A Bastion for Neurodivergent Researchers Loses Its NSF Funding

In the six years since Vanderbilt University launched a fellowship program to teach Ph.D. students to connect their research to the study of neurodiversity, the program has graduated about 24 Ph.D.s who are autistic. Founder Keivan Stassun believes the program, called Neurodiversity Inspired Science and Engineering, may produce more autistic scientists and engineers than any other doctoral program in the world.

NISE is open to students who are neurotypical as well as those who are neurodivergent, meaning their brains process information differently than most people’s. But from the beginning, Stassun said, he expected it would attract a lot of autistic students.

“We really thought of [NISE] as a kind of a win-win-win. One win being the basic engineering and science research that these students were conducting. Another win being for advancing solutions for autistic and neurodivergent people in science and engineering. And the third win being for these students themselves,” Stassun said. “We anticipated that … this would be a vehicle for helping to ensure good mentorship and community and success for autistic and neurodivergent Ph.D. students.”

But now, NISE is in danger due to funding pauses at the National Science Foundation. For its first six years, the program was funded by an NSF Research Traineeship Program grant. Last year, Stassun applied for new NSF funding, not only to continue NISE at Vanderbilt but also to expand it and other successful programs within the university’s Frist Center for Autism and Innovation to other institutions.

In January, Stassun said, he received notice from the agency that the FCAI would be awarded $4 million in funding. But since then, he’s gotten nothing but radio silence from the NSF; the funding, which was supposed to arrive in March, never came.

He’s not alone; recently, other NSF grant applicants have reportedly been ghosted by the agency even after being told they would receive funding. Indeed, since President Trump retook office in January, his administration has canceled, paused or frozen billions in research and programmatic grants from the NSF, the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies. (The NSF declined to comment for this story.)

As a result, NISE’s planned expansion to five new universities won’t happen, and the Vanderbilt program is unable to accept any new fellows for the upcoming academic year.

“As part of the plan for national scale-up of the NISE program, we had budgeted funds to continue [it] at Vanderbilt,” Stassun said. But now, “we can’t, in good conscience, be making offers of admission on the hope that we might yet hear something positive about that grant.”

‘Highest Levels of Research’

Hari Srinivasan, an advocate for autistic people, neuroscience Ph.D. student and NISE program fellow, told Inside Higher Ed in an email that the revocation of the NSF funding could have ripple effects on the overall perception of autistic people, as well as on research into their experiences.

“When you cut off the funds, autism gets less visibility, which means opportunities are less, which will slow the work we’ve done towards progress and solutions,” wrote Srinivasan. “[It] also means less research in autism space. And ultimately research findings is what influences funding priorities, who get access to what spaces, who gets access to what resources, and it is research findings that lead us to solutions.”

Srinivasan, who describes himself as having limited spoken language ability, said he’d been interested in neuroscience since he was a middle schooler and became fascinated by illustrations of the nervous system in textbooks owned by his aunt and uncle, who are doctors. But his experiences with special education classes in elementary and middle school—which he described as being “like kindergarten on repeat year after year”—left him unsure if he would be able to pursue his dreams of becoming a neuroscientist.

Luckily, his experiences at a charter high school that allowed him to take more advanced courses and at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his undergraduate degree, continued to set him up for success: Stassun personally recruited him to Vanderbilt. Now he is researching how autistic people “perceive and interact with the space immediately around their bodies, known as peripersonal space,” he told Inside Higher Ed. He hopes to transform his research into practical solutions “that can help autistics better navigate their spatial and social environment.”

NISE places an emphasis on developing solutions to problems neurodivergent people face every day, especially as students and employees; one of the Frist Center’s goals is to help autistic people join and excel in the workforce. Each of the fellows takes a series of three courses focused on developing those solutions, with the last of the three laying the foundation for the students to transform those products into start-ups, if they so choose.

Students have conceptualized everything from interview simulators that allow neurodivergent people to practice job interviews to technologies designed to lessen the hypersensitivity to sounds that some autistic people experience.

“They really get engaged in the most cutting-edge and the highest levels of research and discovery, and it helps them see how to apply their unique skills and talents and interests across the full range of science and engineering research,” said Sara Frederick, a postdoctoral scholar at Vanderbilt and a lead instructor for NISE. “So, they really get to be creative, come up with creative solutions for science and engineering problems related to neurodiversity. But they also get to form a community … They can work with each other, they can talk with each other candidly and they really get to make a difference in the world. And some of the technologies that they develop, some go on to write patents for those and develop those technologies.”

Different Ways of Thinking

NISE’s planned expansion to other universities was intended to be a multistep process, eventually culminating in the creation of a National Center of Excellence for Autism and Neurodiversity in Engineering, as well as a guidebook of best practices for helping autistic STEM students on campuses across the U.S. prosper.

The six universities still plan to collaborate, even without the grant. But Marisa Chrysochoou, the dean of engineering at the University of Missouri, one of the participating institutions, said having the NSF’s funding and eventually launching a national center would have provided a big boost.

“What I’ve seen through the years is that having federal funding and structure just gives you a different level of visibility and appreciation from the academic community. People pay attention,” she said. “When you have that sort of visibility, provosts and presidents and deans pay attention.”

The visibility of neurodivergent students has skyrocketed in recent years, in large part because institutions saw an increase in accommodation requests during the COVID-19 pandemic and afterward. But many institutions haven’t begun incorporating supports for those students into all facets of their campus experiences, rather than confining them to the disability services office.

A key goal of the coalition was to create supportive campus environments that would fully nurture the strengths of neurodivergent students, Chrysochoou said, with each institution sharing initiatives and solutions that had helped them. For instance, the University of Connecticut, where Chrysochoou worked before moving to Mizzou last August, focused on success for undergraduates with autism and ADHD; advisers were trained to help neurodivergent students find career paths where, despite their differences, they could not only succeed but make the most of their unique ways of thinking.

“We all have different brains that work in different ways, right? The medical model and the more traditional approach of looking at this has been diagnosis of what is wrong—what we perceive to be wrong—with different brains,” she said. “But we also know that brains that work and think differently have a lot of strengths. People with ADHD often think outside of the box, to use a simple term.”

Despite the setback for NISE—and what appears to be an ongoing attack by the Trump administration on funding for scientific research and training—Chrysochoou is still hopeful the group will be able to continue its work as planned through private funding or a future NSF grant.

“This is work that we are all committed to doing, no matter what,” she said.