At the end of April 2025, four federal grants funding Dartmouth research in the anthropology and health-related fields were canceled by the National Institutes of Health. While the College appealed all four cancellation decisions, only one grant has been reinstated. The College “continues to monitor the status” of the three remaining cancelled grants, according to an email statement from College spokesperson Morgan Kelly.
Two of the terminated grants were Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award F31 Individual Predoctoral Fellowships, which fund students from underrepresented groups in health-related studies. A third was a $2 million grant from the Initiative for Maximising Student Development program, which provides stipend support, mentoring and other community programming for Ph.D. students engaged in behavioral, biomedical and clinical research. The fourth was a $141,000 grant from Increasing Diversity in Evolutionary Anthropological Sciences that funds mentorship and training to reduce the underrepresentation of minority scholars in biological anthropology.
The other cancelled grants are “receiving or seeking,” support from “other funds,” Kelly wrote.
“Dartmouth continues to work with these researchers and other affected grantees to help them maintain support for their work,” Kelly added.
Biology professor Magdalena Bezanilla, who helped start Dartmouth’s IMSD program, said the cancellation of grants was “devastating.”
“We spent a lot of time developing this programming, having student programming,” Benzanilla said. “We would meet with them every two weeks during the term. It was a great community of students, and it just felt like a really big loss to not have that support anymore.”
All 43 IMSD grants nationwide were cut. Sixteen have been reinstated.
As a result of the grant’s cancellation, Benzanilla said participating graduate students at Dartmouth have felt “a lack of community” due to the elimination of the program’s “enhanced mentoring, cohort building activities and a community so that they could feel like they belong in science.”
Bezanilla added that the Guarini School of Advanced and Graduate Studies “continued to provide stipend support for the students who have received the award originally” to replace the loss of money after the IMSD grant was canceled at the College.
Medical treatment researcher and Ph.D. candidate Jesse Boggis, who is currently researching treatments for opioid use disorder, was one of the Dartmouth students whose F31 grant was cancelled in April 2025. She said that while the cancellation did not cause her any overall “delays” in her research, “no scientist” she “ever knew or talked to” had “navigated this before.”
She said Dartmouth appealed the decision but has not heard anything back.
“That’s kind of surprising,” Boggis said. “It has been very quiet. It is kind of weird that there are no updates.”
Cell size control graduate researcher Sarah Vandal, who applied for an F31 in April 2024 and received funds from January 2025 until the grant’s cancellation in April 2025, said she had “noticed” that the grant faced the possibility of being cut for future applicants when she was applying. She said that the email she received in April about the grant’s termination implied that her funding would be cut was “general” and implied her grant — which she had already been promised to receive — was “grouped in” with the national cancelation.
“It was a little unclear whether or not I would still be receiving money from this fellowship, whether it would stop in a couple of months or whether it would stop right then and there,” she said.
Vandal said she received notice that the Office of Sponsored Projects would be filing an appeal for her termination notice. In September 2025, she was informed that her funding would be reinstated.
In December 2025, Vandal received another notice from NIH that her grant had to be renegotiated to align with the “new priorities” of NIH, which included research topics “no longer focused on diversity, equity and inclusion, climate change, vaccine hesitancy.” She said her project did not focus on the topics prior to the grant cancellation.
After agreeing to the new terms, Vandal’s grant funding was confirmed.
In an email statement, Kelly wrote that the College “continues to monitor any subsequent communications or actions from NIH” regarding canceled research funding.
Madeline Kahn Ehrlich '29 is a reporter from upstate New York. She is considering studying English and Public Policy. She enjoys creative writing, art and reading historical fiction.
