Brian Donovan, a prominent geneticist, won the Genetics Society of America’s Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education in February, recognizing his work developing a new approach to high school genetics education. However, the award seemed to confirm fears among colleagues that Donovan’s research career was effectively over. On a single day last April, both of Donovan’s National Science Foundation grants were terminated as part of a mass cancellation of science education awards the agency determined no longer “effectuate administration priorities.” By the end of summer, he and his small team at the University of Colorado found themselves unemployed. Recently, he began taking classes and preparing to apply to nursing school.
Donovan had developed the Humane Genomics Literacy (HGL) curriculum with the goal of moving beyond Mendel’s peas and Punnet squares to emphasize true complexities of human genetic variation. The curriculum focused on teaching high school students that genetic differences emerged as early human groups expanded across the globe, but that variation between groups is much smaller than variation within groups, and that bias is best understood as a neurological coping mechanism rather than fact-based. Science published randomized experiments showing that genetics education can indeed reduce racism in February 2024, with results that colleagues described as “stunningly impressive.”
Political Climate and Field Impact
Donovan spent roughly 15 years fighting to keep his work going, to protect it within institutions, and to bring others in to move it beyond himself. Colleagues describe him as a brilliant statistician with expertise in how humans differ and how the human mind navigates complex social dynamics. The NSF grants for science education research took the hardest hit under the Trump administration, accounting for 48% of all terminations at the agency and 65% of the total funding cut. Many scientists in “soft money” positions, where they are wholly dependent on grants renewed every few years, were among the first to feel the fallout when the administration purged support for thousands of research projects last year.
This article is an AI-assisted summary. All facts and figures are drawn from the original report: https://www.statnews.com/2026/04/07/brian-donovan-fighting-racism-with-genetics-education/