How does University of Rhode Island (URI) Associate Professor Samantha Meenach describe her past year ushering underclassmen into the complex and technical realms known collectively as STEM?
“Saga is like the best word to use,” Meenach, who teaches chemical engineering and biomedical sciences, said in a recent phone interview. “It’s been a very surreal year.”
Meenach’s own specialty is pharmaceutical engineering. She is the principal investigator on URI’s ESTEEMED Scholars program, helping first-generation college students and students from disadvantaged backgrounds embark on careers in biomedicine or engineering.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) opened its first ESTEEMED grant cycle in 2017, and URI launched its iteration of the program in 2023 with five students, another five the next year, and seven in 2025. URI’s focus on bioengineering and biomedical sciences aligns with the program’s origins in NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.
The Ocean State’s largest public research campus is one of multiple sites awarded NIH grants to set freshman and sophomores on the pathway to STEM fields via the ESTEEMED program. But President Donald Trump’s administration’s new priorities for federal funds have put URI’s program on a seesaw.
On March 21, the feds notified URI in a letter that the ESTEEMED grant had been terminated.
“This award no longer effectuates agency priorities,” the letter reads. “Research programs based primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.”
It continues: “Worse, so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’) studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans.”
URI appealed the NIH termination in April and was turned down June 12. Then, to Meenach’s surprise, the grant was reinstated on July 1. Shortly after, Meenach said she received some unusual and “very strong” advice from her NIH program manager, a longtime civil servant Meenach described as being “very careful about what she says.”
The manager advised, and NIH ultimately approved, for URI to pay full stipends for the fall semester for the 12 students currently enrolled, shielding them from a possible mid-semester disruption in their studies.
“We don’t normally do that,” Meenach said of the lump sum’s approval. “We normally pay them monthly.”
When first awarded, URI’s grant was set to provide $1.15 million over four years. Enrolled students get stipends of $10,000 as freshmen and $12,000 in their sophomore year.
Students’ housing and food costs are covered for a five-week development course in the summer before their freshman year. Throughout the academic year, they receive one-on-one mentoring, meet weekly and study with their peers, and participate in workshops.
Crucial to the program is research-based coursework — optional as a freshman, but required as a sophomore — which culminates in a full-time summer research session before junior year. Students must be full-time, maintain at least a 3.0 GPA, and participate in all the required program offerings to keep their awards. The funding is intended to allow students to focus on their research and avoid the need for a job off-campus and away from the lab.
Hamzeh Tanbakji, a junior pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering, was working in a microsystems lab on a drug delivery project that uses microscopic needles when he learned about the grant termination.
“It made zero sense for me as to why they terminated it,” Tanbakji said. “Honestly, it didn’t really apply to ESTEEMED. They’re saying something with DEI, but ESTEEMED didn’t just support DEI students, it supported everybody.”
Eligible students are those who “identify as being from an underrepresented group or from a disadvantaged background,” according to a URI flyer for the program. The NIH website currently lists a definition of “underrepresented group” as “people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and underrepresented racial and ethnic groups such as blacks or African Americans, Hispanics or Latinos, American Indians or Alaskan Natives, and Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders.”
The cancellation of the ESTEEMED grant was part of a nationwide purge that ceased approximately $783 million worth of funding for research under three February executive orders from President Donald Trump. Their aim was to eliminate federal spending on programs involving DEI, “gender ideology,” or COVID-related studies.
“It did cut my research a little short, at least the funding,” said Tanbakji, a graduate of Cranston West High School, who grew up with a strong interest in cars, robotics, and hands-on engineering due in part to a childhood love of the TV show “How It’s Made.” “I was really upset over the cut because it played a big role in my college experience, my research experience, my academics, finances, everything.”
Even with the funding issues, Tanbakji called his ESTEEMED program experience “10 out of 10” and said he will “forever be proud to call myself an esteemed scholar.”
“If I didn’t have the program, I would say I probably would have never pursued research, probably would have never been as professionally developed as I am now,” Tanbakji added.
Possibility of federal shutdown
Meenach said her federal liaison could not tell her much else on the rationale behind the haste, beyond an implication that something might happen after the federal fiscal year begins Oct. 1.
So far, Congress has not passed any spending bills covering the full year. A stopgap could temporarily resolve the issue, but without any short-term budgeting solution, a government shutdown could occur. Funding streams and federal agency operations — including those of NIH — could be interrupted, with delays trickling down to grantees.
When asked about URI’s grant specifically, a late Friday afternoon email signed by the NIH Press Team said the agency “does not discuss grant deliberations related to individual recipient institutions, awards, or supported investigators, whether or not such deliberations are underway or have occurred.”
“We remain committed to the advancement of policies that maximize the impact of every federal taxpayer dollar and ensure proper oversight of this funding,” the email reads. “Moving forward, NIH will continue to focus on supporting meritorious and important biomedical research, while at the same time ensuring NIH’s portfolio aligns with agency priorities.”
