scientist

The future of the National Science Foundation is in question after a slew of scientists who serve on the National Science Board, an independent body that promotes the progress of American science and provides advice to the U.S. president and Congress, were abruptly dismissed from their positions Friday by the White House.

All 22 current members of the board, which establishes policies for the National Science Foundation, were terminated, according to Yolanda Gil, a research professor of computer science and spatial sciences and principal scientist at USC Information Sciences Institute, who has served on the board since 2024.

Many of them received a curt email from President Trump’s presidential personnel office.

“On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I’m writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Science Board is terminated, effective immediately,” read an email reviewed by the L.A. Times. “Thank you for your service.”

After receiving an email Friday afternoon, Keivan Stassun, a professor of physics and astronomy at Vanderbilt University and director of the Vanderbilt Initiative in Data-intensive Astrophysics, said he reached out to fellow board members. Every member he heard back from — about a third of the board — reported receiving the same termination notice.

For Stassun, a board member since 2022, the termination represented “a wholesale evisceration of American leadership in science and technology globally.”

The White House has not given any reason for dismissing the board members or provided any information on when, or even whether, they will be replaced. A media representative for the NSF directed all questions to the White House. The White House did not respond to questions from The Times.

The National Science Foundation was created more than 75 years ago as an independent federal agency when President Truman signed the National Science Foundation Act of 1950 to boost U.S. science for national security and international competition during the Cold War.

“The establishment of the National Science Foundation is a major landmark in the history of science in the United States,” Truman said back then. “We have come to know that our ability to survive and grow as a nation depends to a very large degree upon our scientific progress. Moreover, it is not enough simply to keep abreast of the rest of the world in scientific matters. We must maintain our leadership.”

The agency, which has a budget of over $9 billion, supports fundamental research and education across all non-medical fields of science and engineering.

“The genesis of it was to recognize that the world was increasingly being won or lost on the basis of scientific and technological capability,” Stassun said. “The National Science Foundation is the singular agency within our government that has as its focus making sure that we stay ahead in basic science, technological developments, training the next generation of scientists and engineers.“

After Trump’s dismissal of the board’s experts, Stassun said, the Trump administration could potentially run the agency directly through the Office of Management and Budget.

“What it means is that there won’t be any practical impediments to the administration essentially enacting their own budget and priorities and ignoring Congress’ directives or congressional law,” Stassun said.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren of San José, the ranking Democrat on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, dubbed the terminations just “the latest stupid move made by a president who continues to harm science and American innovation.”

The board, Lofgren noted in a statement, is apolitical and advises the president on the future of NSF.

“It unfortunately is no surprise a president who has attacked NSF from day one would seek to destroy the board that helps guide the foundation,” Lofgren added. “Will the president fill the NSB with MAGA loyalists who won’t stand up to him as he hands over our leadership in science to our adversaries? A real bozo the clown move.”

The National Science Board is typically made up of 25 scientists and engineers from universities and industry across the nation. Appointed by the U.S. president, they traditionally serve six-year terms.

Some of the board positions were vacant. The key position of NSF director has been unfilled ever since Sethuraman Panchanathan, a computer scientist and academic administrator, resigned in April 2025.

“Given that the NSF director position has been vacant for a year, and that the NSB’s main role is governing NSF, the agency is left in a very precarious position,” Gil told The Times in an email. “I think this is one more indication of the sweeping changes that the administration is planning for the National Science Foundation.”

Over the last two years, Gil said, the White House has proposed drastic reductions in the NSF budget — a troubling sign, she argued, that basic research in science and engineering and training students are not high priorities for the current administration.

In the last few months, Gil added, the agency had significant reductions of personnel, which she said “jeopardizes the peer review process that the agency is best known for and gives more decision power to program directors.”

In March, Trump nominated James O’Neill, a venture capitalist and biotech investor who served as former deputy secretary of Health and Human Services, to lead the foundation. O’Neill has yet to appear before Congress for a hearing, but Trump’s nomination received a storm of criticism from scientists.

“O’Neill would be the first head of NSF who wasn’t a scientist or engineer,” Dr. Julian Reyes, chief of staff of the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote in a blog post. “If O’Neill is confirmed as NSF’s director, the Trump administration will further tighten its control over an agency created by Congress to be independent in its work to advance science.”

Traditionally, Gil said, NSF directors have had a solid research career and strong familiarity with NSF processes. O’Neill’s background in finance and investments, she suggested, “may be an indication that the administration has a different idea of how to run a science agency like NSF.”

Already, the Trump administration has purged a raft of scientific advisory boards that provided the federal government with expert guidance. Last year, dozens of experts who provided independent evaluations for biomedical research were dismissed from National Institute of Health science review boards. All 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which provides federal recommendation on vaccines, were also removed.

In that context, Stassun said he was not surprised when he got the termination letter Friday. “At some point,” he figured, “they would come for the National Science Board, too.”

Going forward, Stassun said he expected the Trump administration to pursue a narrower agenda, from investments in artificial intelligence to building a fleet of Antarctic vessels.

