Ph.D. student pens heartfelt appeal for research funding, building a student-led campaign for science

As a Ph.D. student in cognitive neuroscience, Erin Morrow is comfortable in a lab. This summer, she’s expanding her comfort level to include media interviews, authorship and a research-based type of activism.

Morrow is spending her break doing TV news interviews and campaigning for the McClintock Letters, an initiative that encourages student researchers from universities around the country to pen letters to the editor of their hometown newspapers.

“I thought it would be meaningful to write about how an experience in my life led to the scientist that I am today,” Morrow said.

When she was 20, Morrow was diagnosed with an atrioventricular block, which prevents electrical signals from passing between the heart’s chambers. A state-of-the-art pacemaker was required. As a STEM scholar, Morrow knew well the years of research that went into it.

“That would not have been possible without the support of decades of research,” Morrow said.

Six months after treatment, Morrow graduated from Emory University before heading to UCLA for graduate school.

Over the past year, she’s watched as federal funding for university research was threatened and understands the risk those cuts pose to treatments at the end of the pipeline, including insulin pumps and artery stents.

“Things that might seem far away on the federal level impact folks in local communities,” Morrow said.

“These science agencies are an integral part of our everyday experience — whether it’s through cures and discoveries that enable a better future or a battery for a beating heart,” Morrow wrote in an opinion piece for the Marietta Daily Journal, her hometown newspaper.

Morrow has spent the summer encouraging other student researchers, including eight at UCLA, to write op-eds in support of research to their hometown papers. So far, they’ve published 140 articles in 40 states.

“There are unprecedented challenges facing the scientific enterprise,” Morrow said. “We have things to learn to make our research more equitable and accessible to everyone.”