On Friday, the National Science Foundation (NSF) canceled three grants worth $1,761,892 to the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and Auburn University.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the NSF announced last week that they were terminating some active research grants due to recent executive orders by President Donald Trump.

According to a public database maintained by Noam Ross, executive director of the nonprofit rOpenSci, and Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist at Harvard University, UAB and Auburn University lost three grants due to recent terminations.

The largest grant termination by NSF hit UAB on Friday. UAB lost a $1,274,120 federal grant for a project that “aims to enact sustainable change by including diverse perspectives and voices to fundamentally change the culture of the (Society for the Advancement in Biology Education Research) and implement initiatives that promote an environment to enable cultural change.”

Auburn University also had two federal grants terminated by NSF. One cancelled grant of $283,448 was funding a postdoctoral fellowship studying undergraduate biology instructors’ and students’ concepts of race.

“Race essentialism is the incorrect belief that race is an inherent biological characteristic resulting in distinct race categories. While race essentialism has been shown to be correlated with increased bias, stereotypes, and prejudice, improving student understandings of race has been shown to lower these distorted beliefs. This project is designed to serve the national interest by assessing beliefs about race of STEM instructors and students, increasing awareness of intersectionality, and developing recommendations targeting misconceptions about race in the classroom. These recommendations will ultimately inform improvements in STEM education, which is of significance to teaching race and ethnicity, and could result in more accurate understandings of race in society. This project measures undergraduate biology instructors’ and students’ concepts of race and combine this information with existing biology education literature and recommendations from experts in diversity, equity, and inclusion to create comprehensive guidelines for teaching race and ancestry in undergraduate biology through anti-essentialist and culturally relevant lenses,” a description of the grant said.

NSF also cancelled a $204,324 grant for “intersectional computing” on Friday.

“Auburn University and Florida State University will collaborate to develop a series of workshops to engage members of the Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) Alliances and Black, Latina and Native American women graduate students to develop a community of support in computing disciplines. Native American, Latina, and Black women are particularly underrepresented in computing, with representation at all degree levels significantly less than the representation of these groups in the U.S. population. While prior work has championed new approaches to student recruitment and preparation, less research has specifically focused on women of color and their lived experiences in the field of computing. An intersectional focus is important because the needs of women of color cannot be adequately addressed when interventions are designed and analyzed along a single axis of race or gender. Working in collaboration with the BPC Alliances, this project will serve as a step towards establishing a more inclusive and actionable research agenda focused on women of color, specifically Native American, Latina, and Black women in the field of computing. The project activities will center the lived experiences of women of color in computing and re-imagine efforts within and across the BPC-A’s while establishing an actionable research agenda around women of color. BPC Alliances are uniquely positioned to integrate appropriate frameworks, approaches, and methodologies to transform computing education for women of color at scale, this project will implement a series of workshops to engage members of the BPC Alliances and Black, Latina and Native American women graduate students to develop a community of support in the field of computing. The resulting intersectional research agenda will be a resource to the larger computing community, centering the lived experiences of Black, Latina, and Native women within each of the BPC Alliances and women graduate students enrolled in U.S. computing degree programs. Contributing to the diversity of ideas and perspectives, the project activities will (1) generate deep knowledge of the experiences of women of color; (2) explore the similarities and differences across Native American, Latina, and Black women populations in computing; (3) provide an analysis of the conditions under which different groups of women of color thrive; and (4) examine the trajectories of Native American, Latina, and Black women populations in computing,” a description of the grant said.

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