These Berkeley researchers may stop the next pandemic — if we let them

January 30, 2026

by Alexander Rony

Moving labs can be a stressful time for any researcher. For integrative biology professor Cara Brook, her July arrival at UC Berkeley was complicated by the sudden loss of nearly half a million dollars in federal funding.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) eliminated a portion of her innovative research award and two supplements that funded students from low-income backgrounds. The U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) abrupt dissolution cut two more projects run by Brook’s collaborators: a project around farmed insect protein for human nutrition and a desperately needed national HIV prevalence study.

“It is an extremely challenging environment for any early-career researcher,” said Brook. “I remember thinking that there would always be funding for HIV in Africa, and that is so far from the truth in the current environment, which is quite tragic. Any kind of international work is threatened.”

Navigating new bureaucratic challenges

Across UC Berkeley, scientists are warning of the dire consequences of federal budget cuts. These fears are felt particularly acutely by zoonotic researchers — those studying infectious diseases that cross between humans and animals. This area of research gained urgency and notoriety after a coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2, originally carried by horseshoe bats) caused millions of deaths worldwide.

Through their fieldwork, zoonotic researchers occasionally discover novel viruses, putting them on the frontline of emerging health threats. Nobody wants another pandemic, but the connections between zoonotic diseases and vaccines, poverty, conservation, and foreign aid have made it more difficult for researchers to get their federal grants approved or renewed over the past year.

“It's an interesting time to be a virologist,” said Molly Ohainle, who studies HIV. “Many of us got into this business because we want to help people. Having just lived through the SARS‑CoV‑2 pandemic, this idea that all of a sudden a virus can come into our lives and completely upend us feels very raw for many people, myself included.”

An HIV vaccine has eluded researchers for decades. It takes an enormous, collaborative effort to create life-saving vaccines. Even when vaccines are developed, pathogens can evolve to override our defenses. Many people receive annual booster shots for COVID-19 and influenza, for example.

While the HIV pandemic was the result of a single cross-species transmission from many years ago, related viruses have jumped between species and into humans multiple times. All these mutations and spillover events can feel like a game of whack-a-mole with dire consequences.

“There's a huge array of viruses in the world,” said Ohainle. “We're interacting with these viruses more often than we appreciate. It's really rare that zoonotic transfers actually take off. It's virtually impossible to predict. It's important to figure out how to deal with it when it happens.”

Preventing future pandemics

A woman wearing a mask and gloves holds up a bat

Three photos showing a woman holding slides at different distances

CARA BROOK HOLDS A BAT AND SOME SLIDES CONTAINING SLICES OF BAT TEETH

TOP PHOTO COURTESY OF CARA BROOK; BOTTOM PHOTOS BY ALEXANDER RONY

Brook tracks viruses in Madagascar's wild fruit bats to understand what predisposes these viruses to infect humans. Brook is seeking a new approach to counter zoonotic threats by preparing to test a henipavirus vaccine in an isolated population of wild bats. She compares her idea to rabies shots for dogs.

The test should offer lessons for conservation efforts as well as human health measures. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, some jurisdictions restricted pivotal strategies like vaccines, mask mandates, and quarantine orders. Brook hopes that preventing zoonotic spillover to humans in the first place will make public health less dependent on a fluctuating political landscape.

A woman smiles in front of a green, natural backdrop

A researcher walks down the aisle of a lab; Two people conduct research in a room

MOLLY OHAINLE AND HER LAB

PHOTOS COURTESY OF MOLLY OHAINLE

“It's a challenging field to work in,” said Brook. “One is never recognized or rewarded for the absence of something happening. There's no way to be certain that you prevented a future pandemic.”

Brook is serving her second stint on campus; she previously worked with integrative biology professor Mike Boots as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2020, the pair joined others in proposing a theory for why bat-borne viruses cause some of the most severe outbreaks.

Boots’ research asks these sorts of big-picture questions, using specific viruses to gain broader insights into how viral transmissions work. We still don't know why certain viruses take off while others don't, posing a major challenge for public health workers in determining where to direct their attention.

