On April 5, 2025 Dr. Heather Ford stood at the steps of the Santa Cruz County Building, joining other scientists around the United States to protest the Trump Administration’s witch hunt against his imagined “woke science agenda.” Since World War II, the US has seen a broadly bipartisan support for the federal funding of science, which has yielded a financial return much greater than the stock market. But scientists today are reeling—in Heather’s words, they’re “devastated”—by cuts in US funding that are reverberating around the world.
Heather is a researcher in Paleoceanography, modeling long-ago climates by studying tiny marine fossils. A native of California and UCSC graduate, she teaches students at Queen Mary University in London, where she is, as she points out, an immigrant like many of those being turned away from the United States. In this interview, Heather explains how the job of “scientist” is now a global one, how her work adds to human knowledge about climate, and how climate change affects all of us, whether we believe in it or not.
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