Jessica Whited shows a photo of one of her proudest moments. She stands with her parents — an autoworker and a schoolteacher — after winning a Presidential Early Career Award signed by President Donald Trump, honoring her as one of the nation’s most promising young scientists.

Six years later, the second Trump administration delivered a blow to her science, cutting nearly all the funding for her work on illuminating the molecular secrets of how salamanders regrow limbs — and how these mechanisms might be used to help human patients.

“Emotionally, it stings,” said Whited, associate professor in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, fighting back tears. “It feels very personal. It took me 19 years to build this axolotl colony and research program with a goal to ultimately help human lives. It couldn’t have come at a worse time.”

The recent funding cuts have damaged research across the University. Whited was hit particularly hard. She lost five separate federal grants worth $4.2 million, or about 90 percent of her research budget.

“The strokes coming down are just so broad and heavy-handed,” she said. “They were not really scrutinizing the individuals that were affected. But I find it very ironic the way we can be characterized as a bunch of ivory tower elitists who don’t have any sense of what’s going on outside in the rest of the world — even while our research is dedicated to solving hard problems that impact human health.”