Michigan Researcher’s Work on Air Pollution and Racial Inequities Caught in Funding Freeze at National Science Foundation
A doctoral candidate examining air pollution effects in mostly Black and Latino neighborhoods in Detroit was among the wave of researchers who have had federal funds halted.
For two years, Ember McCoy has been researching air quality and the gaps in data collection in neighborhoods in Southwest Detroit where mostly Black and Latino residents live. The project, part of McCoy’s doctorate work at University of Michigan, is suddenly at risk.
The National Science Foundation, a major funder across the world for basic research, was ordered by the Trump administration in recent weeks to stop funding and awarding grants.
“I knew that things were happening at the NSF. I knew that future grants were at risk. I think it was more unexpected that they would terminate existing grants,” McCoy said. McCoy, 33, has received $10,000 of a $15,000 grant and was notified April 21 by email that the rest of the grant was in limbo. McCoy is just one of the hundreds of researchers whose work has been targeted as a result of an executive order targeting diversity, equity and inclusion programs funded by the federal government.
The Trump administration, across federal agencies, in the past months and weeks has stopped paying out millions of federal dollars for programs and research linked to environmental justice and racial inequity.
NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan resigned on April 24 amid the most recent round of notices. “I believe that I have done all I can to advance the mission of the agency and feel that it is time for me to pass the baton to new leadership,” he said in an email to agency staff obtained by Science magazine.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced on April 22, the celebration of Earth Day, that nearly 300 employees who work on environmental justice and civil rights issues would be laid off.
McCoy’s academic advisor said professors and students across campus in Ann Arbor were grappling with uncertainty while trying to continue their work. “We’re kind of in this sort of strange time where so much is happening, but also we don’t know what’s going to happen next,” said Shobita Parthasarathy, director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at the University of Michigan.
“The government, of course, isn’t just funding things. It’s also setting priorities,” Pathasarathy said. “And so you know, the private sector isn’t going to obviously do research like this.”
McCoy’s work included interviews with residents about current air monitoring techniques and when and how monitors failed to capture pollutants—including volatile organic compounds, sulfur dioxide, particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide—in their neighborhoods in southwest Detroit. Residents live near several industrial facilities in the area yet air monitors installed by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy, which were updated in 2022 after requests from community members, don’t capture the extent of the community’s pollution burden, according to McCoy.
“That area is where there’s over 50 industrial facilities within three miles. … There’s a Marathon Oil facility. There used to be a coal plant,” said McCoy. “Those types of communities exist everywhere.”
She added: “They face really high rates of air pollution, or at least air pollution related health experiences like asthma, cancer or conditions.”
McCoy has worked or studied at University of Michigan since 2015. She said her current research aims to gather data and share information among the affected communities about pollution levels and risk. The email she received “did not say [why the grant was canceled]. It just said that it no longer fit the priorities of the staff,” McCoy said.
She wasn’t totally surprised. Earlier this year, she was startled to find her grant on a list compiled by Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas of so-called “Woke DEI” grants.
She later surmised, from reading government websites, that the wording of her application may have been a trigger. She had cited “environmental justice” in her abstract
“It was clear on the FAQ page,” she said. ”They remanded grants that are associated with diversity, equity and inclusion.”
“I know they are keywords that are under scrutiny by the administration and so I imagine that they searched abstracts for those words and those that fit them were on the chopping block,” McCoy said.
Longtime environmental justice advocate Dolores Leonard has known McCoy for years. McCoy worked with residents in the area throughout her undergraduate and masters’ degrees study, Leonard said. “I was devastated for her. Devastated because I understood the amount of work that she had put in, 10 years approximately.”
“I felt her pain,” Leonard said. “Not only her personal pain, but all the work that she did to benefit the community, the people.”
Leonard lives near the Marathon Oil Refinery, an area where 80 percent of the residents are Black, 12 percent are Hispanic and 40 percent live in poverty, according to a Harvard Business School study from 2022. The residents in that zip code area, the study said, have higher rates of asthma, heart disease and lung cancer than in most other zip code areas of Michigan.
A resident for nearly 60 years in Detroit, Leonard said she suffers respiratory problems and McCoy has been instrumental in documenting the health risks for people who live near the polluters.“Of all the students I’ve met, I am most proud of Ember,” Leonard said.
McCoy noted that the Trump administration’s actions will likely have a chilling effect on researchers’ efforts. But environmental justice has a long history of perseverance, she said.
“This type of research, this type of activism and organizing around environmental justice has been happening for decades, long before this type of work was properly funded,” she said. “I know [it] will continue.”
McCoy’s advisor said the loss of funding will affect what future generations know about their environments and potential health risks. Funding—and this broadside of federal cuts—will change research tracks for graduate students and curriculums, Parthasarathy said.
“On some level, that is what current policymakers want, what the current administration wants,” Parthasarathy said. “But it is at the expense of better science and technology and public policy.”
Cover photo: A view of the Marathon Petroleum Refinery in Detroit. Credit: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
