What graduate students should know about the sequester

Research universities and graduate assistants across America are starting to feel the sequester's impact. The across-the-board US$85 billion in discretionary spending cuts began just one month ago, writes Delece Smith-Barrow for US News.

"My NIH grant has already been affected. Our budget has been altered because of it," says Thomas Brown, a professor and vice chair of research in the department of neuroscience, biology and physiology at Wright State University. Brown is using a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to research pregnancy-associated disorders. This year he has seven people working with him, but says the number will need to be cut to five because his budget has shrunken.

In his lab, and the hundreds of other labs at research universities in the US, many of the employees are graduate school students who serve as teaching or research assistants. Much of their salaries, and their ability to study topics within science, technology, maths and engineering, come from federal grants.
Full report on the US News site