I am a fourth-year graduate student in Jeremy Borniger’s lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Our lab is a group of cancer biologists and neuroscientists who focus on the relationship between cancer and the nervous system.

I study triple negative breast cancer, an aggressive type of breast cancer that resists common treatments like hormone therapy. I am investigating its relationship to a part of the brain stem that controls stress signals in the body which accelerate the cancer growth. I am trying to find ways to disrupt this relationship to slow this cancer growth as a potential new avenue for treatment.

As a graduate student of the Cold Spring Harbor School of Biological Sciences, I am extremely fortunate to be privately funded. However, I am reaching the end of the program, and I will soon enter the job market. The Trump administration’s termination of National Institutes of Health-funded grants for cancer and neuroscience research, as well as the disruptions of the review process for new grants, will dramatically impact my ability to secure a job. New positions in academia are now rare, as laboratories across the country are wrestling with financial instability and uncertainty.

I am scared about my future and the future of science in the United States. I grew up in Pelham, New York and currently live in Queens. I want to stay in the United States, but I am being forced to consider leaving the country to find a position in academia. Nothing in the world could keep me from being a scientist, but these budget cuts are going to make a career in the United States extremely difficult for me.

Nikolas Holland is a graduate student at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.