Reminder to Fellowship Applicants!

March 31, 2014

Planning on submitting an Fellowship application? Don’t forget that Fellowship applications must be submitted using updated application forms (FORMS-C as announced in NIH Guide Notice NOT-OD-14-027). In addition to the updated forms, …

May Application Due Date Adjustments Make Way for System Updates

March 30, 2014

In May, we’ll be upgrading our electronic Research Administration (eRA) systems to support recognition of Unicode characters (many of you will be happy to know this includes support of Greek symbols). As described in NIH Guide Notice NOT-OD-14-071, this upgrade requires us to take all eRA systems, including the eRA Commons and ASSIST, offline for the three day Memorial Day weekend….

Measuring Purchasing Power in Biomedical Research

March 28, 2014

How can we at NIH compare a $1 million investment in research today with the same $1 million investment twenty years ago, ten years ago, or even five years into the future?

You might be familiar with the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measures inflation experienced by consumers in their day-to-day living expenses, or the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Price Index, which measures general inflation across the nation’s economy. But as readers with an active interest in biomedical research, you might be interested in how these numbers ‘translate’ into the research world. Naturally, so are we, and this is where the Biomedical Research and Development Price Index, or BRDPI, comes in. ….

More on Big Data Training for the Scientific Workforce

March 18, 2014

Biomedical science and healthcare research are generating increasingly large and complex sets of data, from many different subfields. …. In February of 2013 I wrote about NIH’s request for community input on how to best prepare the research workforce to capitalize on big data. Since then, the BD2K group has announced its flagship programs, and welcomed Philip E. Bourne as NIH’s first Associate Director for Data Science. Now, I’m excited to update you on the important research training programs that are part of the BD2K initiative. ….

Federal Agencies and Research Organizations Working In Partnership

March 14, 2014

There are many ways my NIH colleagues and I keep up with the concerns of the research community, but one way that I have not discussed in depth on the blog is the Federal Demonstration Partnership or FDP. The FDP is a forum of federal agencies and funding recipients, sponsored by the Government, University, Industry, Research Roundtable of the National Academies, that comes together to work on identifying, testing, and implementing effective processes and systems for the management of federal government-supported research and education. ….

Collecting Data on Postdoc Benefits

March 12, 2014

NIH’s biomedical research workforce initiatives, which implement Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD) recommendations, include improving graduate student and postdoctoral research training through a number of measures, including increasing postdoctoral stipends to reflect years of training, and considering policies on benefits. In February we announced increases to NRSA stipend levels in the NIH Guide. Today, I’d like to talk about how we are proceeding with evaluating postdoc benefits.