\n<\/p>\n
Nineteen days into the second administration of Donald Trump, Colette Delawalla reached her limit.<\/p>\n
The 30-year-old budding clinical psychologist and mother of a toddler had been eager to finish her dissertation and launch a scientific career dedicated to teaching and research on addiction. Now that plan seemed seriously at odds with where the country was headed. The Trump administration had just announced $4bn in cuts to medical and scientific research. Government scientists had been ordered not to speak at conferences or in public for the time being. The National Institutes of Health was purging grants that conflicted with presidential orders on \u201cgender ideology\u201d and \u201cdiversity\u201d.<\/p>\n
Despite being one of the new administration\u2019s first targets, the scientific community had put up little fight \u2013 and that made Delawalla livid. Still in her pyjamas around noon, the Emory University doctoral candidate sat on the floor of her apartment in Atlanta and posted on the social media platform Bluesky: \u201cCan\u2019t believe I\u2019m typing this but\u2026 FUCK IT IM PLANNING A STAND UP FOR SCIENCE PROTEST IN DC.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her palms were sweating. Her political experience consisted of voting and attending a single Black Lives Matter demonstration. \u201cI sure as hell didn\u2019t consider myself an \u2018activist\u2019,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Founder and director of Stand Up for Science Colette Delawalla speaks on stage during the second-annual Stand Up for Science rally on the National Mall on 7 March 2026 in Washington DC.<\/span> Photograph: Brian Stukes\/Getty Images for Stand Up For Science<\/p>\n Delawalla\u2019s Bluesky post went viral. Within 72 hours, she was on the phone with The New York Times. In less than a month, a team of volunteers led by Delawalla and four other early-career scientists organized 7 March protests in more than 30 US cities. They did it without the support of a single major scientific organization.<\/p>\n But that turned out to be the easy part. Transforming a single day of protest into a sustained movement proved much harder.<\/p>\n \u201cThe challenge comes after an initial wave of activity that doesn\u2019t lead to the change you had hoped for and you don\u2019t get a shift in policy \u2013 how does an organization make sense of loss?\u201d said Hahrie Han, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of Prisms of the People: Power & Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America.<\/p>\n After the demonstrations last year, when the crowds went home and the scientists returned to the lab, the funding cuts remained. So did the purge on studies of gender, DEI and other verboten subjects. Delawalla had to figure out where to go from there.<\/p>\n \u201cIt got very quiet,\u201d said Brynn Paulsen, then a volunteer at Stand Up for Science and a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology, of the group\u2019s next steps. Part of it was burnout among volunteers who\u2019d worked furiously to stage the protests, Paulsen said, \u201cpart may have been that we were all flying by the seat of our pants\u201d, with little organizational structure.<\/p>\n That would change. Over the next year, Stand Up for Science would lose three key organizers but build to its current peak of 22 paid staff, including Delawalla, and more than 2,000 registered volunteers.<\/p>\n \u201cI never set out to build a movement, so I didn\u2019t come to the table with some idea about how it would play out,\u201d Delawalla said. \u201cIn many ways, not having expectations has been a gift.\u201d<\/p>\n In her first year at the helm, Delawalla received a rapid, often surprising, education. She would learn that her fiercest critics were not Maga supporters, but fellow scientists and leftwingers.<\/p>\n <\/span>Stand Up for Science demonstrators at Boston Common near the Massachusetts state house on 7 March 2025.<\/span> Photograph: Erin Clark\/The Boston Globe via Getty Images<\/p>\n Some scientists took issue with Delawalla\u2019s language, her references to \u201cfascism\u201d and \u201cauthoritarianism\u201d. Beneath certain comments ran an undercurrent of the sexism prevalent in science.<\/p>\n \u201cTo have any chance of reaching those who might be interested in stopping this political madness, you should consider a voice that sounds less like a (and I honestly don\u2019t mean to insult you) ditsy socialist liberal and more like a concerned adult,\u201d a male scientist commenting below one of Delawalla\u2019s YouTube interviews, wrote. (Delawalla promptly added \u201cditsy socialist liberal\u201d to her Bluesky bio.)<\/p>\n Although scientists had spoken out during the president\u2019s first term \u2013 especially at the March for Science in 2017, which drew more than 1 million people around the world \u2013 attendance plummeted at follow-up events.<\/p>\n Rush D Holt, the former CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which sponsored the March for Science, said momentum may have stalled during Trump\u2019s first term because funding didn\u2019t crater as scientists had feared, or perhaps because researchers failed to convince the public that science matters to their own lives.<\/p>\n Political activism is not well-suited to the scientific mindset, the training that demands researchers resist a theory until they have done everything possible to disprove it.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s hard for scientists to be black and white, to not provide caveats to every single statement,\u201d Delawalla said.<\/p>\n Soon after the protests, three of the five lead organizers of Stand Up for Science broke away. Emma Courtney said she and others felt they\u2019d been given an insufficient role in decisions. They also believed that focusing on protests would only energize the base, rather than converting skeptics.