In the following weeks, Maredia, a fixed-term Michigan State University Professor of Development Economics, had all four of her other research projects terminated similarly. For months, Maredia’s research was completely halted, with many of her fellow principal investigators forced to leave MSU.

“I was one of the fortunate few ones that survived,” Maredia said.

It was only after the opening of MSU’s first application cycle of the Jenison Fund, a $5 million pool of money made available for researchers in situations like Maredia’s, that she was able to resume her work in a limited capacity.

The fund, which was announced in April 2025, offers a total of $5 million annually over three years to help offset funding disruptions due to executive orders, grant cancellations or stop work orders. There have been two application cycles so far.

University Spokesperson Mark Bullion said the money associated with the Jenison Fund comes from “a strategic endowment fund that is designated for advancing the university’s strategic initiatives.”

Financial assistance from the fund has helped graduate students continue their research amidst disruptions, provide bridge funding for programs that are experiencing delays, and help faculty finish work that has been left incomplete due to federal slashes.

So far, the first two rounds of the Jenison Fund have awarded money to 64 recipients, according to a list provided by University Spokesperson Amber McCann.

The impacts of this initiative by MSU are wide-reaching, spanning across colleges and even beyond traditional research. Last year, the U.S. Department of Education issued cuts to grant programs for language centers across the country impacted five centers at MSU. Many of those centers offer a variety of foreign languages, with grant fellowships available to students to study lesser-taught languages.

DOE cuts to those National Resource Centers led to many losing their fellowships, resulting in diminished foreign language opportunities on campus.

Director of the African Studies Center Leo Zulu said both his center and the Asian Studies Center were able to take advantage of the Jenison fund to support 12 students who had lost their grants to study foreign languages.

Although Zulu said they will still have to downsize the number of languages offered due to the cuts, he said the Jenison fund allows the centers to deliver on grants promised to students last year and stabilize both departments while they search for other funding opportunities.

MSU's solution to these federal slashes is only temporary. While the fund has served as a lifeline for researchers, the $15 million distributed equally over the next three years won't last forever, leaving faculty and graduate students scrambling to secure future funding once the funding pool dries up.

Where to find funding, as well as the competitiveness for research dollars, has also become increasingly challenging as more researchers turn to alternative sources.

Maredia said many of her research projects, which centered on international development, lost federal funding when the United States Agency for International Development shut down and merged operations with the U.S. Department of State last year. 

She applied to the fund for two main reasons. The first was to support five of her students who had lost funding because of the grant termination.

“Majority of the funds were to continue their funding so they can finish their degrees,” she said. “They were all at different stages in their Ph.D. programs.”

The Jenison Fund was also used to continue the work she had already completed before the stop-work order and bring it to a publishable stage, she said. And although the funding allowed her to continue her research, Maredia said it was “mostly to wrap up, in my case — no more data collection.”

The five projects Maredia had terminated were all in different stages, and due to her field work taking place abroad — in areas like Myanmar, Tanzania and Ghana — she said they will be unable to properly realize some of her projects’ original visions due to the inability to collect more data. 

“For some projects, I feel like I lost everything,” she added. “Whatever I put in that one year before the grant ended, it's not going to lead to anything.”

And although Maredia said her research partners still have funding to continue field work in her Myanmar project, Maredia is relegated to “technical support” and analyzing the data her partners collect.

A final portion awarded by the Jenison Fund will go directly to her salary, Maredia said, as her fixed-term position is “100% grant-funded”. The support from MSU is enough to supplement her grant funding through September, if she were to maintain “100% appointed,” Maredia added.

And the search for funding after the Jenison Fund dries up is only beginning for Maredia. Since the terminations from last year, Maredia said she has written around 20 proposals in 2025, with only two yielding grant awards.

She has moved away from sourcing potential funding from federal outlets and is instead looking towards private foundations. Maredia has even found financial support abroad in the United Kingdom with a grant supplied by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

The most consistent justification Maredia said she was given in the stop work orders was that her grants were terminated “out of convenience.” For Professor of African and Digital History Walter Hawthorne and several other researchers, the justification they received looked different — their projects no longer met federal priorities.

Hawthorne said he had received two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2023 for his work on a project entitled: “Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade,” which is based at Matrix, MSU’s Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, where Hawthorne serves as director.

His research centers on creating a hub of data around named enslaved individuals and “using numbers to explain movements of people,” Hawthorne said.

“What we're doing with enslaved.org is humanizing the Atlantic trade and enslaved people and the lives of enslaved people in the Americas and elsewhere,” he added.

Typically, information for enslaved people exists in scattered archives across the globe, Hawthorne explained, and his work serves to extract that data and present it in a readable format that gives a more complete picture of their history.

When the two NEH grants Hawthorne received were terminated by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he said they were unable to complete their project, as his team only received a portion of those grants.

Hawthorne’s project is funded from several sources, including private donors, he said; however, the slashed portion from the federal government was used to pay staff, forcing the project to a halt. 

He said the support his team received from the Jenison Fund as part of its first round allowed him and his 20 other members, including research partners outside of MSU, to complete their work.

“The fact that we're able to carry this phase of the project through to fruition means that we're going to have information out there about tens of thousands of more named enslaved individuals, which will preserve the histories of their lives and allow researchers and members of the general public to learn from,” Hawthorne said.

Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Caroline Szczepanski said she was told that the renewal of a supplement to her National Science Foundation grant, which supported underrepresented graduate students in their research, was also denied because it no longer met federal priorities. 

When Szczepanski and her student, Surbhi Schillinger, received the first year of those supplementary funds in 2024, she said it was given with the expectation that it was renewable for up to three years. When funding was cut, Schillinger, who had three years left of PhD studies at the time, no longer had the funding to continue their research.

In the months without funding, Szczepanski said she was pulling from discretionary funds to support Schillinger, a solution that wasn’t “really sustainable” because of how much time her student had left in their Ph.D program.

Schillinger, a third-year Chemical Engineering doctoral student who works with Szczepanski developing polymeric materials in a research lab for her Ph.D., said the period spent without guaranteed funding was stressful, and there were a couple of months where she “wasn’t sure what was going to happen”.

“Especially the first time hearing about it, the first couple days, it was hard for me to get my work done because I was just so overwhelmed and stressed,” Schillinger said.

If Schillinger couldn’t find funding through a grant, she said she would be forced to work as a teaching assistant — which would have been doable, but tough to balance alongside her research.

The Jenison Fund, which Szczepanski’s lab was approved for in December, will support Schillinger’s research for a full year while they apply for other programs to cover the remainder of Schillinger’s PhD research, Szczepanski said.

The experience left Szczepanski rethinking how researchers like herself will look for funding in the current landscape. Before, she said she had a good understanding of how to get a project funded, but “now it feels like that's all upended”.

“It was a lot of just trying to understand what the new normal will be,” she said. “And there's a lot of things that are really still not transparent. So, I don't even feel like I have that answer right now.”