Thursday, July 17, 2025
Growing up in Babylon, there were endless opportunities to explore. During the summers, while my dad cleaned the fish he caught, I would collect the discarded parts and try to fit them back together — curious to understand how they worked.
Twenty years later, I’m now a doctoral student at the University of Florida, sifting through slices of human brain tissue and still asking the same big questions.
Along the way, I’ve contributed to studies on Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans and, more recently, sports-related concussions. Many of these projects are now threatened by proposed federal funding cuts. These cuts could stall progress on treatments for conditions that affect millions of Americans — and their most devastating effects may fall on our children and grandchildren.
As your neighbor and a product of this community — where I was lucky to take AP biology and psychology classes — I offer my perspective not to tell you what to think, but to offer a look behind the scenes.
In college, one of my professors received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to study a new treatment for non-suicidal self-injury. As the trial ended, participants were improving. But to be sure the improvement came from the new approach — and not therapy in general — we needed more analysis.
Fresh out of a statistics course, I volunteered to help. Under supervision, I led an analysis that showed the treatment had been delivered correctly — and was more effective than existing options. I was hooked.
Later, I designed my own study to test whether people who self-injure have more rigid problem-solving styles. If true, that insight could help improve treatment. When I analyzed the data, my hypothesis was wrong. I was crushed.
But my professor reminded me: Science isn’t about being right or wrong. It’s not about individual ambition. Every so-called “breakthrough” builds on countless other studies — many of them failures — that refine our tools and sharpen our questions.
Since then, I’ve had both successful and unsuccessful experiments. I used to get frustrated at the slow progress in Alzheimer’s research — until I met a professor who had watched scientists invent the MRI in New York in 1969. That wasn’t long ago, historically speaking. In science, that’s just a blink.
When I feel discouraged, I think about the patients I worked with after college — those who agreed to donate their brains after death to support research on brain chemistry and cognition. They knew the findings wouldn’t help them, but they wanted to help someone else down the line.
Today, breast cancer is no longer a death sentence. Heart disease is treatable. These breakthroughs were made possible by public investment. In New York alone, federal science funding supports more than 30,000 jobs and returns $8 billion in economic activity on a $3.5 billion investment.
But none of that progress is possible without the trust and support of the public.
And yes — progress in science is slow. Sometimes we do everything “right” and still fail. But failure is often a necessary step toward discovery.
Skeptical questions are not only fair — they’re essential. Is science funding a good investment? Is the process efficient? Are there biases?
As a scientist, I can assure you no one critiques science more rigorously than we do. We debate which ideas get funded, which findings are valid, and what holds up over time. But the public rarely gets to see that process.
The proposed cuts to federal science funding — made by individuals with no experience in research — are unprecedented. Some are calling this moment an “extinction event” for certain fields. Projects I planned to propose may never get off the ground. If this had happened a decade ago, I might never have become a scientist at all.
But I am one now. And in the spirit of science, I refuse to let setbacks stop me from trying to make things better.
If you feel compelled, I encourage you to contact your elected officials and voice support for continued federal science funding.
Brittany Rohl will receive her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Florida in August, and then complete a fellowship with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Sports Medicine Concussion Program.
