At 1 a.m. in a hotel room, Trajan Hammonds, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Princeton’s math department, lay in bed, bathed in his laptop’s spectral glow. An email banner swiped across his screen with the subject line: “Opportunity Deleted.”
Scanning the automated message that followed, his chest tightened. In early February, Hammonds had traveled to Baltimore for a conference at Johns Hopkins University, expecting to hear any day about the NSF Mathematical and Physical Sciences Ascending Postdoctoral Research Fellowship — a prestigious, career-shaping award he had applied for months earlier. Instead, the email informed him that the entire program was being eliminated. No fellowships would be awarded.
“There’s no doubt in my mind I would’ve gotten it,” Hammonds said.
The fellowship would have both funded his academic research, which focuses on microlocal analysis and number theory, and secured his role as co-academic coordinator at a summer math camp for high school students. Its sudden cancellation upended what was meant to be three stable years of independent research and mentorship.
“It’s completely shifted all of my postgraduate plans,” Hammonds said. “It’s caused me to reassess everything about my life and goals.”
Hammonds is among the many researchers at Princeton affected by the Trump administration’s decision to suspend several dozen research grants. The administration’s decision follows similar spending suspensions and reductions at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
With federal support for research now in jeopardy, graduate students like Hammonds face an increasingly uncertain future in academia. And as unprecedented emails land in their inboxes, many young scholars are left asking the same question: What now?
Having grown up in a predominantly Black low-income neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, Hammonds never planned to become a mathematician. Tall, with short-cropped hair, Hammonds speaks with a quiet confidence as he tells me how his early interests fluctuated between a conservatory education in piano to lab research in evolutionary biology. His academic trajectory shifted the summer after his junior year of high school, when he attended √mathroots @ MIT, a math camp designed for students from underrepresented backgrounds. Led by graduate students at MIT, the program introduced Hammonds to a future in academia. “I just really admired them,” he recalled. “It was cool that they could spend their time doing math research.” For Hammonds, the idea of a career built on “freedom” and “intellectual independence” was unfamiliar, but appealing. He went on to major in math at Carnegie Mellon University with a focus on number theory.
His pursuit of academia defied the pre-professional culture that dominated his undergraduate years. Surrounded by classmates chasing tech internships and six-figure starting salaries, Hammonds faced skepticism for wanting something different. “People would say, ‘Why would you go to grad school? Just go work at Google,’” he recalled. “It really felt like I had to carve out a path that didn’t exist for most people around me.” Instead of bending to the prevailing logic, Hammonds’ passion for mathematics only grew stronger. He was drawn to the discipline for its own sake. “The idea of using math for something else just wasn’t appealing,” he said. “That wasn’t why I loved it.”
Years later, Hammonds returned to √mathroots, the very program that launched his academic journey — this time, as an instructor. “Seeing students who remind me of myself, and helping them discover a love for math — it’s incredibly rewarding,” Hammonds said, reflecting on his two years working at the camp. This year, he was slated to take on a larger role as academic coordinator, overseeing curriculum and instruction. But with the cancellation of his NSF fellowship and his inability to be physically present at MIT, the role was reduced to co-academic coordinator, unpaid and less influential. “That work is important to me,” he said. “It reminds me why I started this in the first place.” Beyond supporting his role at √mathroots, the NSF Fellowship would have funded Hammonds’ research, providing something increasingly rare in academia: time and freedom. “It was a chance to actually do the kind of deep, uninterrupted thinking that this field requires,” he said.
Hammonds is not alone in this funding frenzy.
Across academia, the search for alternative placements, particularly for those who had secured government-backed positions, has become frantic. “A number of my friends in other departments have had their funding cut, have lost their internships because of both overall funding cuts and DEI funding cuts,” Hammonds said. “And so they’re scrambling in March, trying to find an internship for the summer.”
The funding crisis has also triggered an uptick in American researchers relocating to Europe — what media outlets like Politico are now calling an “intellectual gold rush.” Princeton’s mathematics department has shown a dramatic shift in where its graduates are headed, according to Hammonds, who noted that over half of this year’s graduating cohort is heading to Europe — roughly double the typical rate. As U.S. institutions falter under political and financial strain, the European Union is moving swiftly to capitalize on the moment. The European Research Council (ERC) has increased grant funding by up to €2 million for U.S.-based researchers who relocate, offering total packages of up to €4.5 million. In addition, the EU is developing a special visa for top-tier scholars and planning to enshrine scientific freedom into law as part of a broader, coordinated effort across member states and universities to make Europe a global sanctuary for independent research.
At Princeton and nationwide, advocates for academic freedom and public scholarship are speaking out. Some Princeton professors have recently renewed a local chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a national organization dedicated to protecting academic work and its institutional autonomy. “It’s an organization that protects postdocs and graduate students as much as it protects faculty and their academic freedom,” said AAUP Vice-President and English Professor Zahid Chaudhary. While the Princeton chapter is still in its early stages, its members are raising the alarm over recent federal actions. Chaudhary noted that AAUP lawyers have already “put together various portfolios explaining how the universities might respond legally and comply with the laws while resisting repressive policies.”
Still, many scholars are confronted with whether American academia remains viable, even for graduates of the nation’s most prestigious institutions. “Staying in academia and staying at ‘top places in academia’ will be much harder than perhaps I initially thought, or one might think it would be for a Princeton Ph.D. student,” Hammonds said. This realization has pushed him to consider alternatives that once seemed unthinkable.
Hammonds’ research fellowship now in an abyss, he is left contemplating a drastically altered future: a postdoctoral position in Denmark, far from family and friends, or reluctantly “caving” to work at a hedge fund. “I could go to Europe,” he explains, “but unless I really hit home runs while I’m there, I might have a similar issue when I eventually try to come back to the U.S.” Torn between an uncertain academic path and a career he considers a “waste of talent,” Hammonds finds himself at a dead end.
“Maybe this is my chance to pivot and do something else, because I might be on a path that is not going to improve over time,” he said, his voice trailing off as he contemplates a future far different from the one he had planned. For now, like countless other scholars caught in this sudden funding contraction, Hammonds waits in academic limbo — watching as opportunities delete themselves, one email notification at a time.
