There has been a lot of focus on early stage investigator (ESI) extension requests in the community recently. And we certainly understand why. The experience of the COVID-19 public health emergency has brought into sharp focus that the effects of the pandemic on careers and life in general may continue for years to come. This fact has led us to revisit our approach to granting ESI extension requests.
Postdoctoral NIH T32 programs aim to provide select trainees with experience to enable successful career and research development. In a previous posting, we presented NIH career development, or K award, and R01 equivalent research grant outcomes of participants in post-doctoral T32 programs. Here we present further analyses focusing on the association of under-represented minority (URM) status with subsequent K or R01 awards.
Since launching in 2017, NIH’s Next Generation Researchers Initiative (NGRI) is continuing to address longstanding challenges faced by researchers trying to embark upon and sustain independent research careers as well as to promote the stability and diversity of the biomedical research workforce. Today, we are sharing data on our progress towards increased support for ESIs and other targeted groups.
In our continued effort to address sexual harassment, the NIH has implemented some of the recommendations of the NIH Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD) Working Group on Changing the Culture to End Sexual Harassment.
We are working to identify ways to lower barriers for all new applicants to the NIH SBIR and STTR programs. Conferences have the ability to bring people together expressly to share perspectives and exchange expertise, including the lessons of personal experience. That is why I am pleased to announce as a first step in addressing these concerns we will be sponsoring the 2021 HHS Small Business Program Conference with the theme “Diverse Perspectives SEEDing Impactful Innovations.” The meeting will take place virtually April 26-30 and registration is free.
At NIH, we recognized the many ways the COVID-19 pandemic could adversely affect the biomedical workforce, particularly members of underrepresented groups and vulnerable populations. In October 2020, NIH fielded two online surveys to objectively document COVID-19’s impact on extramural research. One survey assessed the perspective of individual research administration leaders at extramural institutions, and the other survey assessed the perspective of the researchers themselves. In this post, we offer a high-level overview of general trends noted within both surveys.
Are you a life science entrepreneur or biomedical researcher looking for seed funding? Are you a stakeholder in a minority-owned business? Are you new to NIH small business programs? If so, make plans today to participate in the 2021 HHS Small Business Program Conference, presented virtually from April 26-30. Registration is free!
I am proud to join my NIH colleagues today in reaffirming our commitment to fostering a diverse biomedical research workforce and ending structural racism at NIH, the institutions we support, and anywhere where NIH research activities take place. Working together, we can continue identifying and dismantling any policies, practices, or other impediments that may harm our supported workforce and science. We encourage you to join us in this effort. Please take a moment to read the statement below from the NIH Director on achieving racial equity in biomedical research and visit our new webpage, which includes more on the UNITE initiative. You are also welcome to share your thoughts and ideas to our Request for Information directly with us here.
Applications for conference grants now require a diversity plan. A recent Guide Notice announced that reviewers will be asked to evaluate the plan and factor it into the overall impact score.
Looking back on 2020 includes seeing how well we have done to capture your interest with our Open Mike blog posts. Did we hit the mark? Here we analyze page views on the Open Mike blog. Similar to what we did for 2018, below we show the top ten blog posts from 2020 based on overall page views. Posts on topics that are directly related to grant funding were the ones that were viewed the most.
