President Donald Trump’s recent actions to curb diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in federally funded programs have created uncertainty for researchers like Kendra Dahmer, who studies intestinal parasites in India and Benin.
Dahmer, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, is supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research.
Her grant is intended to sustain her research through the summer of 2026, but she now questions whether that funding will remain intact. As the first in her family to graduate from college and a woman in science, she benefited from diversity-focused funding. Now, she is concerned about how Trump’s executive order targeting DEI could impact financial support for her field of study.
