Mandi is a Maine returnee and cancer researcher for the George Washington University. Earlier this year, Mandi and her colleagues lost their grant funding because of an executive order.
As a scientist, I want to try to decipher what is actually happening in practice that drives change. The loss of NIH funding really affected our ability to take these actions into more community-based settings.
Mandi and her colleagues were ordered to immediately stop working on a large-scale cancer study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NCI) exploring the best ways to collect information on the sexual orientation and gender identity of cancer patients. The project was already one-third of the way through data collection.
Mandi has made it her personal mission to make evidence-based health care and disease prevention strategies available to more people as quickly as possible. She describes the cancellation of her grant as “alarming”, explaining: “If you’re doing a broad study of people, you’re going to have gay people, bi people, trans people in your sample…by not capturing that data, you have less information as a scientist to distinguish potential patterns.”