Trump moves to terminate hundreds of grants to Harvard

In yet another escalation of its fight against higher education, the Trump administration has moved to terminate hundreds of research grants at Harvard University and its medical school, imperiling dozens of research projects and potentially upending the futures of young scientists.

Harvard researchers studying cancer, infectious diseases, and other topics began receiving termination notices for tens of millions of dollars in research funding en masse Thursday from multiple federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and the US departments of Defense and Energy, according to emails shared with the Globe.

“The scale of what happened is incomprehensible — a bloodbath for research and the wider community,” said Brittany Charlton, associate professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and founding director of the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence, whose federal funding was terminated in March. “Entire labs are unraveling, and young scientists on training grants may be suddenly adrift. Work that could change lives — or save them — is being brought to a standstill.”