“What we’re likely to see is a collapse of what has historically been a broad investment in American science and technology capabilities,” he said. “The most transformative discoveries are transformative because you can’t predict them in advance, so we invest foundationally in scientists and engineers to do basic science and engineering research.”

One of the board’s chief priorities since he joined in 2022, Stassun said, had been the idea of “talent being the treasure” — developing the best and brightest future leaders and discoverers to ensure a future for American leadership in scientific and technological innovation.

For the board, that meant investing in early science education and strong training for scientists and engineers at all educational levels and in all sectors.

“Discoveries and inventions don’t make themselves, Stassun said. “People do those things. I think there’s a kind of attitude in the current administration that such a worldview is sort of too soft or meek.”

The Trump administration’s interests and priorities, Stassun said, seemed quite different.

“They see the future in, or at least their interest is in, big data centers … not in addition to, but in place of, training human minds to be leading the way,” Stassun said. “It’s a dead end or a bridge to nowhere.”

Even the pioneers of AI will tell you, Stassun said, in many cases, what AI does very well is rapidly synthesizing, consolidating or repackaging existing information. A large language model can only tell you, perhaps very quickly and effectively, what’s already been said.

“Discovery and invention remain the purview of the human mind and creative human genius,” Stassun said. “So, yeah, I think it really does say something pretty foundational to choose to invest only in the one and not the other.”

AI is coming. AI is here. AI is a bubble. AI is the future we want. AI is the end. AI is the path to a better us (at least the ones who survive it).

A big topic, this artificial intelligence, with a lot of different ways to think about it. To grapple with AI is a worthy endeavor for any filmmaker. (And by grapple, I don’t mean asking AI to make the film for you.)

Daniel Roher, the man behind the Oscar-winning “Navalny,” has, along with co-director Charlie Tyrell, attempted a nonfiction primer of sorts on the biggest technological, societal and existential challenge of our time with “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist,” a title boasting a hybrid coinage Roher picks up from one of his interviewed experts — one of too many, it turns out. “The AI Doc” is a well-intentioned but aggravating soup of information and opinion that wants to move at the speed of machine thought.

Roher’s approach is understandable for a mainstream doc. He assumes many of us are tech-competent, anxious and confused as to what AI even is to begin with. In his pursuit of answers, Roher employs a cloying framework: his loving wife occasionally narrating as if this were a storybook and Roher the protagonist of a scary adventure. The fable construct extends to a frenetic visual scheme of handmade art and animation that interrupts our absorption process as if we were kids needing stimulation between all the talking heads.

As for the AI itself, the experts — a mix of tech founders (such as Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Amodei siblings), historians, scientists and assorted champions and skeptics — come to Roher’s home, because he wants to foreground a key question as an expectant father: Should he be bringing a child into this world?

Perhaps more urgently, should Roher have made an AI doc that treats us like children? First, he parades all the safety doomers, seeming to believe their warnings that an unfeeling superintelligence is upon us and we can’t trust it. Then, sufficiently disturbed, he hauls in the AI cheerleaders, a suspiciously positive gang who can envision only medical miracles and grindless lives in which we’re all full-time artists.

Only then, after this simplistic setup where platitudes reign, do we get the section in which the subject is treated like the brave (and grave) new world it is: geopolitically fraught, economically tenuous and a playground for billionaires.

Why couldn’t the complexity have been the dialogue from the beginning, instead of the play-dumb cartoon “The AI Doc” feels like for so long? Maybe Roher believes this is what our increasingly gullible, truth-challenged citizenry needs from an explanatory doc: a flashy, kindhearted reminder that we’re the change we need to be.

But if you thirst for a sober-minded investigation into this ominous tool — one with an approach that treats you like the intelligent being you are — you’ll have to wait for AI doc 2.0.

March 25 (UPI) — Dutch scientist Huub Lilieveld has been named the recipient of the 2026 World Food Prize Wednesday for leading a food safety movement across 113 countries.

For six decades, Lilieveld has researched and advocated for food safety, using scientific evidence to inform regulations and legislation across the globe. His work has culminated in establishing modern global food safety, security, trade and aid standards.

The World Food Prize Foundation is recognizing Lilieveld’s contributions with a $500,000 award.

“Lilieveld lives by his conviction that access to safe food is a universal right — a philosophy shared by the late Dr. Norman Borlaug,” Mashal Husain, president of the World Food Prize Foundation, said in a statement. “Through his lifelong commitment to harmonizing regulations, he has lowered trade barriers, prevented the unnecessary destruction of safe food, promoted innovative food safety technologies worldwide and reduced the risk of foodborne illness outbreaks.”

Foodborne illnesses kill 420,000 people annually. There are about 600 million cases of foodborne illnesses per year.

Lelieveld established the Global Harmonization Initiative in 2004, to connect volunteers and food safety experts around the world to combat safe food insecurity and improve the distribution of safe foods.

“Companies large and small, as well as all consumers are negatively affected by unjustified differences in regulations,” Lelieveld said in a statement. “The Global Harmonization Initiative, therefore, strives not only to reach scientific consensus but also to ensure that findings are accessible to everyone, requiring simplification without compromising scientific accuracy and translation into local languages.”