Saturday marked a national day of protests planned by the Stand Up For Science organization, which formed last year to protest President Donald Trump’s administration’s cuts to scientific funding and nominees for key cabinet positions that affect research.
Held roughly one year after the initial protests, this year’s local demonstration drew smaller crowds – but dozens of UNC and Research Triangle students, professors, researchers and medical professionals showed up Saturday to UNC-Chapel Hill to take part in a rally. People stood in the Bell Tower Amphitheater to cheer on featured speakers and hold signs that read “Let us work on cures again,” “Science saves lives,” “Diversity leads to discovery,” and “Science is not an alternative fact.”
Many of those who addressed the crowd discussed the fallout from initial cuts made by the Trump administration, like scaled back research funding at higher education institutions like UNC, Duke and N.C. State and a de-prioritization of vaccine funding. But they also highlighted current threats to public health — like cuts to Medicare and Medicaid or changes to air pollution and water quality standards.
Dr. David Wohl – who helps lead UNC Health’s Divisions of Infectious Diseases – was one of the rally’s featured speakers. As a researcher whose expertise helped both the region and state navigate the COVID-19 pandemic years ago, Wohl pointed to how the change of priorities at the federal level are trickling down to not just work in Chapel Hill but the country’s public health and taxpayers. He cited a memo from the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, that explicitly said infectious disease preparedness is no longer a priority for them. To Wohl, that is a mistake.
“There are other parts of the government that can start thinking about preparedness — but they’re not research institutions, necessarily, and certainly nothing like the NIH,” he said to Chapelboro afterward. “So it worries me quite a bit that we’re turning our backs to preparing for infectious diseases of consequence at the very same time we’ve seen these become more frequent and their scope become broader.
“Measles is a great example,” Wohl added. “What we’re seeing now is 2,300 cases last year, where before you could count them on your hand [annually] in the United States. That’s bad for those people — it’s bad for the 11% of those people who got hospitalized, but it’s also bad for the rest of us because we’re spending an incredible amount of time at UNC, and across the country, preparing for measles… Tens of millions [of dollars] are being spent in responding to measles alone. That’s a waste, and it was very preventable.”
Mark Peifer, a distinguished professor and researcher in UNC’s biology department, has been an outspoken member of the campus community about the political nature of some of the funding cuts. In addition to sharing ways UNC’s research has been slowed by funding cuts, he urged attendees on Saturday to not be intimidated or curb their public pushback on the Trump administration’s cuts — partially, because science is still a widely popular industry.
“There’s still a public support, and bipartisan support in Congress for science,” said Peifer. “They don’t want to turn science over entirely to China and our European, former, allies. They just passed a budget that has a slight increase for the NIH, a flat budget for [the National Science Foundation]. But that isn’t good news because Trump and [Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget Russell] Vought still hold the purse strings and they aren’t spending that money.”
Demonstrators gather around speaker and UNC Health infectious disease expert Dr. David Wohl at the Bell Tower Amphitheater at UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus. (Photo by Brighton McConnell/Chapel Hill Media Group.)
UNC biology professor and researcher Mark Peifer speaks to the gathered crowd at the Stand Up For Science rally on Mar. 7, 2026. (Photo by Brighton McConnell/Chapel Hill Media Group.)
Misha Angrist, who is an associate professor at Duke University, studies the connections between biology and society — which means he often interacts with non-scientists to discuss research. During his comments to the crowd, Angrist encouraged those in the scientific community to use this moment to do more outreach to help people understand their work and equate knowledge more with humility than superiority. He encouraged people to strike up conversations with strangers to help tease out their curiousity — and reminded them the importance of just listening to others instead of trying to convince them of expertise.
“Let me be clear: none of this is easy, comfortable or without risk,” Angrist said. “But think about all of the people who have already been censored, threatened, fired, marginalized? The stakes are existential. But my hypothesis is that together, we can defend science not only as an institution but, more importantly, as a way of seeing the world. Together we can defend our humanity, we can overcome our fears, we can defend our lives.”
Wohl said he felt motivated and supported by seeing those who had gathered for the Research Triangle chapter of Stand Up For Science demonstrations, describing it as a good opportunity to “link arms together and say, ‘This is important to us'” while pointing out the dangers of spurning science. But he also acknowledged that with the extent of sweeping changes caused in the last year, other players will need to vocally join the cause for momentum to swing back the other direction.
“I think the big change has got to come from bigger organizations and consortiums,” Wohl said. “Whether it be universities, academic institutions, companies… there are definitely a lot of companies that got burned because they followed the rules down to the very last minute of approval for their vaccine or drug, and then had the rug pulled out from under them [by the Trump administration]. There’s discord from many fronts.
“I think Stand Up For Science plants the flag,” he concluded, “and I think other protests have really done that to say, ‘Hey, we’re here…we’re loud, this is what we’re feeling.’ But we really do need institutions to gather together to make a big difference, to help us along.”
Featured photo by Brighton McConnell/Chapel Hill Media Group.
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