The NIH Press Team added that the agency’s director, Jay Bhattacharya, has repeatedly emphasized “the national need for and our agency’s commitment to supporting career continuity for early career researchers,” and cited remarks made at a Senate Appropriations hearing and on the director’s podcast.
To her knowledge, Meenach said, URI’s ESTEEMED program was the first in the nation to be canceled this year. A document shared by NIH which lists terminated grants includes nine ESTEEMED programs, with terminations starting April 17. The URI program is not listed.
The March letter incensed Meenach, who called the language “offensive.”
“Yes, it’s a diversity program, you can certainly call it that,” Meenach said. “But you know, you can’t convince me that providing students an opportunity that they wouldn’t otherwise have harmed the health of Americans.”
At least two of the five ESTEEMED students in the program’s first cohort in 2023 “will probably go on to graduate school, and they didn’t even know what that was before starting the program,” Meenach said.
“I said it was racism,” Meenach recalled telling her students. “I don’t think I was being crazy for saying that, but you know, our sophomores in particular were really upset just because they were finishing the program and they knew firsthand … [the] impact it had had on them.”
URI’s ESTEEMED grant runs from May 1 to April 30 each year. Future shocks to the program could see the loss of its full-time coordinator, two graduate student assistants, and an undergraduate assistant, Meenach said.
“If this gets terminated again, I might be taking a leave of absence for my mental health,” Meenach said.
Meenach said she’s “very worried” about such an outcome. NIH’s approval of the semester-long payments arrived before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 for a partial stay on a June ruling by Massachusetts Senior Judge William Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee, in favor of the American Public Health Association in its lawsuit to reinstate funding for numerous plaintiffs seeking to have their NIH grants restored.
The Supreme Court’s Aug. 21 decision gives plaintiffs two options for contesting terminated grants. The first is that underlying grantmaking policies regarding DEI can still be challenged in federal district court. That’s partially why the Massachusetts case is still chugging along, with its next hearing scheduled for Thursday.
But the second kind of challenge seeking to restore frozen or canceled funds must be tried in the Court of Federal Claims, the Supreme Court decided. That could narrow the possibility of a financial victory, even if researchers’ cases win on merits in district courts, as Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her opinion.
The ruling, Jackson argued, “neuters judicial review of grant terminations by sending plaintiffs on a likely futile, multivenue quest for complete relief.”
Per the NIH’s email response: “NIH has issued amended Notices of Award for nearly all of the grants listed in the June 2025 Massachusetts court judgment. NIH will be reimbursing allowable costs as required by the judgment while the judgment is in effect.”
Delays and uncertainties
For Meenach, the program’s future beyond this semester is uncertain. She finds it unlikely URI could fund the entirety — about $20,000 a student across the program’s two years — on its own. Meenach said she’s “not optimistic about next year.”
URI is overall heavily reliant on federal funding for its research activities. The school received about $131 million in federal research funding in 2024, which comprised the lion’s share of its total $161 million in research funding.
Even research activity unable to fall under the DEI label has been impacted at URI, according to Bongsup Cho, who runs the statewide research incubator based at URI, the Rhode Island IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (RI-INBRE). The recipient of a multiyear NIH grant worth $4.1 million this fiscal year alone, RI-INBRE allocates and divides its spoils among research projects at universities across the state. The research unit is also one of the sites that hosts ESTEEMED students’ summer research.
Cho said in a recent phone interview that while awards typically go out in May, this year’s money did not emerge until early September. That monthslong delay sent research timelines helter-skelter and generated unease among researchers, Cho said.
“For me, I’m running a large capacity building program,” Cho said. “This is really tough, having uncertainty and the big delay in funding…We’re doing what we can, but this may not be sustainable if this goes on for another three years.”
With ESTEEMED, Meenach said she’s prepared for a few outcomes. If changes do land in October, the school could reapply and revise its application for a grant to keep the pipeline relatively intact. If the termination comes back, then she imagines the school will have to step in and bridge support.
“They terminated us in mid-March, and everybody else got to finish,” Meenach said. “If we had just been allowed to finish out all these grants and then let NIH figure out what the new direction was going to be like, we could have at least recovered faster. And I think we’re just not going to recover for a really, really long time.”
Meenach also runs the Particle Engineering Laboratory in URI’s College of Engineering, which designs particle-based drug-delivery systems, especially for pulmonary diseases. For her, the stakes of a helping hand in STEM education are not abstract.
A first-generation college student from rural Kentucky who grew up in a town of 186 people, Meenach applied to a summer research program as an undergraduate not for any particular love for research — she said she just needed a job. But research won her heart after she completed a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship and an NIH postdoctoral fellowship later.
“I know firsthand the impact of these training programs — they’re literally transformational,” she said. “I would not be a faculty member if I hadn’t done these programs.”
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