The U.S. government is the world's largest funder of basic research, and the NIH is the largest single funder of biomedical research. Boots is concerned that federal cuts will cause long-standing harm to public health.

“People in America are not immune to the threats of these infectious diseases,” said Boots. “That's obvious from 2020, and it's going to come again. We're going to have another pandemic.”

He noted that the National Science Foundation has archived the Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases Initiative. The multi-agency program supported interdisciplinary research on the broader drivers of infectious diseases.

Public health agencies aren’t the only ones that matter to zoonotic researchers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) laid off scores of bee researchers in February 2025, though many were later rehired. The back-and-forth delayed the government's response to a severe drop in honeybee colonies, another concern of Boots' lab. Boots looks at disease transmission between pollinators as a model system for how zoonotic diseases may spread to humans.

“What worries me is I have no sense of what's happening at that agency, whether they have funding, and whether people have lost their jobs,” Boots said, echoing sentiments researchers expressed about other agencies. “I don't think there's been an active sense that we don't need research in agriculture, but if they're shrinking all these agencies across the board, then that's the knock-on effect.”

Losing focus on preventative measures

Similar to Boots, Tierra Smiley Evans examines the larger reasons why diseases spread. In her case, she studies emerging pathogens at the landscape level. Her work on human-wildlife interactions takes her deep into the forests of East Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Amazon River Basin.

Government cuts have had a particularly deleterious effect on Smiley Evans's work. She had been closely involved with the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases Network, a group of centers aimed at preventing future pandemics.

“It was the first time they’d made an investment at that level and scale,” said Smiley Evans. “The first five years were about developing the infrastructure, network, and collaborations. We were starting to get some interesting, combined papers and were about to hit the ground running, and they canceled the whole thing.”

Smiley Evans was also pursuing an intriguing line of research into sarbecoviruses, a subgenus of the coronavirus family that includes SARS-CoV-2. She had been collecting human blood samples in northern Myanmar for years before the pandemic, so the NIH awarded her a grant to further study this population of people. Her team demonstrated a very high prevalence of sarbecovirus antibodies in the remote region before March 2020.

Smiley Evans hoped to continue her research to test theories that we need a different boosting system that develops broad-spectrum antibody protection against SARS-CoV-2 and other sarbecoviruses (as opposed to boosters that target a single virus strain’s new variants). As her initial grant was ending, she was told that this entire area of inquiry was effectively dead at the agency and that they shouldn't bother pursuing another grant.

“So...that was that,” said Smiley Evans.

Beyond her faculty position, Smiley Evans serves as the chief scientist for the nonprofit Gorilla Doctors. Humans and mountain gorillas are closely related and have similar responses to pathogens. A virus like Ebola could be equally devastating to both species. Gorilla Doctors had signed a contract with USAID Rwanda a year ago to expand a regional diagnostics laboratory. The project had been in the works for around five years.

Headshots of a woman in a denim shirt and a man in a button-up shirt

TIERRA SMILEY EVANS (LEFT) AND MIKE BOOTS (RIGHT)

People in America are not immune to the threats of these infectious diseases. That's obvious from 2020, and it's going to come again.

Mike Boots

“We really need a high-level wildlife diagnostics laboratory, because the big, scary outbreaks are in these areas,” said Smiley Evans. “Ebola, Marburg, and Mpox all come from animals, so when you're just covering humans and not testing wildlife during an outbreak, you're missing a whole piece of the puzzle. We had signed the contract, and before we even got a single payment, the USAID no longer exists, and the whole thing went away. That was a big hit.”

As U.S. funding shrinks, some disease researchers are searching abroad. The UK-based Wellcome Trust is funding a project in which Smiley Evans' team is comparing serum collected from primates decades ago with modern samples to see how Zika and dengue virus profiles have shifted. The goal is to determine why these viruses have been more problematic in Latin America compared to Africa.

