My Science Is Important

Communications

Current Issue

This Article From Issue

September-October 2025

Volume 113, Number 5
Page 259

DOI: 10.1511/2025.113.5.259

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In the July–August issue, we published a call for letters from scientists to give brief explanations of their research and why it is important. We hope that these letters will bring awareness to the vital work of scientists and to the need for continued research funding. If you would like to submit a letter, please keep it to 300 words or fewer and email it to editors at amscionline dot org with the subject line “Science Is Important.”


My Science Is Important

To the Editors:

After the tragic Texas Hill Country floods this June, which killed more than 120 people, including children, many people asked why areas were not evacuated prior to the flooding. The first question often was, “Did they receive a flash flood warning?” Some people may have received emergency alerts, but this binary question overlooks the complexities of receiving a warning and responding to it.

We are a climatologist and a social scientist who study early warning systems for extreme weather, focusing on overlooked communities and complex situations that challenge even well-designed systems. These challenges include multihazard events such as simultaneous flash floods and tornadoes, as well as nocturnal events, which are often more deadly. Additionally, as climate change shifts the hazard landscape, people are unprepared for the unfamiliar and intensifying threats they face.

Our federally funded studies track how forecasters decide whether and how to communicate warnings; how people receive, interpret, and respond to these alerts; and how systems can improve. Our research shows that many individuals face barriers such as unreliable cell service, lack of weather radios, limited alert systems, or messages in unfamiliar languages. Even when alerts arrive, action may be impossible without transportation, shelter, or social support. We translate these local insights into practical changes by partnering with emergency managers, forecasters, media outlets, and residents to ensure future alerts meet community needs and better fulfill the mission of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to protect life and property.

We do this work because early warning systems save lives, but only when they are accessible, trusted, and built for the communities they serve. By investing in collaborative research and strengthening warning systems, we can help ensure that all communities receive timely, actionable alerts during extreme weather.

Kelsey Ellis
Department of Geography and Sustainability
University of Tennessee


Jennifer First
School of Social Work
University of Missouri


To the Editors:

On April 8, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) terminated its long-standing Centers of Excellence (COE) program, which included university/government partnerships dedicated to reducing terrorist threats, enhancing cybersecurity, and building resilience for infrastructure and coastal areas. As a result, all projects funded under this program were also terminated, including ours. We had been developing and implementing an emergency management early warning system for coastal hazards: the Coastal Hazards Analysis, Modeling, and Prediction (CHAMP) system.

“When science funding is cut, what’s lost isn’t just research; it’s opportunities for communities today and in the future to benefit from that knowledge.”

Funding from the DHS Center of Excellence in Coastal Resilience had supported deep engagement with emergency managers and resilience planners aimed at cocreating the CHAMP hazard impact prediction platform for hurricanes and nor’easters. CHAMP provides high-resolution flood and wind forecasts as well as detailed potential storm impacts that are of particular concern to infrastructure facility managers, who need to know if an electrical transformer might be destroyed by flooding or if a communications array might be blown over by wind.

CHAMP is the culmination of more than 10 years of rigorous research comprising numerous doctoral dissertations, peer-reviewed publications, and hundreds of consultations with end users. Its scientific advancement and public benefit are unmatched among existing forecasting, projection, and early-warning systems. A demonstration of CHAMP is on standby in Rhode Island, but it was expected to play an indispensable role in decision-making and emergency management efforts for the next hurricane or nor’easter.

When DHS terminated the COE program, it terminated four active projects that were advancing and scaling the capabilities of CHAMP for use by other states as well as by the U.S. Coast Guard. Without continued funding, reestablishing collaborations and maintaining the technologies is extremely challenging. Moreover, without the engagement across institutions that makes meeting these goals possible, we lose a vital and natural side benefit, namely, the cross-institutional capacity to respond rapidly to increasing numbers of unprecedented events. Decision-support tools such as CHAMP inform emergency managers, thus protecting lives and reducing economic losses. We must keep these tools functioning and advancing.

Austin Becker
College of the Environment and Life Sciences
University of Rhode Island


Isaac Ginis
Graduate School of Oceanography
University of Rhode Island


Peter Stempel
Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture; Institute of Energy and Environment
Pennsylvania State University


To the Editors:

I am an anthropological archaeologist working in the north-central highland valleys of Peru, where many communities face severe water shortages because of climate change and the disappearance of glaciers. My research focuses on using archaeology to understand how people in the past managed water in these same landscapes during times of drought. My team and I study ancient canals, reservoirs, and agricultural terraces built hundreds or even thousands of years ago as a part of the landscape history. We consider them to be living lessons for the present and future.

Why does this research matter? These ancestral systems show us how communities once adapted to unpredictable water supplies using strategies that were sustainable and deeply connected to their environments. That knowledge is especially valuable today, as rural towns face growing water scarcity and struggle to balance tradition and cultural heritage preservation with modern challenges. My team collaborates with local residents, engineers, university students, and government agencies to map and analyze ancient infrastructure, combine it with new technologies, and help develop practical solutions that support long-term community resilience.

Science funding makes this kind of work possible. Research isn’t just about discovery for its own sake. It’s about bringing together knowledge across time, disciplines, and cultures to solve real problems. When science funding is cut, what’s lost isn’t just research; it’s opportunities for communities today and in the future to benefit from that knowledge.

