What question did this study set out to answer?

To assess the impact of NIH grant cancellations on funding distribution among genders and early-career researchers.

April 25, 2026C&EN Global Enterprise0 citations

Women and early-career researchers hit hardest by NIH grant cancellations

Key Points

To assess the impact of NIH grant cancellations on funding distribution among genders and early-career researchers.
Analyzed NIH grants canceled between February and August 2025 using the Grant Witness database.
Ventured into NIH RePORTER for details on funding amounts and grant types.
Used computer algorithms to infer gender from names and confirmed identities when possible.
NIH canceled or paused 2,291 grants totaling $2.45 billion during the study period.
Women experienced a higher percentage of funding loss compared to men, though men lost more total money.
Early-career researchers lost a significant portion of targeted grant funding.

Abstract

Shortly after the second Donald J. Trump administration took office, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) canceled or paused thousands of previously awarded grants. Those cancellations did not affect everyone equally, according to an analysis published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A.: Women lost greater proportions of their funding than did men, while men lost more money as a whole. Early-career researchers also lost hundreds of millions in grants designed to help them launch into biomedical research. “While headlines quickly reported the scale of the cuts, we realized there was very little information about who was actually being affected,” lead investigator Diego Fregolent, a computer scientist at the University of North Dakota who has studied gender differences in science funding, writes in an email to C the agency froze another 1,534 grants. At the 10 institutions with the most terminations, men

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