Yankton native Dr. Frank Leibfarth studies plastic at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In an interview spurred by Leibfarth’s winning a prestigious $250K Blavatnik National Award for his research on upcycling plastic waste and removing PFAS from water, Leibfarth credits the “creative freedom” he enjoyed during his undergrad days at USD with making him a better scientist:
[USD]’s a very good state institution. It allowed me to do lots of different things. I was on the varsity football team, but I also could participate in high-level science. There were people who identified my trajectory early on and gave me quite a bit of individual mentoring.
I contrast that with this world of people who have Ivy League educations, who I interact with now on a day-to-day basis. When you’re in that kind of situation early on, you develop a sense for what’s allowed and what’s not within the academic structure. In some ways, because I was not a part of that, I didn’t know what unwritten rules I was breaking along the way. It allowed me to have a little more creative freedom. I feel like I was able to follow my gut a little more than some of the people who’d grown up in that atmosphere [Frank Leibfarth, interview with John Hult, “Q&A: ‘Creative Freedom’ from South Dakota Education Helped Scientist Earn $250,000 Prize,” South Dakota Searchlight, 2025.11.16].
But federal funding also boosted Leibfarth’s career:
I ended up doing a research project at a National Science Foundation-funded program in New York City, at Columbia University. I feel like I was very presumptuous at the time. I said to my professor, “Hey, I really like this organic chemistry. I would love to do research in it, and I would also love to travel. But my family doesn’t have money to let me travel, so I need it to be paid for. Also, I’d like to go out of state.”
Luckily, the NSF had programs that allow you to do exactly that. I applied to 10 of them, got rejected by nine of them, but got into the best one [Leibfarth, in Hult, 2025.11.16].
And Leibfarth notes that federal funding, though small in the big picture, is a crucial part of sustaining American science, innovation, and economic prosperity:
The federal government has in the past been really generous with science funding, but also it’s a drop in the bucket. A large pharma company spends more per year in research and development than the entire U.S. budget for science. But a lot of the initial ideas for the innovations that come out of the U.S. that support our economy, make better medicines, make our world more sustainable, those start in academia because of the funding provided by these federal organizations. We’re the ones who can think 10 years out, 20 years out. A pharma company or a chemical company has to think about their next quarter’s profit, their next year, their next two years.
That’s always been the balance that has really kept the U.S. at the forefront of innovation. If we compromise that funding on either end, we’re going to really compromise this delicate balance. Cutting science funding now is going to hurt our economy tremendously in five or 10 years. There’s no way to get around that [Leibfarth, in Hult, 2025.11.16].
The National Science Foundation had to freeze all grants last spring and cancel 1,574 projects worth $1.1 billion under Project 2025‘s anti-science, anti-diversity ideological axe. The White House wants to cut NSF’s research budget by 61%; the House wants a 24% cut, while the Senate is trying to hold the research cut to 2%.