As US federal grants remain frozen and budget cuts loom, anxiety and fear grip early-career researchers.
The first in her family to go to university, Suzanne Autrey pushed herself to the brink chasing an academic career. She is now an assistant professor at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, and takes delight in teaching geology to other first-generation university students. “I know first-hand that a degree to them doesn’t just change their lives,” Autrey says. “It changes their families’ lives.”
Now, like some other early-career scientists in the United States, Autrey feels her dream of a research career slipping away. The tick-tock of her tenure clock echoes in her ears as she checks and rechecks the status of two crucial grant applications. Both are stalled at the US National Science Foundation, an agency facing the prospect of large budget cuts. She can’t do the research needed to support her tenure bid without those grants. “I’m dead in the water if I can’t get one,” she says.
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