Columbia Professor Advocates for Gaza, Funded by Taxpayer Dollars

American taxpayers are funding a professor at Columbia University who participated in pro-Hamas demonstrations on campus.

Neuropsychologist Jennifer J. Manly was involved in a human blockade aimed at preventing the dismantling of unauthorized encampments last April.

Images from the event show Manly wearing an orange vest while standing alongside other professors as they rallied for Gaza, with banners that read “Demilitarize education” and “Palestine is Everywhere,” while some called for a financial boycott and divestment from Israel.

As reported by the National Institutes of Health and various public databases, Manly has been associated with over $100 million in grants over the past two decades.

A significant portion of her research centers on the controversial “social determinants of health thesis,” which argues that racism, sexism, and homophobia can lead to health issues in “Black and Latinx communities” — a viewpoint that critics have labeled as pseudo-science.

Manly’s involvement in a pro-Hamas rally, along with her activist-focused academic work, prompts serious concerns regarding the medical field, which has allocated substantial amounts of taxpayer funding to ideologues dressed as educators and activism masked as research.

This further supports claims from Trump administration officials advocating for funding reductions aimed at disrupting the pipeline of leftist radicals.

Manly’s work often promotes the notion that racism can lead to physical health problems, including Alzheimer’s disease. In an interview last year, she asserted that “we shouldn’t blame people for their lifestyle choices in terms of their brain health.”

She argues instead that “systems of oppression” and “discriminatory beliefs” are the reasons why Black individuals disproportionately suffer from dementia.

“Any biological differences are driven by… racism,” Manly has asserted, going on to characterize racism as “the pathway through which race is ‘biologized.’”

Her academic publications reflect these perspectives. One study she co-authored attributed higher dementia rates among Black individuals to “historical patterns of segregation.” Another paper linked “structural sexism” to decreased memory, noting a stronger effect among Black women.

Manly’s research, heavily funded by taxpayers, has recently seen support from the National Institutes of Health, which granted her nearly $700,000 to investigate links between racism and brain disease.

As part of this funding, in January 2025, Manly and her team published findings suggesting that Black individuals in states with “high lynching proportions” in the past experience elevated levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a biomarker associated with increased dementia risk.

The authors claimed that “racism is associated with inflammation and dementia risk” since it “cumulatively taxes the body resulting in worse biological and cognitive health.”

Another article concluded that “racist U.S. policies” significantly influenced cognitive health and dementia risk over time.

Psychiatrist Kurt Miceli, a critic of the incorporation of wokeness into the sciences and medical director at Do No Harm, argues that Manly’s research illustrates the necessity of removing DEI initiatives from the medical domain.

Miceli criticizes her correlation of historical lynchings to dementia rates among Black individuals as “political” rather than scientific. He contends that the CRP marker she uses to support her hypothesis on racism-induced stress can fluctuate dramatically and is more significantly affected by health factors such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension.

He argues that Manly’s activist-oriented research squanders taxpayer resources, stating, “There’s so much else that could be done [instead of] sort of focusing on an argument that… leads to calls for possibly reparations.”

Despite her politically charged research and history of endorsing pro-Hamas activism, Manly remains a principal investigator on a multimillion-dollar government initiative, funded by multiple agencies, that studies brain aging.

She currently oversees more than $20 million in active grants for her research at the Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center and the Taub Institute at Columbia.

The Trump administration has indicated its commitment to reducing the National Institutes of Health’s expansive budget. Scrutiny of the work conducted by professors like Jennifer Manly, who appear focused on ideological research rather than substantive medical science, is warranted, alongside the termination of funding for projects that fail to meet conventional academic criteria.

To restore confidence in America’s research institutions, priority must be given to genuine research — not pro-Hamas advocacy or questionable racial theories.

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Hannah Grossman is an investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute.