You probably walked past the Rockefeller Building on Case Quad hundreds of times in your student days. You’re familiar with the names etched in stone near the top of the graceful building: Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Kepler, and more. Murmur the names, and it’s as if the great scientists of history are still here, inspiring today’s researchers and discoverers.

We have faculty whose names may one day appear on the side of a university building. The work of people like Baer, Peckham, Rimnac, Tyler, Kisley, and Gurkan could echo through history. But right now, they and their peers are worried about the future of university research.

It’s not an easy time to run a research lab, which means it’s not an easy time to be a professor at Case Western Reserve. In this issue, you’ll find an interview with Michael Oakes, the vice president of research at CWRU. He tells us what the university faces if dramatic cuts to federal research funding go through. He also talks about the people who conduct that research and why their work is essential to who we are.

Case is a research university, one of the nation’s best, which is why students and faculty come here. Surveys show more than 80% of our students participate in research. They work for labs and institutes that become like “professional families,” as Oakes describes them, close-knit communities striving for discoveries.

A federal judge has paused the funding cuts, but a chilling effect has taken hold. Faculty have stopped hiring graduate student researchers. Experiments have stalled. An aura of uncertainty pervades.

If you have a favorite professor, and you appreciate his or her efforts to find a cure, solve a problem, advance science in the Case tradition, now would be a good time to cheer them on.