When Kulindu Vithanachchi’s phone lit up with an update from the National Science Foundation about his application for a high-profile early-career fellowship, he couldn’t wait to open the message, hopeful for big news. But not this news.
Vithanachchi, a University of Arizona undergraduate and budding microbiologist, was in the lab when he learned that his application for NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program had been “returned without review,” turned back before outside experts had a chance to judge the scientific merit of the proposal. The agency’s email said his submission included proposed research that made him ineligible for the program — and that the decision was final. The email did not specify further.
“I was baffled. I was a little bit concerned. I felt kind of defeated,” he said.
There has been a strange solace in realizing he is not alone. Many applicants have received identical messages lately, befuddling students as well as lab heads who may be used to hearing about rejections but not a string of applications simply returned without review. The exact number of students who’ve received such notices is unclear, but Grant Witness, a project launched to track federal funding disruptions, has compiled 45 examples; 40 of those cases are in the life sciences. The true total is likely far higher, as social media mentions of the issue have prompted hundreds of replies, many of them from users claiming to have been impacted.
Eos, an online publication covering Earth and space sciences, first covered news of the returned applications. An NSF spokesperson did not say how many submissions have been turned back without review or the exact reasons for these returns, though the spokesperson listed general causes.
“An application may be deemed ineligible for several reasons, including failure to meet proposal preparation requirements or eligibility requirements related to degree status, field of study, degree program, or proposed research,” she said in an email to STAT.
It’s unclear whether staffing issues at the agency, which has been trimmed from more than 1,700 workers in 2024 to about 1,200 now, are a factor. Program officers were among those fired last year, and the agency noted in its email that all GRFP applications are screened by program officers to assess eligibility, adding that NSF has seen an increase in applications over the past year.
Researchers and former GRFP directors told STAT that NSF’s weeding out of applications doesn’t seem consistent with the agency’s own eligibility guidelines, adding that the number of submissions prematurely returned seems higher than in previous cycles. Scientific leaders fear the rejections could discourage students from pursuing research careers at a moment when graduate students are already struggling to find work in labs due to tenuous biomedical funding.
“A lot of students are hearing all these things that are happening, but they may not be at the forefront of submitting large NSF or large NIH grants. They’re getting a taste of it [now],” said Jill Wegrzyn, a computational biologist at the University of Connecticut who advises a master’s student whose application was deemed ineligible. “When they see something like that happen so early in their career, they’re going to be more likely to leave science.”
Around 12,000 undergraduate and graduate students apply for the NSF fellowship each year, with just 1,000 to 2,000 applicants selected annually. Those students get an annual stipend of $37,000 for three years. The program, launched in 1952, has a reputation for picking promising talent — more than 40 recipients have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.
For many students, this fellowship is their first time applying for funding from the federal government. For Vithanachchi and others, it has been a bewildering experience.
Vithanachchi proposed studying how genes control bacterial responses to antimicrobial compounds. He spent around 20 to 30 hours refining his application, soliciting feedback from peers and a former labmate who’d received a GRFP award. So he was surprised when the NSF email telling him his application was ineligible said that “applicants must select research in eligible STEM or STEM education fields.” He’d submitted under the life sciences category and selected microbial biology as a subfield, both valid choices according to the agency’s solicitation.
David Baltrus, Vithanachchi’s undergrad adviser, is also searching for answers. Baltrus says that Vithanachchi, who has worked in his lab since high school, has grown into one of the university’s top microbiology students and has a promising scientific career ahead of him.
“Speaking candidly, it sucks,” Baltrus said. “To have them not even get a fair shot at things from our interpretation of the letter of the law, it’s sad and it just doesn’t feel right.”
Some applications are returned without review every year for various reasons, including missed deadlines, formatting issues, and missing letters of recommendation. Applications that directly focus on human health and disease instead of basic science are ineligible, as are proposals with the “expressed intent” to shape policy. But these restrictions aren’t new, and even experts intimately familiar with GRFP don’t understand why NSF is currently turning away students. That includes Susan Brennan, a former director of the program and a cognitive scientist at Stony Brook University, who mentors applicants throughout the state of New York.
“Two of the ones that I mentored, and there are probably more, wrote to me in tears essentially, and I have seen their applications, and they are basic neuroscience, basic microbiology. There is not a word of ineligible [research],” she said. “And I used to make these decisions.”
Brennan and Gisèle Muller-Parker, who ran GRFP from 2008 to 2018, told STAT the volume of returned applications this year doesn’t seem normal. They’re also concerned by the possibility that the life sciences are being targeted — again.
When NSF announced a second batch of 500 GRFP recipients last year, none was in the life sciences, even though the field has historically been among the leaders in applicants and recipients. Students in computer science and physics, however, had better odds of success, and the Trump administration has made artificial intelligence and quantum information science key parts of its scientific agenda. The former program directors recently performed a statistical analysis suggesting that the 2025 award pattern was the result of selection bias.
A GRFP award isn’t a golden ticket, but it offers some security in academia, where funding can make or break careers. Corbin Schuster, a microbiologist at Oregon State University, had been hopeful a Ph.D. student in his lab would receive the award, as the fellowship combined with startup funds would have covered the student’s stipend for the length of her dissertation project. But Schuster, whose trainee had her application returned without review, says the student will probably need to do teaching assistantships to cover part of her pay, which will slow down the pace of her project.
“I can sort of envision it elongating her timeline in graduate school, which has its pros and cons,” he said.
The dismissed applications are also impacting principal investigators, especially early-career faculty with tight budgets. Daniel Sprockett, an assistant professor of microbiology and immunology at Wake Forest University’s medical school, had been impressed when a student rotating in his lab submitted a GRFP proposal for studying how microplastics impact gut microbes. Sprockett, himself a former GRFP recipient, worked closely with her to make sure that application was eligible. He even made early preparations for carrying out the proposed work.
But it’s now unclear whether that project will ever happen. It’s also unclear whether she’d be able to join the lab. Sprockett has enough funding to support one trainee, and having your own money can make a difference when faculty pick which students to accept.
Had she received the fellowship, he said, “it definitely would have changed the trajectory of not just her career, but also probably my lab as well.”
STAT’s coverage of the federal government’s impact on the biomedical workforce is supported by a grant from the Dana Foundation and the Boston Foundation. Our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.
