Hi, I'm Flora Lichtenen, and you are listening to Science Friday.

Today in the podcast, a researcher who's fighting back against the federal cuts to science.

You know, initially I was feeling so helpless and just like, this is the end of my career.

Then I got angry, and then I said, I'm going to do something about this.

And now I'm suing the NIH.

Since January, the National Institutes of Health has made sweeping cuts to science.

They add up to hundreds of millions, possibly billions of dollars of research funding lost.

Some scientists are fighting back,

taking the NIH to court. And for the first time in months, they're seeing some small victories.

Last week, a Boston judge ruled that many of these cuts were illegal and said they needed to be reinstated. And this week, internal memos show the NIH might be walking back some of those

cancellations and stopping further cuts. A scientist at the center of one of these lawsuits is Dr. Katie

Edwards. She's the director of the interpersonal violence research lab at the University of Michigan.

We talked to her on Thursday. Katie, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me.

Katie, you study violence prevention, and I want to hear more about that in a minute, but since March, you've lost

eight grants, millions of dollars worth of funding. What's been the fallout for your research program?

So we received our first termination in March,

and since then, I think devastating and catastrophic are the only ways I know how to describe it,

or the simplest ways. First, it's impacted staff. We have over 50 staff, and they will be essentially without a job here in the

near future, and many of them are already at reduced hours. And that's really devastating.

I mean, it's completely paralyzed our research. We have, it's been chaos trying to scramble to

figure out how do we pause a study that we're in the

middle of an intervention for example trying to prevent suicide and depression among trans

...