Harvard’s Zhiming Kuang explains the science of monsoons and the threat to research funding

Zhiming Kuang recalls a flood he experienced as a kid in his hometown of Jiangxi, China. Though his memories have grown less vivid with time, he can remember that “the water was maybe a couple feet deep. The bus wouldn’t run, and people had boats out, [and were paddling along the road].” School was closed for the day, so young Kuang enjoyed a “pretty fun” day off. 

Kuang’s flood occurred during the rainy summer months of the East Asian monsoon.

Monsoons are seasonal shifts in the direction the wind flows that divide the calendar year into a rainy season and a dry season. Essentially, hotter, less dense air rises while cooler, denser air sinks, but the actual processes that determine when, where, and how much it rains are quite complicated. Floods during the monsoon season vary in severity. Though the one Kuang experienced was mild, some can damage homes and farms or even be life-threatening.

Kuang, now a Lexington resident, is a faculty member at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where he teaches and conducts research on the subject. He has two daughters: one who will attend Diamond Middle School this fall and another who just graduated from Lexington High School and will be off to college in a month. In his free time, he can often be found driving his daughters around to school events and ice skating classes at the Hayden Ice Rink. 

Now, like many other researchers and academics, Kuang has experienced abrupt funding cuts under the Trump administration.

Before the cuts, Kuang authored and co-authored over 60 publications and reports on his research at Harvard, though he highlights one in particular related to monsoons. The strongest monsoon in the world, the South Asian monsoon, has a chokehold on the well-being of the people in the area.

“The people in that region, in general, depend on the rain from the monsoon for agriculture and water resources. If there is a monsoon failure, which is a rainfall [volume] drop of 20 percent, there will be devastating effects to agriculture and society,” Kuang says. Research like Kuang’s on the long-term trends and tendencies of these rainfall patterns can help people living in the area predict the strength of the monsoon and get their bearings before the rainy season.

Scientists have historically believed that the strength of the South Asian monsoon was caused and influenced by the Tibetan Plateau, due to it being perceived as a significant heat source. Kuang and his team refuted this theory through a study that involved the use of radiosondes—weather balloons that collect atmospheric data—and computer simulations, which allowed them to model the effects of geography on monsoons. They found that it is actually the height of the Himalayan mountains that obstructs cold, dry air from the north from mingling and mixing with the hot, humid Southern air, exacerbating the humid conditions in South Asia and increasing the magnitude of their monsoons. 

The resources Kuang and his team used on this project—the radiosondes and the computer simulation—were of a very low cost and readily available to the group. However, the group still required financial support to pay for the junior researchers’ work and time. Kuang’s team relies on federal funding from funding agencies to compensate graduate students and postdoctoral researchers for their work, a salary that amounts to “about $80,000” to “support a graduate student for a year.” Like many researchers, he spends less on equipment and more on personnel.

The process by which Kuang acquires money from federal funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation and NASA, goes as follows: “What typically happens is a researcher has an idea of [a project] they want to work on, and they will write a proposal to a funding agency, which includes, ‘I want to do X, Y, and Z, and this is why you should support my funding for this particular project.’ Then, that proposal will be sent out for review… the funding agency… will evaluate [it] and [determine whether it] is a good project, [and if they] should support it [by] providing money to the researchers. It’s a competitive process.” Scientists also attach a budget to their research proposal, which Kuang said is often met by funding agencies.

By allocating the majority of his budget to junior researchers, Kuang gives them the opportunity to participate in groundbreaking research. He describes their presence on the team as “training in part to learn and in part to contribute… It’s a part of their education.” Contributing to complex and rewarding projects is an essential component of these students’ education at Harvard and serves as important preparation for the work they will do later in their careers.

Harvard is now cut off from federal funding, which means that Kuang and his junior researchers cannot count on the financial support they once received from funding agencies. There is “no point in submitting [proposals]. Given that the existing grants have been terminated, my inference is that there will be no new grants issued.” Kuang does have one pending grant at the National Science Foundation, though it has been pending for eight months when it normally takes just five, suggesting that the outlook is not good.

When asked broadly how these cuts have affected him, Kuang acknowledges that Harvard University has certainly “done its part in supporting research groups to continue their research.” Harvard University has set aside $250 million from its endowment as a temporary measure for researchers like Kuang to help them get their projects off the ground. But this is not a sustainable solution. 

In the midst of all the conflict and turmoil, Kuang and his team prioritize “making sure we continue to support and educate the junior scientists,” falling in line with Harvard’s approach to insulate everyone from the chaos as much as possible.

“We can turn to private foundations,” Kuang acknowledges. “It’s not going to be at the same level as the federal government. They have been the dominant source of support for basic research. There’s no substitute. So, it will be quite, quite difficult, but we will see.”

Trump’s funding cuts are not only affecting scientists and their jobs, the education of future academics and scientists, and institutional life, but also the daily lives of large communities on the other side of the world, who could benefit from research that the United States has the capacity to produce. To Kuang, this situation is quite unfortunate. “Ultimately, it is the decision of Congress [on] how to allocate resources, how to make the nation stronger. I hope they do the right thing.”

Researchers do not know whether or not they will be able to count on federal funding in the foreseeable future. As Zhiming Kuang put it: “It’s quite an age of uncertainty.”