Category: Director’s Column

With $21 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), we are pleased that NIH is able to facilitate educational opportunities for students and science educators in extramural laboratories holding active NIH grants. These administrative supplements providing summer research experiences for students and science educators are now available on an expedited basis to those with active NIH research grants.

What a wonderful day for biomedical research, and what a privilege it is for the NIH both to create jobs and to fund excellent science. To President Obama, the 111th US Congress, and the American people, thank you. We are truly grateful to be part of such a historic effort.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) gives a total of $10.4 billion to the National Institutes of Health that we will need to expend by September 2010. $8.2 billion of this will be devoted to research funding. $1 billion is allocated to construction and renovation of extramural research facilities and another $300 million goes to the acquisition of shared instrumentation and other capital research equipment.

The effectiveness of NIH extramural stewardship is directly relevant to the improvement of public health. The Office of Extramural Research is at the core of promoting effective stewardship by working with the Institutes, Centers, and Offices to create, harmonize, and implement policies spanning the full spectrum of the grant making and monitoring process. In times of change, our responsibility is further heightened by the need for making OER services as responsive and transparent as possible.

Over the past thirty years, NIH has initiated programs to increase diversity within the scientific workforce. The coming year will mark the beginning of renewed efforts to enhance our current activities, and to identify other opportunities to address diversity in the scientific research enterprise.

In this time of rapid global change, the NIH is newly energized in its mission of improving health worldwide, I eagerly look forward to supporting the Agency in this effort as it further strengthens its foundations for the future.

As some of you may already know, in November, I will transition as Director of the Office of Extramural Research (OER) and NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research (DDER) to the role of Special Advisor to the NIH Director. Much remains to be done, and we have a number of challenges ahead, but I am very proud of all that we have been able to accomplish in our five years together.

Through its readiness and recovery efforts, the NIH is helping the Biomedical Community respond to natural disasters. While such disasters may be inevitable, the setbacks they present to medical research hopefully need not be.

Our longstanding commitment to attracting and retaining the best new investigators has led to the development of programs geared to cultivate talent and allow individuals to mature into world-class researchers. Looking forward we are focusing our attention on encouraging earlier transitions into independent research careers by developing programs that focus specifically on early stage investigators.