Last week, I appeared on The Noon Show, a live FM radio program out of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, talking to hosts Lisa Jones and Johnnie Aycock about chromatography, science communication, and why researchers need to stop keeping their work to themselves. A few hours later, Lisa and Johnnie came on my podcast, Concentrating on Chromatography, and we kept going.
The conversation stuck with me, because it kept circling back to the same uncomfortable truth: the people doing the most important work in American science are the least likely to be talking about it publicly. And right now, with federal research funding under assault, that silence is a problem that researchers can no longer afford.
Let me give you some numbers that should stop you cold.
NIH awards are down 29% and NSF awards have dropped 50% compared to recent years, and some institutions have reported 10–25% declines in federal research funding year over year (Association of American Universities, July 2025). That's not a rounding error. That's labs going dark.
In 2025 alone, the Trump administration froze or ended approximately 5,300 NIH and NSF research grants totaling over $5 billion in unspent funds (Science News, January 2026). Those weren't proposed cuts. Those were grants that had already been awarded, already incorporated into lab budgets, and already relied upon by graduate students who planned their careers around that funding.
The administration's proposed budgets called for cuts of nearly 40% to the NIH, 57% to the NSF, and 14% to the Department of Energy's Office of Science — collectively slashing spending on applied research by 38% and basic research by 34% over prior-year levels (Brennan Center for Justice, May 2026).
Congress has pushed back on some of these proposals. The latest funding package approved by Congress ensures that federal funding for scientific agencies, including the NSF, remains steady from 2025 through 2026. But the damage from grants already frozen, canceled, or restructured is already baked in. Research on cancer, Alzheimer's, vaccines, and HIV is already being impacted, and the long-term price will be measured not just in dollars, but in lives — diseases we couldn't cure and disasters we couldn't prevent (National Education Association, February 2026).
I saw this up close when I visited a municipal lab last year. On one hand, they had more projects than ever. On the other, some of their staff had been fired and then rehired the following month. These are researchers who don't know if they have jobs long term. They don't know how to invest in equipment. They don't know what their funding situation looks like six months from now.
This is where science communication enters the conversation — not as a nice-to-have, but as a survival skill.
Lisa Jones spent 27 years inside the University of Alabama's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry — not as a scientist, but as a business professional embedded in that world. When she retired, something clicked. She realized that the discoveries being made in those labs, the breakthroughs that scientists celebrated in hallways and passed around as normal conversation, weren't reaching anyone outside those walls.
Not the community. Not the taxpayers funding the work. Not the policymakers making decisions about the budgets.
That realization is what eventually led her and her longtime collaborator Johnnie Aycock — a 28-year economic development veteran — to build a STEM-focused spotlight series on The Noon Show and, now, Bright Path, an upcoming show on Alabama Public Radio.
Here's what Lisa told me on my podcast: "Researchers who have come on the show, we realized they were hungry to tell those stories." She wasn't surprised that the research was valuable. She was surprised by how much researchers wanted to talk about it once someone gave them the chance.
That's the gap. It's not that researchers don't want to communicate. It's that no one has built them an easy on-ramp.
Most of the researchers I talk to are already presenting at conferences. They're already spending two or three years developing an area of study, running the experiments, documenting the failures and the breakthroughs, and eventually putting together a polished poster or a talk. Then the conference ends, and that presentation goes into a folder.
Think about that for a second. You've done 95% of the work. The last 5% — sharing it with a wider audience — is the part that has the most leverage on your career, your funding situation, and the future of your field.
Johnnie Aycock put it bluntly: "You're preaching to the choir" at conferences. The 300 people in the room already understand why your work matters. They're not the ones who need convincing. The general public, the local business community, the policymakers with budget authority — those are the people who will ultimately determine whether your lab exists in five years.
The good news is that getting visible doesn't require a media team or a publicist. My own podcast, Concentrating on Chromatography, runs on a free HubSpot hosted website with a $20 dollar a year domain fee, with videos embedded from YouTube. If a researcher wanted to start documenting their own work and putting it out there, the investment in tools is minimal. The investment in time is real, but smaller than most people assume.
The number one barrier isn't money. It's public speaking anxiety. And the answer to that is the same one Lisa gave on air: the more you do it, the easier it gets. Researchers who have already presented at conferences, who have already defended their work in front of committee rooms, are closer to ready than they think.
Johnnie comes from economic development. When he hears a researcher talking about their work, his mind immediately goes to applications — workforce pipeline, commercial opportunity, community impact. He's not being naive. He's making a point that the scientific community sometimes forgets.
