I was born and raised in the Upper Valley, in Brownsville, but now I work at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee, in a laboratory in the Vanderbilt Genetics Institute. (Of course, all views I share here are my own opinion, and not those of my employer.)

My path into research was guided by the community that raised me, my first experiment was in the science club at Albert Bridge Elementary School, where I measured the effects of sunscreen in lake water. If you attended graduations from A.B.S. in the mid 2000s, you may have seen me proudly declare that I wanted to be a scientist, to invent things to make the world better. In fact, I got my first real scientific job in Lebanon, where I started programming as a 16 year old in the Dartmouth Bioinformatics department.

I tell you this to underscore the deep and lasting impact that my upbringing in the Upper Valley played in my journey into biomedical science, a profession that now faces an existential crisis. My lab is federally funded by the NIH. My research focuses on using computational methods to comb through medical records and identify pediatric patients with rare genetic diseases. There are over 10,000 of these diseases, and although each is rare, combined they impact around 5% of the world’s population. Early intervention can be critical, but most of these patients wait years to be diagnosed, so we aim to identify them early to help them, and also to build better understanding of the genetic basis of diseases in order to potentially develop more effective treatments.

I could have made more money working at some tech company, but I do this because I believe we can help people with our research. So when you see Trump and his unrecognizable version of the Republican party pushing through a budget bill that proposes to cut funding for the NIH by at least 40%, I’d like you to consider whether you think medical research is valuable. If your child was suffering from a disease you didn’t know, wouldn’t you want medical centers to be using advanced technology to identify it as early as possible? Funding universities, funding the NIH, that is what makes research like mine possible.

New Hampshire and Vermont received over $187 million in funding from the NIH in 2024 alone. It is largely concentrated in the Upper Valley for research projects at Dartmouth, but the existence of these projects drives a large amount of economic activity. If funding is lost, universities will slow their activity, advances will stall, we will have fewer scientists, fewer available jobs, and a population who will be less healthy.

J.D. Vance once gave a speech titled “Universities are the enemy.” In this speech he said “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities.” Do you agree with him? I am part of those universities which he sees as enemies, yet I was shaped and raised in your community. If you went to Brownsville General Store around 1996 or 1997 you would have seen me as an infant, maybe even bounced me on your knee while my mom cooked and worked behind the counter. If you’re my age, I might have played against you in basketball or tennis, or you may even have seen me performing at the Hurricane Irene benefit concert held in Woodstock to help fund repairs. Is Vance telling the truth? Do I sound like someone who wants to do you harm, who is making the world worse? Am I part of an institution that should be destroyed?

If you agree with him, then I suppose you can stop reading. If you instead, like me, believein the value of publicly funded scientific research, then I urge you to take action to oppose these funding cuts, and to support funding going forward. One of the most important actions you can take as an individual, in my belief, is to speak to the people you know who don’t agree with you on this topic. They may not know the extent of the destruction the current administration is inflicting on science in America. Research is meant to benefit us all, and to bridge all political divides.

I also urge you to contact whichever elected representatives you have, and to tell them in the strongest language that we must preserve federal scientific funding, and to convince your friends and family across the country to do the same. I’ve written this as part of the McClintock letters campaign, a campaign by scientists to communicate with their hometowns about the importance of science, which has a “Locals Supporting Science Pledge” located here: tiny.cc/sciencepledge