Physicists working on breakthrough medical treatments face an uncertain future

In a laboratory at the State University of New York at Albany, Carolyn MacDonald has been busy studying samples of human tissue, looking for the abnormal signatures of breast cancer. For years, her team has worked to develop new X-ray phase and scatter imaging techniques to catch these signatures. "We think this will lead to much earlier detection of cancer," she says.

But MacDonald is worried. Nearly five months into President Trump’s second term, the administration has already canceled or withdrawn an estimated $8 billion in grants to higher ed. Her team’s work, she says, “is not going to clinical [trials] without federal funding.”

This spring, MacDonald received an initial review for a recent grant application to the National Institutes of Health, but “what’s up in the air, of course, is whether [NIH will] actually have any money once the proposal is resubmitted,” she says. With the university’s help, she’s “scraped together some barely adequate funding” for her own students, but fears other students across the country — facing an unstable path — will leave American universities.

MacDonald is one of countless researchers working at the intersection of the physical sciences and biomedicine, where some of today's most promising medical advances emerge, and which now faces an existential funding threat.

In May, the Trump administration released topline figures for its budget proposal for the 2026 fiscal year, which foreshadowed drastic cuts to science. In early June, the administration published a more detailed account of these proposed cuts — including a roughly 40% cut to NIH’s budget and 57% for the National Science Foundation.

The president’s budget request is not set in stone; Congress must ultimately approve a budget, and both the House and Senate typically propose their own spending bills that can differ significantly from the president’s proposal. But the risks are dire. “For decades, the United States has been regarded as premier in graduate education,” says MacDonald. “That’s something we could be on the cusp of losing.”

The U.S. government’s support of research dates back decades. When the U.S. entered World War II, the government bankrolled over $9 billion in defense-related research and development. These investments helped defeat the Axis Powers, and in the war’s aftermath, they inspired a powerful realization in Washington: Scientific discovery can determine a nation’s fate.

A new paradigm was born, and the government adopted a fresh identity as the primary financier of the scientific enterprise. In 2023, the U.S. government spent nearly $190 billion on research and development, with roughly $60 billion directly supporting research in higher education. In 2020, U.S. institutions of higher education awarded nearly 42,000 STEM doctoral degrees, surpassed only by China.

This research investment has returned dividends — more than $5 in social benefit for every dollar spent, according to a 2020 paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research — and made U.S. science and technology the envy of the world.

But this engine of innovation is imperiled. The administration’s proposed cuts would affect researchers in every STEM discipline, including scientists who work at the intersection of physics and medicine, developing new therapeutic techniques and diagnostic tools.

Amanda Peiffer, a postdoctoral researcher in chemical biology at MIT, is also funded by NIH. “All the work I do — the experiments, the training of graduate students — is supported through federal grants,” she says.

Peiffer focuses on developing novel compounds to treat antimicrobial-resistant infections, which are on the rise. Major pharmaceutical companies seldom fund this line of research, she says, because it’s viewed as financially “risky.” So academic labs, largely supported by federal funding, have become the de facto home for fundamental research in the biomedical sciences, where “you have the freedom to explore new ideas.”

The administration’s proposed R&D funding cuts also include caps on indirect costs for grants issued by the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, NSF, and NIH. ‘Indirects,’ a type of overhead, allow institutions to recoup a range of expenses associated with research support, such as handling of biohazardous waste. For universities with biomedical research programs, the proposed 15% cap could leave entire centers without sufficient funds for the simplest expenses, like electric bills, says MacDonald.

“The whole machine stops without the federal funding mechanism in place,” says Peiffer, who is waiting to hear from NIH about multiple grants. “If we cannot get funding in, it will be absolutely devastating to the graduate students. The postdocs will inevitably have to leave,” including Peiffer.

While she had planned to pursue a career at an American university, she plans to exit academia for the private sector. “This is not the environment I’d been hoping to start my career in,” she says.

Kate Chain, a graduating physics major who plans to begin a Ph.D. program this fall, says that, fortunately, her future research advisor still has access to internal funds from his university. And Chain has a head start in her research area: stimuli-responsive elastomers, which could underpin a new generation of orthopedic support devices, like knee braces.

But her best hope for financial security during her doctoral studies would have been NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program, she says. Recently, the GRFP has awarded roughly 2,300 new fellowships each year, valued at about $53,000 annually per student. This April, the program extended just 1,000 awards for the next class.

