NIH All About Grants Podcast: Fellowships and What’s Changing

The application and peer review processes are changing for fellowship applications due on or after January 25, 2025. These changes aim to:

• Better focus reviewers on the fellowship candidate’s preparedness and potential, research training plan, and commitment to the candidate
• Clarify and simplify language in the application and review criteria to ensure a broader range of candidates and research training contexts
• Emphasize commitment to the candidate without undue consideration of sponsor and institutional reputation to reduce potential bias during review

Drs. Alison Gammie, Director for training and workforce development at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, and Lystranne Maynard-Smith, a Scientific Review Officer with the Center for Scientific Review, will discuss fellowships in this episode of the NIH All About Grants podcast. They will explain how input was obtained from the research community over several years, what the changes are, considerations when putting an application together, approaching the science and training plans, mentors, resubmissions, and much more.

“We really want to broaden the scope of what we think would be a successful candidate for fellowships…We want to clarify and simplify the instructions to make it as accessible as possible to more promising candidates in the external community.” – Dr. Lystranne Maynard-Smith

“[We aimed to] simplify and reorganize the application…[condensing] it to fewer sections …and importantly for many people, academic grades are no longer part of the application…The conceptual changes are a focus on the candidate and this includes their preparedness for the training and the training potential that they’re outlining in the proposal.” – Dr. Alison Gammie

—

NIH’s All About Grants episodes can also be heard on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and on the NIH Grants YouTube channel. Have an idea for a future podcast? Email [email protected]. We love suggestions!