Encouraging Participation in Upcoming NIH Surveys to Identify Impacts of COVID-19 on Extramural Research

NIH has been working diligently to support the extramural research community since the pandemic began in March. We are now preparing to reach out with surveys to gather data on how COVID-19 is impacting our extramural researchers and their institutions. If you receive such a survey, we hope that you will take the time to provide us with your perspective. The results of the surveys  will be extremely valuable to inform policy and program decisions as NIH seeks to identify ways to continue to support the biomedical research enterprise as we move forward.

We will be launching two surveys. The first is the NIH Impact of COVID-19 on the Extramural Institutions Survey, launching this week. This survey aims to understand overall challenges faced by institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the next couple of days, a single institutional leader who oversees research at the institutions in our sampling population will be receiving an email from me with a link to take the survey. I encourage your prompt attention to the survey as the link will be open for only a couple of weeks.

The second survey is the Impact of COVID-19 on Extramural Researchers Survey that we will be sending to researchers in mid-October. This survey aims to understand how COVID-19 has impacted individual researchers at NIH funded institutions. Researchers in our sampling population will be receiving an email from Qualtrics (noreply@qemailserver.com) with an invitation to take the survey. This survey will be open until the end of October.

Both surveys are confidential and run by a third party, who will share only de-identified survey data with NIH.  Survey results will be analyzed and reported to leadership in aggregate.

Earlier this summer, we surveyed our intramural workforce to learn more about how COVID-19 is impacting their lives and work at the NIH. We were very happy with the number of responses we received from the community and are hoping to see similar response rates for the extramural institutional and individual surveys. We encourage everyone who receives a survey link to take the survey and make their voice heard.

We deeply appreciate your support of this effort as the NIH continues to adapt to a changing research environment. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to jennifer.miller-gonzalez@nih.gov if you have questions about this effort or the survey itself.