Tamplin has faced roadblocks with federal research funding. Jeff Miller
John Allen’s cover story, “The Two Owens,” traces a poignant connection. Owen Petrzelka is a child who died from a rare brain cancer, and Owen Tamplin is a UW–Madison researcher trying to ensure that the boy’s death was not in vain. I predict that you’ll be inspired by Tamplin’s efforts to better understand the terrible disease called diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma.
I also predict that you’ll be disheartened by the roadblocks Tamplin has faced with federal research funding. Changing policies have threatened his grants, cut him off from key research partners, and caused uncertainty in his lab. “It makes it very difficult to plan, to recruit people,” Tamplin says.
In 2025, the university saw a 17 percent decline in federal research funding. Over the same period, 145 federal grants were terminated or subject to stop-work orders, with $27 million in lost funding. Since then, however, we’ve seen progress. Legal challenges have helped reinstate some of the grants, and some of the major proposed cuts to federally funded programs have been stemmed. Our Summer issue shows UW researchers charging ahead, with breakthroughs in medicine, astronomy, agriculture, and artificial intelligence, among other fields.
In “The Two Owens,” Owen Petrzelka’s mother pleads for “something meaningful” to come from his death. With an assist from UW research, hopefully it still can.
Published in the Summer 2026 issue
Comments
No comments posted yet.