Louisville eating disorder clinic loses $300,000 to Trump’s anti-diversity push
Republished from Kentucky Lantern
If you or someone you know has an eating disorder, you can get help through the National Eating Disorder Association by calling 800-931-2237 or chatting online at nationaleatingdisorder.org. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 988.
The University of Louisville’s Eating Anxiety Treatment (EAT) Lab, which treats and researches eating disorders, has lost nearly $300,000 in federal funding, money that covered salaries for two scientists, among other things.
Termination notices from the National Institutes of Health, housed in the Department of Health and Human Services, were sent to the lab over the last two weeks and shared with the Lantern. The funding cutoff appears to be part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping efforts to root out and end support for diversity, equity and inclusion activities.
The notices say the research projects in question are “antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.”
“Worse, so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’) studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans,” the notices say.
The two staff members whose jobs were defunded through this action — a post-doctoral fellow and Ph.D. student in clinical psychology — are non-white, but their research wasn’t related to DEI, said Cheri Levinson, the director of the EAT Lab and an associate professor with the University of Louisville.
One project was focused on identifying who is most likely to develop eating disorders and learning how to prevent them. The second was learning how to most effectively treat eating disorders.
Cutting the work sends the message that government officials holding the purse “want people to continue to suffer from mental health problems,” Levinson said.
The NIH has not yet responded to a Lantern request for comment.
Trump has issued executive orders gutting DEI programs and activities across the federal government. The Trump administration also has reduced funding for medical and scientific research at universities, including the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky, although federal courts have temporarily blocked those cuts.
‘ … if being a woman is a DEI issue’
Eating disorders are widespread and can be deadly. The COVID-19 pandemic increased their prevalence in Kentucky.
About 9% of Americans live with eating disorders, which can lead to a “preoccupation” with food intake, weight, calories and more, according to the National Eating Disorders Association. Girls are more likely to have disordered eating, according to research that the Lantern has previously reported.
Luis Sandoval-Araujo, the doctoral student, said he’s mostly researched how eating disorders developed in young girls. He studied a group of girls aged 6-8 and 10-12, following them over the course of two years to see what factors contribute to eating disorder development.
“The research doesn’t really have anything to do with DEI,” Sandoval-Araujo said. “I guess there’s an argument to be made that the research is focused particularly on women, for example, because we’re looking at 6- to 8-year-old girls, 10- to 12-year-old girls, and their mothers. So … if being a woman is a DEI issue, then that could be the arguments. But … that doesn’t really make sense.”
Before its termination, the federal “diversity supplement” was a way to ensure scientific fields were open to people of minority racial and ethnic backgrounds, former foster care youth, first generation students and other marginalized groups.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in February that the diversity awards being eliminated by the Trump administration “are fundamentally identical to the non-diversity equivalents” but helped scientists from diverse backgrounds have equal access to funding.
“This funding mechanism, and other funding mechanisms like it, definitely, more often than not, are used by scholars of diverse identities, particularly racial and ethnic minorities,” said Sandoval-Araujo. “So (cutting it) likely has a disproportionate effect on people of color, people from minoritized backgrounds, all that kind of stuff. Is it directly racist? I don’t think so, but it’s hard to ignore the impact.”
Sandoval-Araujo said that losing the diversity supplement will cost him a $25,000 stipend, but the loss will not interrupt his studies.
“Even with the loss of this grant, I’m still able to support myself,” he said. “I have another year fellowship from the university directly that I’m going to be using for my funding. But if I didn’t have a fallback option, for example, I’d have to spend additional time during my studies to be a teaching assistant or do some type of other assistantship in order to get my stipend, which is really not a lot.”
“It still stings, because you make plans around having that money, having that funding,” he said. “It pays for my tuition, my stipend, a little bit of travel money for me to attend conferences and disseminate our work, which is really important and really impactful.”
The funding also covered extra training — outside of his university classes — that he needed for his work that is now going away.
“It costs a lot of money for me to attend the class on advanced machine learning techniques that I’m no longer going to be able to do because that money doesn’t exist,” Sandoval-Araujo said.
Lab turns to GoFundMe
The lab is now trying to raise the lost funds on its own so Sandoval-Araujo and the post-doctoral fellow can maintain their work. Meanwhile, Levinson said she is working to put her staff on other projects to keep them in the lab.
A GoFundMe set up by the lab to make up for the federal cuts says the staff whose jobs are affected “are essential to the lifesaving work we do developing better treatments and preventions for eating disorders. These are researchers who are dedicated to advancing our understanding of eating disorders — complex mental health conditions that affect millions of lives but remain deeply misunderstood and underfunded.”
The fundraiser also asserts: “These grants were terminated because of the color of these trainees’ skin, with no consideration to the harm that these terminations will cause on the progress of the work and the trajectory of these trainees’ careers.”
It’s unclear what will happen to the active patients who were involved in this research, Levinson said, but she warned that the cuts could cause real harm.
The decision to cut money that was promised through August 2026 “actively risks lives in an active clinical trial,” Levinson said. “It also risks just so many more lives that we don’t even know how they would be saved by the work that these young scientists are doing.”
Cuts are ‘infuriating’
Kimberly Osborn, who graduates with her doctorate in counseling psychology this month, planned to work as a post-doctoral fellow at the EAT Lab and research a topic she’s deeply passionate about: the intersection of eating disorders, trauma, suicidality and sleep.
Osborn, a former foster youth who survived an eating disorder and suicidality as a teenager, saw firsthand the need for evidence-based eating disorder care and treatment.
She applied for “diversity supplement” funding but the program was cut before she could get it. That means that while she will continue to assist Levinson in research as a post-doc, she won’t have the funding to do her own research, which “delays me.” She plans to apply for other grant opportunities, but that process could take a year.
She said the grant termination affecting her two colleagues demonstrates a “lack of critical thinking.” The diversity supplement funding, she said, isn’t about giving minority communities “the upper hand.” Rather, she said, it was a way to “balance it out for people” who are doing work and “just need extra support.”
In the termination notices for two of her colleagues who already had been promised funds, the NIH said that the award had been “related to research programs based primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives.”
Osborn finds the allegation that the lab’s research is non-scientific “infuriating” and “completely untrue.”
“I work with patients. I see the impacts of eating disorders,” she said. “Dr. Levinson, along with a lot of the trainees that she supports — many of which are diversity scholars — are directly making an impact on improved outcomes and literally saving lives. To say that just because it’s done by someone who is from a diverse background, or who have these kinds of supplements … is offensive and untrue.”
Data published in the medical journal JAMA in 2023 showed about 1 in 5 children have disordered eating.
“This harms everyone,” Levinson said. “Everybody knows somebody that has an eating disorder. We might not talk about it a lot, but the work that we’re doing on my team is making a huge impact to stop eating disorders and these sorts of terminations are not only harmful, but they’re undoing decades of work to be able to get to the point where we can make a difference and make it so that people don’t have to die and suffer and lose their joy because of eating disorders.”
Help is available
If you or someone you know has an eating disorder, you can get help through the National Eating Disorder Association by calling 800-931-2237 or chatting online at nationaleatingdisorder.org.
The Louisville Center for Eating Disorders provides nonemergency services, including outpatient therapy. Visit louisvillecenterforeatingdisorders.com or call 502-205-1114 for more information.
The Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 988.
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