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. 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 “gender ideology” and “diversity”.
Despite being one of the new administration’s first targets, the scientific community had put up little fight – 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: “Can’t believe I’m typing this but… FUCK IT IM PLANNING A STAND UP FOR SCIENCE PROTEST IN DC.”
Her palms were sweating. Her political experience consisted of voting and attending a single Black Lives Matter demonstration. “I sure as hell didn’t consider myself an ‘activist’,” she said.
Delawalla’s 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.
But that turned out to be the easy part. Transforming a single day of protest into a sustained movement proved much harder.
“The challenge comes after an initial wave of activity that doesn’t lead to the change you had hoped for and you don’t get a shift in policy – how does an organization make sense of loss?” 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.
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.
“It got very quiet,” said Brynn Paulsen, then a volunteer at Stand Up for Science and a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology, of the group’s next steps. Part of it was burnout among volunteers who’d worked furiously to stage the protests, Paulsen said, “part may have been that we were all flying by the seat of our pants”, with little organizational structure.
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.
“I never set out to build a movement, so I didn’t come to the table with some idea about how it would play out,” Delawalla said. “In many ways, not having expectations has been a gift.”
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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.
Some scientists took issue with Delawalla’s language, her references to “fascism” and “authoritarianism”. Beneath certain comments ran an undercurrent of the sexism prevalent in science.
“To 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’t mean to insult you) ditsy socialist liberal and more like a concerned adult,” a male scientist commenting below one of Delawalla’s YouTube interviews, wrote. (Delawalla promptly added “ditsy socialist liberal” to her Bluesky bio.)
Although scientists had spoken out during the president’s first term – especially at the March for Science in 2017, which drew more than 1 million people around the world – attendance plummeted at follow-up events.
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’s first term because funding didn’t crater as scientists had feared, or perhaps because researchers failed to convince the public that science matters to their own lives.
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.
“It’s hard for scientists to be black and white, to not provide caveats to every single statement,” Delawalla said.
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’d been given an insufficient role in decisions. They also believed that focusing on protests would only energize the base, rather than converting skeptics.
“We’re 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,” said Courtney, who left with two others to form the nonprofit Science for Good, which is pursuing that vision.
Delawalla preferred to focus on “direct action”, 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’d received against becoming a mother while still working on her dissertation. Why couldn’t she do both?
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’s 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.
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 “is a very quick study” 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’s chief operating officer.
King, 68, recruited the other key member of the group’s political brain trust, Vincent Vertuccio, a 22-year-old consultant with a chest tattoo that reads: “Organizing Works”. 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.
Four months after an unprepared Delawalla had struggled through her first meeting on Capitol Hill – a sit-down with Democratic Illinois congressman Bill Foster to deliver a message she describes as, ‘Hey, this stuff with Trump and science is very bad!’ – 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 Stand Up for Science message in 200 congressional meetings.
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 “remains focused on fixing a broken status quo and delivering results for the American people, not responding” to impeachment efforts “designed to prop up a failing campaign”.
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% – in a district Trump captured by more than 20% the previous year.
In the organization’s 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.
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This 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 – half the size of the previous year.
“We had people come out in every state for science,” 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.
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.
Delawalla still intends to complete her dissertation this summer, but she has chosen to go “all-in” on the work of defending research, a decision that means giving up her own research career.
“It was a decision that came with a lot of grief,” she said. “Being a scientist is a huge part of my identity; research is where I found my purpose and place in the world.” 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.
“I happened to stumble upon a skill set within myself that I can use to keep those people discovering,” she said. “It’s where I belong in this moment.”