Archaeology isn’t only about the past. It’s about using the past to build a better future.

Amanda Brock Morales
Kawsay Pacha Archaeological Project
University of North Carolina at Charlotte


To the Editors:

North Atlantic right whales are on the brink of extinction. These large baleen whales live in the shallow waters off the U.S. East Coast, and although they have been safe from whaling for almost 100 years, humans still kill them accidentally through ship strikes and entanglements in fishing gear. I study how their habitat is shifting because of climate change, which makes it even harder to determine where and when to protect them from humans.

Although my climate change–related research is under threat, my current funding for this work has not been revoked. However, my lab has lost funding for a project that deploys robots that listen for right whale vocalizations in the U.S. Southeast waters during the winter. This project supports monitoring efforts while right whale moms migrate south to give birth in these relatively warm waters. When we hear a whale, we broadcast that information to the government, mariners, and the public within a few hours. These near-real-time detections are used to motivate mariners to slow down and keep an extra eye out so as to avoid injuring or killing these vulnerable moms and their newborn calves. Real-time detections and their broad communication are especially important given the increasing challenge of implementing and enforcing vessel speed limits and fishery regulations that keep whales safe.

The Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act mandate effective management for species such as the right whale. I serve on the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team and several other advisory committees that support the development of these evidence-based management plans. Funding cuts to NOAA and new legislation that limits research funding are obstructing the work of these groups and threaten to dismantle them altogether. Without right whale monitoring or management, it seems like our country is giving up on this gentle giant that is one of our national treasures.

Erin Meyer-Gutbrod
School of the Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of South Carolina


To the Editors:

Religion is one of the most influential—and understudied—social identities affecting public health. Despite assumptions that declining religiosity has made the study irrelevant, religious rhetoric, particularly from antiscience Christian movements, has shaped 21st-century public health more than many realize. From vaccine hesitancy to climate change denial, and from restricting reproductive health access to undermining health education, religion plays a powerful and often underacknowledged role in shaping policy and public perception.

As a scholar trained in both religious studies and public health, I believe the recent cuts to federal research funding threaten our ability to fully understand the relationship between faith and science. Most existing studies reduce religion to simplistic measures—such as asking how often someone attends church or prays—and miss the deeper theological and political frameworks that drive health behaviors and policies.

The complexity of religion as a social force cannot be captured through surface-level questions or left to be studied only by institutions with a religious agenda. Without rigorous, independent research, we risk reinforcing stereotypes and overlooking how religion can both support and undermine public health efforts.

The recent federal funding cuts don’t just end research projects—they close off pathways to deeper understanding of the cultural dynamics shaping health. If we are serious about creating policies grounded in evidence, we must continue to fund and protect research that examines religion’s evolving role in public life.

Alejandra Salemi
Population Health Sciences
Duke University


To the Editors:

As a budding scientist, my work is important not only for the progress that it is helping to bring within my field, but also for teaching me how to think and learn.

I am currently in the first year of a doctoral program in which I am studying spider silk. Spider silk has the potential to revolutionize many industries because of its remarkable material and mechanical properties. For example, a naturally antimicrobial and antifungal material that is highly elastic has many applications in the medical field. In addition, because spider silk is naturally occurring and composed of proteins, it removes the need for chemical refinement to produce an artificial material with similar properties, making it much more environmentally friendly and cheaper to produce.

My current research is focused on how the strength of spider silk has changed over time, throughout spider evolution. This focus will help track useful characteristics through evolutionary time, so we may one day produce these materials for our own use. Biomimetic materials, or materials that mimic natural systems to create innovative solutions, are widely used in designs for robotics, health care, environmental management, and other applications. Spider silk has the potential to be widely applicable and beneficial for the environment, but reduced or rescinded funding harms the potential of research to show that usefulness.

Ella Kellner
Department of Biological Sciences
University of North Carolina at Charlotte


To the Editors:

My scientific research is within the public policy arena, but it has always been driven by the high standards of science and empirical evidence. It involves human service rules and regulations, and adherence to them, with respect to safeguarding children while in out-of-home childcare.

“The recent federal funding cuts don’t just end research projects—they close off pathways to deeper understanding of the cultural dynamics shaping health.”

An “all-or-nothing” approach to rule compliance was the prevailing paradigm in human services licensing for decades in the United States and elsewhere. As a social scientist and research psychologist, I was interested in testing this paradigm and discovered that it held up under scientific study, but only to a point. When one compared regulatory compliance with corresponding program quality, a very interesting relationship was discovered: Overall, full compliance with rules is not necessarily linearly correlated with program quality. There is a ceiling effect in which full compliance is not any better than substantial compliance. This finding led to several replications of these results and an alternative paradigm based upon substantial, rather than full, compliance with rules within the human services licensing field. These results were recently published in American Scientist. (See Finding the Rules That Work.)

It is important for us as scientists, whether social scientists or physical scientists, to test out the prevailing assumptions against empirical evidence and not assume based upon anecdotal evidence that certain assumptions are true. Science is about reducing the uncertainty in decision-making and being able to make more informed choices.

Richard Fiene
Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center
Pennsylvania State University

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