A loud din rumbles through the Hodges Taylor Gallery in South End as spectators discuss the canvases and sculptures that fill its rooms. Paintings depict spectral explorers, and prints show fractured rocks drifting through space.
“I really like that he captures a lot of the different kinds of angles that it has,” said Dani Ferguson, a UNC Charlotte student. “A lot of them seem regular, but then you look closer and there's more variation than first appeared.”
Ferguson said the granular detail enticed him to look closer and closer at the rocks, which is fitting since UNC Charlotte professor and artist Marek Ranis spent an artist residency watching researchers who, in turn, spent weeks lying on the ground, examining the rocks very closely.
It’s the type of collaboration that may become more scarce as federal funding dries up. The National Science Foundation has canceled hundreds of grants, and the National Endowment for the Humanities even more. The cancellations of grants bearing the scarlet letters of DEI have left students and universities reeling — but even the threat of cancellation has had consequences.
He was shadowing Martha Cary Eppes, a geologist at the university, and her students. Eppes studies how and why rocks crack at the microscopic level and how climate change is causing them to crack faster.
Her research shows how these seemingly static objects — rocks — are constantly changing. All those little cracks add up over time, sometimes with explosive consequences.
These tiny fissures can start with something as small as a molecule of water. As the climate warms, the atmosphere can hold more of these microscopic wedges, and the added heat gives them more force.
The collaboration gave Ranis a subject to inspire his exhibition. For Eppes, it gave her words to help contextualize the broader impact of her work:
“When we think of the global warming that we as humans are causing to our planet, it's not these far-off ideas — as Marek always says — polar bears and glaciers,” Eppes said. “It's literally possibly cracking the bedrock under our feet.”
The project also helped the Ph.D. students understand the broader context of their research.
“Sometimes having someone from a very disparate background come in and draw you back out of it for a minute helps you broaden that conversation in a way that opens it up for a broader general public to be a part of it,” said José Gómez, dean of the College of Arts + Architecture at UNC Charlotte.
That ability to explain research to the general public can help students disseminate their work and secure funding. But collaborative opportunities like this one may become rarer as federal grants are cut. Even just the threat of funding cuts has restricted student opportunities at UNC Charlotte.
“We've got students who are connected to NSF projects that we're looking at mosquitoes and malaria prevention and new designs for housing in remote parts of the world, like the African continent,” Gómez said. “Those trips are on hold right now because the funding climate's a little bit uncertain.”
Grad students cast a wider job net
The problem isn’t exclusive to Charlotte. At UNC-Chapel Hill, the federal government has terminated 72 projects — some without advance notice. The courts have since rescinded some of those terminations. Several federal agencies have issued stop-work orders, often a harbinger of termination.
The uncertainty surrounding funding has created an atmosphere of anxiety and confusion for students like UNC Greensboro Ph.D. student Rosalie Terry.
“If you're a fourth- or fifth-year student at this point, our options for what we can do after grad school feel a lot more limited,” Terry said.
She studies how grazers, such as elephants or zebras, and the plants they eat respond to climate impacts, like wildfires and drought. The next step for Terry would be to apply for a postdoctoral position with a federal agency, such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture. With only a year left in her program, she feels confident she’ll finish the program, but what comes after feels less sure. Federal positions that already felt competitive based on merit would become increasingly scarce.
Terry said she’s now considering nonprofit work, while others are looking to the private sector for jobs. But some students who were counting on NSF-funded positions to continue their research are now turning their sights abroad:
“Students are considering expanding their job searches beyond what they were looking at before,” Terry said. “There are folks now in my social circles who are considering expanding their postdoc searches or their career searches outside of the U.S.”
The National Science Foundation has stated that it will not fund projects aimed at broadening participation in STEM from underrepresented groups. Moving forward, the National Endowment for the Humanities will prioritize projects focused on U.S. history after the land’s colonization by European settlers.
Terry said she would still encourage students who are passionate about research to pursue grad school — but doing their due diligence is more important than ever, asking questions like, “Does your department or university have a plan in place in case their funding cuts again?”
