Read the full article by Steven Yoder at RAM’s New Times Magazine
At the start of a Friday morning seminar at UC Davis this past spring, a student we’re calling Tiana, a junior studying marine and coastal science, was joking with a friend at her table. “We were low-key loud,” she said. She tried to shush her friend — their professor, Connie Champagne, wasn’t overly strict though always started on time. But Champagne took a few minutes to goof around with them. “I think she was just trying to let us have a moment of some joy before she laid on the bad news,” said Tiana.
Champagne told them the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had notified the school that $1.3 million in grants, funding seven programs to help aspiring researchers like them, had just been slashed.
Those annual offerings, the oldest dating to 1988, prioritized students often underrepresented in science: those who were first in their family to go to college, young adults coming out of foster care and students from underresourced communities, said Champagne, who directs the college’s Educational Enrichment and Outreach Programs. They enabled hundreds of students in the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences to enter biotechnology, health sciences and other research fields.