Three Penn research projects funded by the National Institutes of Health have been terminated by the agency in recent weeks.
The NIH notified Penn’s Office of Research Services of the grant terminations in letters addressed to former Associate Dean for Research Services Stuart Watson — who retired in 2022 — and Associate Vice President Elizabeth Peloso. The termination letters, obtained by The Daily Pennsylvanian, told the researchers that their awards were “incompatible with agency priorities, and no modification of the project could align the project with agency priorities.”
As a result, all three projects were immediately terminated rather than suspended. One project focused on researching the impact of HIV vaccines, while the other two examined nicotine addiction and vaping among sexual and gender minorities.
"HHS is taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned with NIH and HHS priorities," a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson wrote to the DP. "At HHS, we are dedicated to restoring our agencies to their tradition of upholding gold-standard, evidence-based science."
A request for comment was left with a University spokesperson and with Peloso. Watson could not be reached for comment.
One project, titled “Understanding the Regional Ecology of a Future HIV Vaccine,” lost funding on March 10, only two years into its five year timeline. It followed changes to vaccination policy in the United States, and the media attention around it — including conspiracy theories and general public reactions. The project also explored the possibility of a future HIV vaccine.
In the project’s termination letter, the NIH wrote that the award “no longer effectuates agency priorities.” It added that the project did not satisfy the agency’s obligation to “carefully steward grant awards to ensure taxpayer dollars are used in ways that benefit the American people and improve their quality of life.”
“It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research activities that focus on gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment,” the NIH wrote.
Associate professor Andy Tan spoke to the DP about the termination of two of his projects, “Project SMART: Social Media Anti-vaping Messages to Reduce ENDS Use Among Sexual and Gender Minority Teens” on March 12, and “Project RESIST: Increasing Resistance to Tobacco Marketing Among Young Adult Sexual Minority Women Using Inoculation Message Approaches” a week later.
“Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans,” the NIH wrote in the termination letters for both projects. “Many such studies ignore, rather than seriously examine, biological realities. It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize these research programs.”
“We are close to the end of our fourth year of [Project SMART],” Tan told The Daily Pennsylvanian. “We were anticipating to receive another [year], and the direct costs for the fifth year was close to about $450,000.”
The grant termination also lost the project over $200,000 in indirect costs, according to Tan. He described it as a “huge hit to the phase that we're in right now for this fourth year.”
Tan emphasized that losing NIH funding support would impact their ability to ensure their research is “rigorous and reproducible and ultimately useful for the LGBTQ+ communities.”
Project RESIST — a project to tailor “anti-industry, anti-smoking messaging” for young adult “LGB+ women” — has been fully funded by the NIH for the past five years. Tan said that he was “certainly flabbergasted” why the grant was terminated considering the project is already in the “no cost extension period,” meaning most of the grant funds have already been disbursed.
“There's never been a straight out termination without any recourse and without any cause for termination that are due to scientific or financial or some other kind of misconduct or adverse events to participants,” Tan said.
He added that terminating funding to projects such as RESIST threatens the “welfare, safety, anonymity” of vulnerable populations and their willingness to participate in future research.
“I think this set of actions will have a huge lasting impact on LGBTQ+-identifying individuals being willing to share their knowledge, experience, and data moving forward,” Tan said.
A research team member on Tan’s projects — who was granted anonymity due to fear of professional regulation — said she felt “devastated” by the termination.
The team member added that there are increasing concerns among those in the industry about securing new employment should they lose their current positions.
“[There is] a lot of fear in terms of what these positions are going to look like in the future, and what research is going to look like for folks who are looking to get into PhD programs,” she added.
Alongside consequences for those in the industry, a senior Penn researcher who worked on one of the terminated grants spoke to the DP about the broader implications of restricting research topics.
“It's worse, to some extent, than saying ‘let's just cut all the grants by 10%,’ because [they’re] looking for those that [they] don't like for a political reason, which is completely contrary to everything that science and the review of science at NIH or NSF is about,” the senior researcher said.
Looking ahead, the research team member confirmed that Penn will allow the project to continue for “at least a few more months.”
In the meantime, the project team is currently exploring opportunities to work on additional grants to keep current staff employed. Tan stated that these decisions “upend scientific infrastructure” and may have “generational impacts” on researchers and their careers.
“We can't lose their talent, their efforts, their skills, their expertise [that] has been built up over the years working on these two projects,” Tan said. “It will be a huge colossal waste of energy and time if our staff can no longer work on these projects.”
These cuts come weeks after the NIH implemented an indirect costs funding cut that could cost the University $240 million. In a letter addressing the federal action, Penn President Larry Jameson wrote that the decision would “severely harm our highly impactful research mission.”
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