UC Davis geneticist says NIH denied grant renewal over South Africa collaboration

Brenna Henn, a geneticist at the University of California, Davis, said the National Institutes of Health declined to renew a five-year grant because it involved a collaboration with South Africa. Her program officer told her, according to Henn, that “because your grant involves a collaboration with South Africa, it will not be funded.” Henn’s lab studies human genetic diversity, focusing on populations in Africa and people of African descent to improve the reach of personalized genetic medicine.

She said her team aggregated about 3,600 genomes from those populations, contributed 80 samples collected in South Africa from the Khoisan, and used the data to support a model of a pan‑African emergence of early humans. Henn said much clinical genetic work is done in Europeans, and scores derived from those data often do not work as well in other populations.

Henn said she received an NIH early career investigators grant in 2019 and put in a renewal last year. A program officer told her in September it “looks like you’ll be funded,” but the grant moved to “pending” and sat there from December of last year to September of this year.

Key Topics

Science, Brenna Henn, Uc Davis, Nih, South Africa, Khoisan