Introduction

Donald Trump's administration has issued a flurry of executive orders and memos that impact researchers and science all across the nation. paused all federal grants many researchers posted on social media what they used NIH Funding for. I posted about how NIH funded many parts of my training and education as a bioinformatician.

https://bsky.app/profile/humbertoortiz.bsky.social/post/3lgtx36glik2a

I wanted to collect the posts here outside of social media.

• Executive Order "Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing"
• NIH caps Facilities and Adminstration costs at 15%
• Communications "pause" at Health and Human Services

What has NIH funding enabled?

NIH funding has supported me in every stage of my career: undergraduate, master's student, PhD student, staff, and faculty to work on problems from asthma to zebrafish.

When I was an undergraduate research assistant in chemistry, the NIH supported my work in a lab that studied new compounds for their potential to fight cancer.

In that lab I started to pivot to computer science after having the opportunity to work on remote computing facilities (NIH Prophet and Grateful Med).

I met my wife at a Minority Biomedical Research Support symposium with NIH funding, a program that would be classified as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion now (and thus be cancelled).

In grad school for master's level coursework in computer science, I used NIH funding to work on monitoring high-risk pregnancies with neural networks, then I moved to a part-time research assistantship working on the Human Genome Project.

In my PhD in computer and information science and engineering, part of the data for my dissertation came from my wife's lab, from students and researchers looking at how we learn and remember, with NIH funding through the SCORE program (another minority or DEI program).

NIH funding has been crucial in building and supporting the High Performance Computing facility where I've worked since 2000, paying salaries and providing equipment money.

The HPCf in turn uses NIH funding to support over 80 research groups across the entire island of Puerto Rico. These researchers have produced hundreds of papers, supported hundreds of students, produced over a dozen patents in a wide range of areas.

(Many of these researchers have their own NIH funding and #NSFFunding to support their work in areas ranging from drug discovery, addiction, materials science leading to new computing devices, medical devices, energy storage and production).

As a professor, NIH funding has helped us train 100's more students (from Puerto Rico, and the mainland US) in computer skills including programming and AI needed to do modern biology, mostly through Diversity Equity and Inclusion initiatives such as IDI-BD2K, IDGeNe, and NeuroID.