SACRAMENTO, Calif. \u2014 As smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted across North America, and western U.S. states girded for their annual fire siege, Neeta Thakur was well into her search for ways to offset the damage of such fumes on people\u2019s health, especially among minority and low-income communities.<\/p>\n
For more than a decade, the University of California-San Francisco researcher relied on federal grants without incident. But Thakur, a doctor and a scientist, suddenly found herself leading the charge for public health science against President Donald Trump\u2019s political ideology.<\/p>\n
Thakur, 45, a pulmonologist who also is medical director of the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital Chest Clinic, is the lead plaintiff among six UC researchers who in June won a class-action preliminary injunction<\/a> against the efforts of several federal agencies to carry out Trump\u2019s executive orders seeking to eliminate research grants deemed to focus on areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The administration has filed a notice of appeal, and the outcome, whether or not she and her colleagues prevail, could influence both the future of academic research and the health of those she\u2019s spent her life trying to help.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen this moment hit us, where science was really under attack and lives are at stake, it doesn\u2019t surprise me that she stepped up,\u201d said Margot Kushel, who directs the UCSF Action Research Center for Health Equity and has known Thakur for more than a decade through their work at the center and San Francisco General, the public county hospital.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t think our work should be political, to be honest,\u201d Kushel said. \u201cSaving people\u2019s lives and making sure people don\u2019t die doesn\u2019t seem to me that it should be a partisan issue.\u201d<\/p>\n Thakur said that after the abrupt funding cuts, she and the other researchers \u201cfelt pretty powerless and found that the class-action lawsuit was a way for us to join together and sort of take a stance.\u201d<\/p>\n The suit was filed independently by the researchers and allowed them to show the harm inflicted not just on their own work \u201cbut more broadly on public health and public health research,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Thakur\u2019s study, which received more than $1.3 million in funding from the Environmental Protection Agency and was set to run through November, explores the impact of increased wildfire smoke on low-income communities and communities of color, populations that already experience heightened pollution and other environmental health disparities. The goal is to find ways to help residents limit their smoke exposure, Thakur said, adding that the results could help people no matter their circumstances.<\/p>\n Preliminary findings show that smoke can trigger breathing emergencies among children days after exposure, knowledge that could lead to better treatment, and that smoke intensity may peak during just a few hours when protection is most needed, indicating the need for more precise and timely safety messaging.<\/p>\n Thakur said her studies on health equity and health disparities saw growing federal support during the covid pandemic and a national focus on racism spurred by the murder of George Floyd. The EPA had solicited the grant in 2021 for her and her team to research how climate change affects underserved communities.<\/p>\n Trump, in one of several<\/a> executive orders blocking federal funding for DEI programs, said they \u201cuse dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences\u201d that he said have \u201cprioritized how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing.\u201d<\/p>\n EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in March<\/a> that, in cooperation with the Department of Government Efficiency<\/a>, the administration had canceled more than 400 grants topping $2 billion \u201cto rein in wasteful federal spending.\u201d<\/p>\n The order by U.S. District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco temporarily blocking the grant terminations covered the EPA, as well as grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation. Lin\u2019s ruling was not a nationwide injunction of the sort restricted by the U.S. Supreme Court in a June decision<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Trump administration agencies affected by the order have reinstated the UC grants as the lawsuit proceeds. The government filed a motion for a temporary stay on the order pending the outcome of its appeal, but a decision had not been issued as of publication.<\/p>\n The EPA declined to comment on the judge\u2019s order blocking the attempted cancellation of the research funding, citing the ongoing litigation, and attorneys representing the government did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n Thakur defends the need for research that spotlights disadvantaged communities. Her interest in health equity stems from childhood experiences. The daughter of immigrants from India, with a physician and an engineer as parents, she grew up relatively well-off in a mixed-income neighborhood in Phoenix. While she prospered, however, she had friends who couldn\u2019t afford college or became pregnant as teenagers.<\/p>\n \u201cI see my research being directed towards trying to understand how where you live and what you experience impacts your health,\u201d Thakur said.<\/p>\n When the grants were suspended in April, the researchers were unable to finish identifying ways to help protect communities from wildfire smoke. Thakur had to dismiss a student intern and dip into discretionary funds to pay her postdoctoral fellow. At least three research papers that could have directly affected public health were in danger of going unpublished without the funding, she said.<\/p>\n The government reinstated her team\u2019s grants about three weeks after the judge\u2019s order, and Thakur is in the process of picking up the pieces. She\u2019s hopeful that researchers can publish two of the three studies they were working on.<\/p>\n Thakur said she is now cautiously optimistic after experiencing \u201ca roller coaster of emotions.\u201d Putting together a project and conducting the research takes years, she said, so \u201cto have all of that end suddenly, it brought me a range of emotions one thinks about when folks are experiencing grief. There\u2019s denial, anger.\u201d<\/p>\n But the Trump administration\u2019s actions have already sapped morale in the field. Rebecca Sugrue, Thakur\u2019s postdoctoral fellow and an expert in health equity and climate change, is rethinking her entire career path.<\/p>\n \u201cI kind of came to the realization that all the expertise I had built up were the kind of things that were being deprioritized,\u201d Sugrue said. She said she and other postdoctoral students and more junior members of the research team even had discussions about leaving academia: \u201c\u2018Unstable\u2019 and \u2018uncertain\u2019 were words that were used a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n The lasting damage is not lost on Thakur. If the grants ultimately disappear, universities won\u2019t have the typical programs to train students or to support academic research, she said, adding that, \u201cI think there are concerns that the sort of divestment from science and research in these particular areas will cause generations of impact.\u201d<\/p>\n This article was produced by <\/em>KFF Health News<\/em><\/a>, which publishes <\/em>California Healthline<\/em><\/a>, an editorially independent service of the <\/em>California Health Care Foundation<\/em><\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n KFF Health News<\/a> is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF\u2014an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF<\/a>.<\/p>\nUSE OUR CONTENT<\/h3>\n