Harvard student and recent Bainbridge High School graduate Ella McRitchie is quintessential Ivy League material — she is a decorated athlete, a stellar student, an advocate for public health in her community and has a powerful drive to achieve her goals as a pediatric trauma surgeon.

In her first year at Harvard, she placed first in the Ivy League and second in the NCAA for pole vaulting, worked in a soft-materials engineering lab, enrolled in a challenging course load and volunteered at a hospice center.

As one can imagine, her schedule is packed, which means she can’t afford disruptions, like losing $6,000 in grant funding she uses to support herself while she conducts research on the development of an origami-inspired prosthetic material on the forefront of surgical healthcare.

McRitchie has sought community support from Bainbridge and Kitsap and has achieved about 3/4 of her fundraising goal, or about $4,400, in just over a month. Ten percent of the funding is earmarked for McRitchie’s side project, building and installing Narcan-dispensing mailboxes in areas of high substance use in Seattle.

At that level of funding, McRitchie is “able to be comfortable,” she said, but if she can fulfill her goal of $6,000, she won’t have to sacrifice her sports or her studies to find income.

When the Trump administration froze $2.26 billion of federal funding and contracts at Harvard University in April, McRitchie and her colleagues in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences were suddenly thrown into uncertainty. Funding from sponsored research projects made up about 37% of the SEAS budget in 2024, about the same proportion of funding as Harvard’s medical school, and the cuts represent the second-largest loss of funding out of Harvard’s 13 colleges.

People at all levels of the college were left without financial resources: career researchers working on groundbreaking medical projects, graduate students perfecting innovative bioengineering ideas and undergraduates like McRitchie, who were just beginning their journeys.

“I stayed on campus after finals, doing track for a little bit longer, and I got to see how politics started to affect everybody,” McRitchie said. “I think the biggest thing for me is meeting all these researchers and getting to know them pretty well, personally — people that are working on different scientific advances that are helping cure chronic diseases and cancer — and seeing what amazing work that all these people are doing, just to help people. And they don’t give a sh** about ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’; they just want to help everybody, right?”

McRitchie isn’t alone, and nor are her difficulties; over half of her labmates are international students, she added, which means their concerns are doubled — some are worried about applying for visas as well as acquiring funding. Many are stockpiling essentials like toilet paper, she said.

One ray of hope has come from more senior researchers, she explained, especially her mentor, Dr. Katia Bertoldi.

“I think a lot of people are being very persistent with everything. And they’re still doing this incredible work, even though it’s for very little financial benefit to them, or nothing, at this point,” McRitchie said. “They’ve told me, ‘Don’t give up — just keep doing it, and things will get better if you keep education as a priority, and keep learning from the people around you.”

Financially, McRitchie knew choosing Harvard meant forgoing an athletic scholarship at another university, but it was worth it to be able to balance her academics and her sports pursuits, she said. She’s back home on Bainbridge for the summer, working 40 hours per week running simulations to test her research material, but she looks forward to reconnecting with her new friends at Harvard in the fall and diving back into the rigorous work.

“This [fundraiser] isn’t just about one summer. It’s about fighting to stay in the room when someone’s trying to slam the door shut on young scientists. It’s about proving that investing in education, in innovation, and in students like me matters,” McRitchie wrote on her donation page.