“We're creating this big vacuum,” Smiley Evans said of U.S. funding cuts. “Other countries are recognizing the importance of this work.”

We're creating this big vacuum. Other countries are recognizing the importance of this work.

Tierra Smiley Evans

Funding gaps endanger long-running datasets

The Wellcome Trust also came to the Harris Research Program’s aid after the NIH froze several grants. Professor Eva Harris runs the world's longest-running study of dengue in children. Her lab samples 4,000 Nicaraguan children every year to understand what protects some children but not others from a virus spread by mosquitoes.

Globally, dengue infects 100 million people each year and kills 25,000. Cases are rising in the United States as the virus spreads outward from tropical regions. Last year, U.S. cases tripled to more than 10,000. Most of the domestic transmissions occur in warmer areas like California, Florida, and Puerto Rico — but cases are now being reported as far north as New York and Washington.

While the risk to Americans is clear, the Trump administration froze many foreign research and health programs, arguing that these studies should occur in the United States. However, because transmission rates are much higher in tropical countries, it is far more cost-effective to run studies elsewhere — ultimately saving taxpayers money.

“For most of last year, every week, we got new guidance, new rules,” said Tulika Singh, a postdoctoral fellow in the Harris Research Program.

Singh mentioned that scientists have been forced to censor their federal grant applications, scrubbing terms like “climate change” and ignoring the proverbial elephant in the room.

“Of course, dengue is a climate-driven disease,” said Singh. “Climate change is already making diseases worse. Dengue virus is going farther north and south and up to higher elevations.”

An NIH ban on foreign subawards was particularly burdensome for researchers with international collaborations. Suddenly, they couldn't pay local institutions to hire workers or purchase equipment. The ban effectively halted work at disease hotspots worldwide. Harris had to scramble to continue paying her Nicaraguan researchers and community outreach specialists.

The agency announced a new process in September, but operations are tenuous even if they have continued.

“The problem is that no one knows how to interpret the rules. I've been told a hundred different things on how we can proceed,” said Smiley Evans, whose Ebola early warning system in Uganda was impacted. “All the researchers are talking with each other — 'What did you hear? What was your conversation?' — and everyone is getting a different story. I don't even know what to believe.”

Three people bend over to inspect a pan of water; Storage tanks in a large room; A woman points at a circular image on a computer screen

LEFT TO RIGHT: TULIKA SINGH CONDUCTS COMMUNITY OUTREACH IN NICARAGUA; LIQUID NITROGEN TANKS STORE CRYOPRESERVED CELLS IN NICARAGUA; TULIKA SINGH ANALYZES FLUORESCENT MARKERS TO TRACK VIRUSES

PHOTOS BY CLAUDIA SANCHEZ SAN MARTIN, TULIKA SINGH, AND FAHD NAUFAL

Not all is lost

Scientists are not all gloom-and-doom. Several emphasized that many countries upgraded their public health infrastructure in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These measures included better training for medical workers, improved surveillance, more information sharing, and increased funding.

Many institutions were able to quickly pivot to coronavirus research, which generated key lessons should they need to respond to another pandemic. That flexibility was only possible with preexisting access to secure lab facilities. These sites are critical to maintain; it can take years to build or renovate a lab to study deadly microbes, and it takes institutional support (often including government research funds) to stay operational.

And, of course, science made giant leaps in vaccine development. Chinese scientists posted the first genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 on January 10, 2020. NIH and Moderna scientists designed an mRNA vaccine in just two days. By March 16, Moderna began its clinical trials with the first human receiving a dose.

“It was the fastest solution we've discovered and developed, but that would not have been possible without decades of basic research,” said Singh, the postdoctoral researcher. “That has to be recognized. People are being shortsighted by not continuing to support basic science research, which was the foundation for all of this knowledge.”

Still, each researcher senses that something has been lost in the political debate over public health. They entered their fields hoping to advance knowledge and protect others. Now, they warn that mass distrust in vaccines and science imperils everyone. Whether political leaders will respond quickly enough to be effective remains uncertain.

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