UB delivered more than $1 million to faculty impacted by federal grant cancellations

The federal government’s recent shift in national priorities presented significant challenges to both the UB and national research communities, resulting in funding cuts and program terminations from agencies including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

At UB, 70 grants were impacted by these changes. 

In response, UB’s Office for Research, Innovation and Economic Development (ORIED) launched two grant programs to help faculty mitigate the negative impacts of the nebulous funding landscape.

UB LAUNCH and UB COMPLETE offered funding up to $25,000, with a required one-to-one match from the principal investigator (PI), their department or their decanal unit. Faculty with terminated grants were eligible for UB COMPLETE, while UB LAUNCH was designed to support faculty transitioning their work to align with evolving national research priorities.

From May to October 2025, more than $1 million was awarded from ORIED to 48 PIs across 21 departments, sustaining critical research in health, education, artificial intelligence, social work and more.

“It was important that the university step in to assist our researchers during this unprecedented time,” says A. Scott Weber, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. “Partnering with departments and decanal units to enable continued research — and support faculty exploration of federal priority areas — ensures the vitality of UB’s research enterprise.”

“Through these programs, we sought to fill funding gaps for projects that were cancelled and respond to changing research priorities,” says Venu Govindaraju, senior vice president for research, innovation and economic development. “Critical work is continuing across our campus thanks to this investment.”

Mike Malkowski, chair of the Department of Structural Biology and interim chair of the Department of Pharmacy and Toxicology, both in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, recognized the value of these initiatives both as an administrator and as a researcher. His departments provided $289,208 in matching funds to PIs to secure UB COMPLETE and UB LAUNCH support, and he received a grant himself. 

“These grant programs were vital lifelines in a time of uncertainty, in a tight funding climate,” Malkowski says. “The additional funds helped some faculty bridge gaps in funding and generate preliminary data for grants to be submitted within the year. The support went a long way at the departmental level.”

For Melissa McCartney, associate professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, UB COMPLETE allowed her and her postdoctoral associate to implement a faculty training program for undergraduates considering careers in biomedical sciences, while Katie Stalker, professor in the School of Social Work, was able to retain her fellowship program training social work students to effectively handle youth mental health crises in underserved communities. As of spring 2026, Stalker’s program has eight fellows completing internships in rural school districts and receiving intensive training to prepare them for careers.

Kenny Joseph, associate professor in UB’s new Department of AI and Society, is working on a project that aims to understand how AI models are developed to work in different sociocultural contexts in health care settings. “The funding from UB LAUNCH helped us to begin developing and testing ways of thinking about how current AI models break down in different contexts and what that means for their future use and development.”

Mary McVee, director of the Center for Literacy and Reading Instruction, leveraged the funding for research that supports elementary school teachers with literacy instruction. The LAUNCH funding allowed McVee to take her work for multilingual students who are learning English into classrooms and collaborate directly with teachers.

McVee describes UB LAUNCH as a “point of hope” amid the changing funding landscape.

“A lot of what is happening with grant policy is beyond the control of individual researchers, but this felt like a way to take action,” McVee says. “This grant has [been a] bridge to maintain our research-practice partnership until we can receive additional grant funding from other sources to scale up our research and impact.”

“This grant program meant that we were able to finish out our research project,” McCartney adds. “Without this funding we would have been unable to finish the most important part of our research: sharing what we developed with the rest of the scientific community.”