Without the award, Chain says her advisor can only guarantee funding for three years. The typical STEM doctorate takes at least four years to complete.

Federal funding also set Chain on her current path: In college, she participated in two summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REUs). In 2024, NSF allocated $85 million to the program, which helps roughly 10,000 undergraduate students access research labs each year.

As an undergrad, “I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do career-wise,” says Chain. But her first REU experience solidified her love for physics, and the second set her on a course for graduate school. Now, “quite a few of my peers aren’t able to do REUs because the funding was cut,” she says. “We’re going to lose a generation of scientists.”

One national lab staff scientist, who asked not to be named, shares a similar sentiment. “Virtually all of my funding has been federal,” he says. Like Chain, he was first exposed to research through NSF’s REU program.

Today, he develops new methods for measuring nuclear properties, which could shape novel therapies for cancer. Figuring out patient dosage is “a major bottleneck with cancer therapeutics in clinical trials,” he says. His current work, supported by a federal grant, offers a promising approach for targeted therapies.

But he fears that the odds of future funding are shrinking. And if the research groups with whom he could collaborate on clinical trials — the natural next step — are dismantled by federal cuts, it would create a major “choke point.”

“I assume it would set this area of cancer research back by 10 to 15 years,” he says.

At a medical imaging company based in the U.S., one R&D scientist, who asked to remain anonymous, is similarly worried about the “long-term implications” of the Trump administration’s cuts to research.

After NSF funded his doctorate in physics, he completed a postdoc at a federally funded national lab before moving into the private sector. “A big part of the reason that our R&D division is located here, as opposed to anywhere else in the world, is that the U.S. has always been a really fertile location to hire people with Ph.D.s in STEM,” he says. But if the proposed budget cuts hit U.S. doctoral programs, “then five years from now, when we need to start hiring new people, there just won’t be any.”

“Eventually, it could get to the point where the company says we need to move our research group to a country where there are actually scientists who can work for us,” he says.

Doug Kelley, faculty at the University of Rochester since 2013, says the partnership between the federal government and U.S. universities has led to “a really great, well-trained [scientific] workforce” and “discovery after discovery.”

“America is an unreasonably innovative place,” says Kelley. “People debate about why, but almost everybody’s list of reasons includes the fact that we have the best university system.”

In Kelley’s research lab — home to scientists at every step of the career pipeline, from undergraduates to staff researchers — his team is studying the mechanisms that pump cerebrospinal fluid around the brain. Last year, they discovered that lymph flow in the neck slows with age in mice — suspected to be one of the reasons that the clearance of brain waste slows over time. The team also found that drugs that make lymph vessels pump faster can restore some fluid flow and waste clearance.

Findings like this could be revolutionary for the treatment of certain diseases, he says. For example, “we could do a lot more with diseases like Alzheimer’s, with stroke and traumatic brain injury,” he says. That’s why Kelley’s research has received funding from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, which is interested in its implications for U.S. combat veterans, as well as from NIH.

But today, Kelley is fearful of the Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts. And as of May 21, NSF and NIH — top funders for biomedical research — had already collectively canceled more than 3,000 awards, according to Grant Watch. Of NIH grants canceled, Grant Watch reports the tallies by keywords: HIV (206 grants canceled), cancer (133), brain (130), and aging (88), among others.

All the terminated awards amount to an estimated $1.9 billion from NIH and just over $1 billion from NSF. On May 28, the Department of Energy announced it had terminated $3.7 billion in clean energy projects. These canceled grants represent a savings of just 0.09% of the budget, given the $7 trillion in federal outlays in 2025 tabulated by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office.

“All of these things we’ve been building with the federal research funding, we’re just losing — all of that infrastructure, the capital of being regarding as the place to go to do research, all of these health studies that are in progress — in order to save this relatively tiny amount of money,” says MacDonald. “That’s absurd.”

These impacts are not inevitable, however. Many of the administration’s actions, including its cancellation of billions of dollars in NIH grants, have successfully been challenged in court. Other lawsuits are still moving through the legal system.

And the Trump administration’s budget proposal cannot take effect unless Congress approves. The final budget will emerge from negotiations between both congressional chambers, and it can look very different from what the president initially requested.

As a result, APS is mobilizing opposition through a 50-state advocacy campaign, aiming to reach legislators with a clear message: If enacted, the sweeping cuts would impact research in every state, and, in turn, the communities those institutions support.

APS members and non-members can play a key role in this advocacy campaign. To learn more about this work, and to help directly, visit APS in Action.