The research happening inside universities is not separate from the economic and social fabric of the communities those universities sit in. When a researcher from Auburn University figured out a way to oxygenate catfish ponds overnight — solving a problem that was forcing farmers to stay up all night manually monitoring oxygen levels — that innovation didn't just benefit a lab. Public communication of science has increasingly become crucial to research activity, and there is growing evidence that scientists and research institutions around the world are embracing this practice as a way to demonstrate broader impact and relevance.
The connections are everywhere, once you start looking. A precision time research program at the University of Alabama spun out a company now building atomic clocks and optical maser technology. That's not an abstract science project. That's jobs, economic development, and national defense capability growing directly out of academic research.
And consider what happens when that story doesn't get told. The person who controls the NIH budget sees a line item for research they don't understand and makes the call to cut it. They've never heard the story. They've never met the researcher. They've never had anyone explain to them — in plain language, with a concrete analogy — why this work matters.
Republicans and Democrats alike, according to recent polling, support government investment in scientific research and want to see the U.S. remain a leader in science. Nearly half say the U.S. is losing ground in scientific achievements compared to other countries. The public is already sympathetic. They just don't know enough about what's actually being done to advocate for it.
That's a messaging problem. And it's fixable.
Let me move from the big picture to the personal. Why should you, as an individual researcher or analytical chemist, invest time in building a public presence for your work?
Funding leverage. Scientists rely on competitive grant funding to finance their research, and public engagement is increasingly a requirement of that funding — not just in justifying how public funds are spent, but in communicating scientific vision to the funders and policymakers who define priorities. A researcher who already has a track record of effective public communication is a more credible grant applicant than one who exists only in peer-reviewed journals.
Student recruitment. Labs that are visible attract better graduate students. If your work is on YouTube, if there's a podcast episode where you explain what you're working on and why it matters, prospective students find you. They arrive already motivated. That matters when you're competing for the best talent.
Career mobility. For researchers approaching graduation or considering a transition from academia to commercial science, a polished public presentation of your work is a professional asset that most of your peers don't have. An employer or a partner company that can Google you and find clear, articulate explanations of your research is going to take you more seriously than a candidate who exists only on paper.
Collaboration. Lisa and Johnnie described something interesting in our conversation: researchers who have come on their show tend to refer other researchers. The network effect is real. Getting visible opens doors that you didn't know were closed.
Advocacy. If the goal is to reverse the funding trend, it starts with individual researchers telling their stories loudly enough that the right people hear them. Johnnie said it directly: what if every business association in the country — the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, state-level chambers — had a policy position supporting research funding? They can't get there unless they understand why research matters. And they can't understand that unless researchers talk to them.
I started this podcast in 2024 because I kept going to analytical chemistry conferences, watching graduate students present two and three years of rigorous work to a room of their peers, and thinking: this shouldn't end here.
I'm not a scientist. I'm the General Manager of a Massachusetts lab instrument manufacturer. But I've been around enough conferences and enough labs to know that the work happening in academic analytical chemistry — in chromatography, mass spectrometry, environmental testing, pharmaceutical analysis, food safety — has enormous real-world relevance that never makes it past the conference hall.
Concentrating on Chromatography is my attempt to fix that. I bring on researchers, help translate their work for a broader audience, and put those conversations on YouTube and Spotify where they can actually find people who need to hear them.
If you're doing analytical chemistry research — or you know someone who is — I'd love to have you on the show. The time commitment is modest. The preparation I'll ask of you is minimal. I'll come to the conversation having done the homework, and my job is to make your work accessible to people who might not know what chromatography is. That's the whole point.
The conversation Lisa, Johnnie, and I kept returning to is that we all need more people with platforms doing more of this work. Until that moment arrives, the platforms that exist need to be used.
Your research is worth hearing about. The question is whether anyone outside your field will ever get the chance to hear it.
Sources
Association of American Universities. "Federal Research Cuts Threaten U.S. Innovation and Leadership." July 2025. https://www.aau.edu/key-issues/federal-research-cuts-threaten-us-innovation-and-leadership
Brennan Center for Justice. "The Cost of the Trump Administration's Attacks on Research Funding." May 2026. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/cost-trump-administrations-attacks-research-funding
National Education Association. "Americans Want Scientific Research. The Government Cut It Anyway." February 2026. https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/americans-want-scientific-research-government-cut-it-anyway
Science News. "See the Alarming Extent of NIH and NSF Funding Cuts in 2025." January 2026. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/nih-nsf-cuts-2025-data