Plant biologist who went from Manheim to the Mojave makes case for federal funding for science
If there’s a single origin to my scientific career, it’s the moment Charlie Longenecker introduced me to chicory.
Chicory is a common, weedy plant in the daisy family, originally from Europe. It grows clusters of tiny flowers, each with a single long, pale-blue petal. In aggregate, they’re like little blue mopheads at the end of leggy green stems. Mr. Longenecker led my first-year biology class into the woodlot behind Lancaster Mennonite School to teach us about chicory and a dozen other wildflowers, and it transformed how I saw my own backyard. Once I had a name for chicory, I saw it everywhere it grows, in ditches and fencerows all around my family’s home outside of Manheim.
More than a quarter of a century later, I teach botany to college seniors, and I get to introduce them to chicory myself. Even though I teach at California State University Northridge, in suburban Los Angeles, the little blue wildflowers have made their way across the whole breadth of North America.
At my university, I split my time between teaching and running a research lab, where my students and I study Joshua trees: twisted, spiky, drought-tolerant succulents native to the Mojave Desert. Joshua trees have a unique relationship with very specialized pollinating moths, and they’re part of the same landscapes as the Grand Canyon, Death Valley and Mount Whitney. I’m incredibly lucky — I get to spend my workdays studying alien-looking plants in Southern California’s beautiful and diverse landscapes and teaching the next generation of plant scientists.
But I’m worried that today’s budding botanists, whether in my classroom or back at Lancaster Mennonite School, won’t have the same opportunities I had to build a career in science. The Trump administration is vandalizing the very agencies that provide those opportunities.
My journey from Manheim to the Mojave, inspired by Mr. Longenecker’s wildflower walks, was really made possible by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Grants from that federal agency supported research experiences I had as an undergraduate student, as well as the work I did to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Idaho, and then postdoctoral research at the University of Minnesota before I ended up at California State University Northridge. The biggest single source of support for my own lab has been a National Science Foundation grant, and my research plans for the next five years and beyond are laid out in project proposals I’ve been working to submit.
Now, however, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health — the bigger federal agency that funds biomedical research — are under unprecedented threat from funding freezes and cuts imposed by the Trump administration. Over the past month, grant funding and expert review of new project proposals have been blocked at both agencies. Thousands of expert staffers have been dismissed without cause. The National Institutes of Health has been prevented from reviewing new proposed projects, even after a court ordered reviews to resume. The National Science Foundation is reviewing proposals, but the results of those reviews remain uncertain. The administration has tried to cut off funds even for projects that passed expert review and started work long before Donald Trump returned to the White House in January.
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