Last week, the federal government terminated hundreds of research grants to Harvard University professors from a broad range of fields of study. This comes on the heels of a conflict between Harvard, among other universities, and the Trump administration.
To recap: The Trump administration has accused Harvard of not doing enough to combat anti-Semitism on its campus and made a series of demands to the university. Harvard has refused to comply, claiming that the demands violate the First Amendment and amount to a government takeover of the institution. The Trump administration retaliated by terminating grants to Harvard from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and others.
Yesterday, the administration foreshadowed cutting all remaining federal funds to Harvard.
Vijay Janapa Reddi is an associate professor of engineering and applied science at Harvard who specializes in computer architecture, specifically edge devices such as smartwatches, smartphones, autonomous vehicles, and more. His team focuses on making edge computing more sustainable by rethinking how these systems are designed and deployed in the real world. He’s also an IEEE member.
Last week, while his group was working hard to meet the abstract submission deadline for the prestigious NeurIPS conference, Janapa Reddi learned that three of his grants had been terminated. IEEE Spectrum caught up with him about his experience and how the Trump administration’s actions will affect his field of study.
How and when did you find out your grants were getting terminated?
Vijay Janapa Reddi:It was around 10 p.m. when internal emails went out listing which grants were being cut. We were deep in submission mode for the NeurIPS deadline, so it felt surreal. At first I tried to stay focused, doing business as usual. But as the news sank in the next day, the scale of the disruption became clear.
What’s most jarring is trying to hold both realities at once: pushing forward with your work, while also watching the foundation beneath it begin to crumble. That cognitive dissonance is hard to carry.
What work were you doing under those grants?
Janapa Reddi:One grant was focused on sustainability at the extreme edge, where computing must operate in settings with strict limits on power, cost, and available materials. These systems are deployed in places like food supply chains, agricultural fields, environmental sensors, and health care diagnostics in underserved areas. In such environments, computing can’t simply be an add-on. It must be reimagined to fit within the constraints of the setting while still delivering meaningful impact.
For instance, monitoring food spoilage is not just about attaching an everyday computer chip to a box of apples to monitor food deterioration. In many cases, the cost of that chip would exceed the value of the food itself. The deeper question is how to fundamentally redesign computing to be practical, scalable, and sustainable in resource-constrained contexts. This challenge led us to explore new types of hardware, including flexible, non-silicon microprocessors based on the open RISC-V instruction set. These systems are programmable, low cost, and suited to real-world applications where traditional computing models fall short. The work is aligned with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and seeks to bring technological innovation to places where it’s needed most.
Another project we were working on was through MLCommons, a nonprofit organization where I serve as vice president. MLCommons helped establish some of the original industry benchmarks for machine learning, promoting shared evaluation standards across the field. One of our recent research initiatives focuses on supporting the development of foundation models for scientific applications. We have been working on building an open-source ecosystem that enables contributions from the broader community, while also curating a set of benchmarks tailored to AI for science.
The other grant was intended to support a community workshop we were organizing to bring researchers together around shared challenges and opportunities. This effort was part of our broader commitment to education and public engagement, which aligns with the National Science Foundation’s mission to ensure that research advances knowledge and reaches and benefits a wider audience.
What effect does this have on your research?
Janapa Reddi:The immediate impact is clear: I have to pause or scale down without funding. The deeper concern is what happens next. Research doesn’t ramp down like a switch; for all of us, it unwinds slowly and takes time to regain the lost momentum. It’s a bit like stopping a freight train. You can’t bring it to a halt instantly, and once it has stopped, getting it moving again takes even more energy and time. Research is the same. It depends on people, planning, and long-term vision, none of which can be restarted overnight.
What do you see as the longer-term effects of these cuts?
Janapa Reddi: I still believe in the strength of the American higher education and research ecosystem. It has a long history of rising to challenges, of turning constraints into catalysts for innovation. But moments like this test our resilience. The global perception of U.S. research is at risk. Disruptions like these send a concerning message to the next generation of scientists, engineers, and innovators around the world. That is troubling because what makes American research exceptional is not just the level of funding but the steady influx of talent, the diversity of thought, and the culture of open competition and collaboration.
Perhaps the most important thing to realize is that the research itself is almost secondary. It starts with people. If you look at any company with a trillion-dollar market value and ask what drives that long-term technology roadmap, it’s not an AI agent mapping it out. It’s the people behind it, the ones building, questioning, imagining, and creating. If we’re not investing in training those people to the highest caliber, then where is the next wave of innovation going to come from?
What would you like to see going forward?
Janapa Reddi: The silence from those who have benefited from higher education is the most deafening—the people who earned their degrees, built their lives on that foundation, and know just how many doors it can open. If we want our kids to have the same chances we did, we cannot take those opportunities for granted. As beneficiaries of that system, we have a responsibility not just to protect it but to renew it, so that a decade from now, those doors are still open and continue to lead to even greater possibilities.
That’s especially true in areas like sustainable computing, where the challenges are urgent and the impact is tangible. Whether it is reducing food waste or building energy-efficient AI systems for science, these efforts cannot be paused indefinitely. As we submitted our work to NeurIPS last week, it reminded me why this matters. We are not just writing papers. We are trying to build a future that is smarter, more sustainable, and more just. To do that, we need a system that still believes in investing in the future.
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