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re hoping to engage people that might not know or care about science, or might be skeptical about it. [We want them] to understand what science is happening and why it benefits them,\u201d said Courtney, who left with two others to form the nonprofit Science for Good, which is pursuing that vision.<\/p>\n Delawalla preferred to focus on \u201cdirect action\u201d, a need she felt was not being met by other pro-science groups. After the protests, several staffers told Delawalla she needed to make a choice: either quit pursuing her doctorate, or hand over the leadership of the organization to someone else. She found the choice an annoying echo of warnings she\u2019d received against becoming a mother while still working on her dissertation. Why couldn\u2019t she do both?<\/p>\n Raised in rural Ohio, Delawalla dropped out of community college in Indiana after studying and hating accounting. But she returned to school four years later and eventually earned dual master\u2019s degrees in clinical psychology and quantitative psychology from Ball State University. She was drawn to the study of addiction, a condition that had affected her family.<\/p>\n Inexperienced though she was in politics, Delawalla recovered from the split with the Science for Good organizers and drew together a team that included young scientists like herself as well as a few seasoned campaigners. She \u201cis a very quick study\u201d and takes advice well, said Stephen King, a political organizer and mass fundraiser for numerous environmental and social justice causes, who became Stand Up for Science\u2019s chief operating officer.<\/p>\n King, 68, recruited the other key member of the group\u2019s political brain trust, Vincent Vertuccio, a 22-year-old consultant with a chest tattoo that reads: \u201cOrganizing Works\u201d. Vertuccio, who cut his teeth in local politics on Long Island, had experience with campaign machinery: phone banks, door-to-door canvassing, advertising and social media.<\/p>\n Four months after an unprepared Delawalla had struggled through her first meeting on Capitol Hill \u2013 a sit-down with Democratic Illinois congressman Bill Foster to deliver a message she describes as, \u2018Hey, this stuff with Trump and science is very bad!\u2019 \u2013 she took a different approach. This time, Delawalla spent eight hours prepping with Vertuccio for a meeting with Mike Levin, a Democratic congressman from California. Her comfort level grew, and over the next year, she delivered a more focused <\/strong>Stand Up for Science message in 200 congressional meetings.<\/p>\n In the fall, the organization led other health-related groups in launching a campaign to impeach Robert F Kennedy Jr, delivering a petition to Congress with 150,000 signatures. Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services, said the secretary \u201cremains focused on fixing a broken status quo and delivering results for the American people, not responding\u201d to impeachment efforts \u201cdesigned to prop up a failing campaign\u201d.<\/p>\n Before the year was out, Stand Up for Science made its first foray into electoral politics, running a late-stage effort to swing a Tennessee congressional race to Democrat Aftyn Behn. The group made 65,000 phone calls and knocked on hundreds of doors in rural areas of the district. Behn lost by 8.9% \u2013 in a district Trump captured by more than 20% the previous year.<\/p>\n <\/span>People gather for the first \u2018Stand Up for Science\u2019 rally at Washington Square Park in New York on 7 March 2025.<\/span> Photograph: Sarah Yenesel\/EPA<\/p>\n In the organization\u2019s first full year, Delawalla and her team raised $1.2m in donations and won support from more than 65 Nobel laureates, a sign that its message was resonating more in scientific research circles.<\/p>\n T<\/span>his March, Stand Up for Science held demonstrations in more than 50 US cities to mark its anniversary. At the National Mall, the crowd topped out at about 2,000 people \u2013 half the size of the previous year.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had people come out in every state for science,\u201d Delawalla said, stressing that the events came off without incident and received press coverage despite occurring a week after the US and Israel launched military operations in Iran.<\/p>\n On Friday, Delawalla and her colleagues plan to establish the Science Victory Fund, a Super Pac that will back pro-science candidates in the 2026 midterm elections.<\/p>\n Delawalla still intends to complete her dissertation this summer, but she has chosen to go \u201call-in\u201d on the work of defending research, a decision that means giving up her own research career.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a decision that came with a lot of grief,\u201d she said. \u201cBeing a scientist is a huge part of my identity; research is where I found my purpose and place in the world.\u201d Ultimately, she felt her own research was not as important as protecting the work of other scientists engaged in projects that may yield new cancer treatments or ways to address the climate crisis.<\/p>\n \u201cI happened to stumble upon a skill set within myself that I can use to keep those people discovering,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s where I belong in this moment.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nineteen days into the second administration of Donald Trump, Colette Delawalla reached her limit. The 30-year-old budding clinical psychologist and mother of a toddler had been eager to finish her dissertation and launch a scientific career dedicated to teaching and research on addiction. 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