June 11, 2015
It is bittersweet for me to announce that I am leaving my position as the NIH Deputy Director and will be retiring from NIH and the government to take a new position as Director of the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research. This is a newly formed foundation that I will lead through its formative first years. This foundation is a non-profit corporation that will focus on important national and international issues of agriculture where expanded investments will generate innovative solutions. This position brings together my experience at NIH and my previous ….
May 28, 2015
If you are interested in the kinds of issues we discuss on Rock Talk, you might want to check out the video of my plenary presentation at the NIH Regional Seminar. I address the impact of NIH funded research and the challenges of the current NIH funding situation; highlight opportunities, new initiatives, and policy changes; and even discuss the blog.
April 30, 2015
I’m excited to tell you about a new option for submitting your R01 applications to NIH. Today, we made ASSIST (the Application Submission System and Interface for Submission Tracking) available as an option for submitting your R01 applications, as well as most individual career development (K) award applications. ASSIST is a web-based system that was developed by NIH, in close partnership with Grants.gov, to address common application submission challenges identified by the community. We first launched ASSIST ….
April 15, 2015
As I’ve written before here on Rock Talk, peer review is the keystone of the scientific process. I’m excited to call your attention to a website update that connects the what, when, why, and how of NIH’s peer review process. ….
April 10, 2015
One topic of frequent interest to NIH leadership is how R01-equivalent awards compare to other research grant awards. The R01 is the standard mainstay of NIH’s research portfolio, and the oldest grant mechanism in use by NIH. As those familiar with the blog and RePORT know, we usually look at R01s in conjunction with other awards providing similar support analogous to an R01, which includes R37s or MERIT program awards. Of the R01-equivalent pool however, R01s make up the overwhelming bulk of these grants so while we call them R01-equivalents for accuracy-in-reporting reasons, it is highly appropriate to consider R01-equivalent data as representative of R01 trends. Over the past years we’ve been looking at trends in R01-equivalents compared to trends in awards through the R21 activity code. ….
March 25, 2015
There has been a lot of discussion in the community about the age of NIH supported researchers. As I’ve mentioned here on the blog before, we continue to examine how best to sustain the biomedical workforce. There are many ways to characterize our workforce or the biomedical research ecosystem, and many factors that contribute to successfully obtaining an NIH award. Since the topic of age is a popular one right now, I’d like to share with you some recent analyses that my office looked into regarding the distribution of research funding by age group.
We examined total and direct costs of NIH research project grants from 1998 through the last full fiscal year, and graphed the distribution of research funding by age group. The full data is posted on RePORT, and since the patterns are similar, I’ll post the graph of direct cost funding distribution below: ….
March 20, 2015
It’s spring and that means it’s time for the NIH Regional Seminar. This year, I’m especially excited that I will have more than 50 of my NIH and HHS colleagues joining me in Baltimore to share the latest updates and guidance on NIH initiatives, policies, and updates on the NIH grants process. If you are new to working with NIH – or maybe just in need of a brush-up on NIH funding and grant policy-related topics – consider joining us May 7-8, 2015. ….
March 2, 2015
On February 5, NIH announced its “NIH Interim Grant General Conditions”, our first step toward implementing Fed-wide administrative requirements for the use of Federal funds.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB)’s “Uniform Administrative Requirements, Cost Principles, and Audit Requirements for Federal Awards” (2 CFR part 200), (you may also hear it referred to as the “Uniform Guidance” or “UG”), published in December 2013, provided a government-wide framework for administrative requirements, cost principles, and audit requirements when ….
February 3, 2015
From enhancing diversity to supporting training in emerging fields, over the past three years NIH has continued to examine the needs of the biomedical workforce and create initiatives that will sustain the amazing work being performed by you, the extramural research community. Our efforts place a lot of focus on trainees and early stage investigators through policy changes and new programs, but there are two sides to every equation. We have many well-established research programs run by senior investigators. We want to explore how ….
January 30, 2015
Since 2008, NIH’s Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools, better known as RePORT, has provided easy access to info on NIH funded research. My office continues to look at new ways to enhance your access to important information through robust search tools, data visualization dashboards, and more. I’d like to highlight one of our newer tools today: Matchmaker.
Matchmaker allows you to enter manuscript abstracts, research bios, ….
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