canceled programs, which include U-RISE, Bridges to the Doctorate Research Training Program and the Initiative for Maximizing Student Development, were set up to help anyone from an "under-represented" group, including Black and Latino students, not just deaf students.
Earlier this month, the American Public Health Association and other plaintiffs sued the National Institutes of Health and then asked for a preliminary injunction to restore U-RISE and other research and education grants. "The sudden termination of funding places participating students at immediate risk of losing housing, income, and academic continuity," the association said in its lawsuit. The NIH has not responded to the suit.
Nikki Maphis, a plaintiff in that lawsuit, was waiting to hear a decision on her application for highly competitive research funding when she learned the program had been canceled. Maphis, at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, qualified as the first in her family to attend college.
Now she's not sure if she'll get the chance to keep doing her research on the link between Alzheimer's disease and alcoholism, because the government shut down the program she'd hoped would let her continue. "They are basically conveying a message that says, 'You're not good enough to be here. We don't want you here," she says.
Koplitz says the work supported by the pipeline helps counter bias and barriers faced by deaf people when they try to access the health care system. One common problem: Not being able to communicate with a hearing doctor or other medical professional.
Earlier this year, Koplitz spoke to deaf undergraduates at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she'd gone to college. Several, in a program that is now canceled, talked about plans to go to medical school. More than a dozen years ago, before the start of the Deaf Scientist Pipeline, Koplitz had given up her dreams of medical school.
So when she spoke to the excited students, she wondered: "If I had gotten that support …if my future would have been very different."
Now, she says she worries about her own future in science and for theirs.
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